Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  She defended the then-radical idea that food had healing potential. As most Americans happily adopted the invention of canned and frozen vegetables, Todd Webb recalled that dinners at the Abiquiu house always included fresh salad greens and vegetables from the garden. Lucille Webb added that the painter regularly harangued her about the benefits of eating liver. “It will keep you well,” she insisted. When newspaper articles began reporting that liver contributed to high cholesterol and could contain toxins, a triumphant Lucille reported the fact to O’Keeffe. “Oh good,” the artist sighed, “I don’t have to eat it anymore.”6

  O’Keeffe had told Stieglitz’s lawyer that she would live off of the interest from her inheritance. Although she had been contemptuous of Stieglitz’s flamboyant sister Selma, O’Keeffe adored her son, William Howard Schubart, and his wife Dorothy. An investment banker and partner at Kuhn, Loeb, he managed O’Keeffe’s investments from the late 1940s until his death in 1953, increasing her capital by one hundred thousand dollars. He was warned by O’Keeffe not to let her “slave” Bry know anything about her finances.

  With the sale of the occasional painting, and the money from investments guided by Schubart and Robert Young, O’Keeffe could afford to maintain a staff of five who cleaned, cooked, and attended to her two houses with their combined seventeen fireplaces and extensive gardens, in addition to secretarial duties. Like many Americans of the times, she was benefiting from the postwar economic boom. After reviewing her bank statements, she wrote to Schubart, “When I . . . see the capital appreciation, it astonishes me—and I wonder if that is what the war is for . . . or am I just fortunate.”7

  After the summer’s many visitors, O’Keeffe found the winter months to be a little solitary. After Kiskadden’s departure, she wrote, “A tear drops as I write to you. . . . The long time we spent over Alfred’s work . . . made it seem that he had been here too. He always seems oddly present here at the ranch. . . . I wrote to him from this table so many many lines—so he is always here.”8

  To allay her feelings of isolation, O’Keeffe adopted pets. One of her cats would catch rats and eat only the heads, leaving the other half for the kittens. Ever frugal, O’Keeffe kept the half-rats in the icebox to be consumed by kittens as needed. In the early fifties, O’Keeffe indulged her love for dogs and horses. In 1951, she got a black standard French poodle called Pancho. “I have a dog that would really amuse you,” she told her sister Claudia, “really very sweet and polite.”9 The Packs’ horse corral was adjacent to her Ghost Ranch adobe, and she often went on long rides through the Chama River valley.

  She also dedicated herself to the studio. In addition to the big abstractions of the Black Place, she completed In the Patio IX, an arrangement of charcoal planes cut by an ebony V shape and a wedge of cobalt. A barely visible line where two pale walls come together is the only indication of architecture. Two other pictures, In the Patio XIII and Patio Door with Clouds, are modestly scaled, vertical canvases with the adobe wall and door, but the sky is dotted with cotton ball clouds as stylized as those seen in Japanese prints.

  At sixty-four, O’Keeffe was still competitive. Although she nurtured the perception that she was a desert recluse, she traveled to New York and Chicago on a regular basis for the rest of her life and made a point of visiting exhibitions at museums and galleries. She was sufficiently aware of developments in the art world to recognize the surge of excitement among critics and collectors with regard to the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School, and she wanted her new paintings to hold up in the company of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Using color on a vast scale to create a unified field, Newman and Rothko spawned a movement known as color field painting.

  After her bold abstract efforts, however, O’Keeffe returned to the tried and true. Two sensitive drawings were made in preparation for Poppies, a large canvas of two pale peach and white flowers with their black centers facing the viewer. Cottonwood trees along the Chama River valley generated seven paintings, five of which borrow from the picture that she had described with pleasure to Vernon Hunter. Painted in the winter, the trees’ uncoiling branches are rendered in shades of pewter and chalk, with apricot tones in the background. Winter Trees, Abiquiu I is a miasma of silver mists and sooty branches. In spring, O’Keeffe completed a picture of a tree dotted with shades of orange, Early Spring Tree, and Cottonwoods Near Abiquiu, painted when the tree was coming alive with green.

  In October, An American Place held its first exhibition since Stieglitz’s death, Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings 1946–1950. It included thirty-one canvases painted over the past four years, including eight pictures of the patios, nine of cottonwood trees, a smattering of hilly landscapes, large and small flowers, and a series of antelope and deer horns.

  Schubart had expressed concern about the reception of her work after her long absence from Manhattan. She countered his fears, “Alfred was always a little timid about changes in my work—I always had to be willing to stand alone—I don’t even mind if I don’t win—but for some unaccountable reason I expect to win.”10

  The critics, however, were unimpressed, and her exhibition drew a single paragraph in the New York Times. It was her last show at The Place. She agreed, with Marin, to close the gallery, and both artists joined Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, which already represented the Dove and Demuth estates.

  On her way back from New York, O’Keeffe took the train to Kansas City to see the Asian collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. When she returned, her sister Claudia made a visit to the Abiquiu house. After Claudia’s departure, Callery came to spend the Christmas holiday. In the company of her old friend, O’Keeffe took solace in the ancient rituals of the Navajo, such as a curing ceremony that she attended. Around twelve hundred people gathered around an enormous bonfire surrounded by fifteen smaller fires and a ring of pine boughs. Although it was bitterly cold and snowing, many of the Navajo men danced and sang all night dressed only in loincloths. “They all bring food and eat around the fires—evening and morning—the singing and dancing amid the green—the smoke—the fires and the stars,” she wrote Schubart. “It is quite wonderful.”11

  At this point in the artist’s life, the simple pleasures of New Mexico seemed more rewarding than any that could be had from a Manhattan art gallery.

  After years of feeling harnessed to Stieglitz and his demands, O’Keeffe was surprised to find herself feeling burdened with time and money, and lacking much desire to paint. The effect of producing dozens of top-notch pictures only to have them ignored in her ill-advised 1950 show led her to retreat from painting. In 1951, she completed only five canvases, two of them reiterating her fascination with the spectral winter cottonwoods. She also returned to the familiar view of the cliffs a few hundred yards away from her Ghost Ranch house to paint Dry Waterfall, which is explicitly portrayed in pale shades of amber and taupe. Lavender Iris, starkly realized in vibrant purples, was to be sent to a forthcoming retrospective in Dallas and Palm Beach.

  Patio Door Green Red departs entirely from O’Keeffe’s previous approaches to her beloved subject. The long rectangular wall is painted a violent cadmium red diagonally divided by a darker shade. The band of “sky” at the top is yellow; the band at the bottom is orange. The door is black but for a tiny triangle of green where it is crossed by a shadow.

  Still, work in the studio lacked its usual satisfaction element, and O’Keeffe felt that she needed some new ideas. At sixty-five, she decided to immerse herself in the diversions of a wealthy widow, the most lavish being a travel schedule that would have daunted a teenager.

  Her first trip was a modest enough. In February, she drove to Mexico with Spud Johnson, photographer Eliot Porter, and his artist wife, Aline. O’Keeffe enjoyed Eliot, who had been a research physician at Harvard before turning to photography, but she tended to dismiss Aline’s accomplishments as a painter. They took two station wagons, with the Porters in the lead, and the first evening, the Porters pulled over at five o’clock for a few cock
tails before setting up the tents where they would spend the night since there were few hotels along the Pan-American Highway. O’Keeffe wanted to skip drinks, eat an early dinner, and go to bed, but she was outvoted by her three companions. By the time they had reached Mexico City, it was agreed that the Porters would proceed on their own.

  For the next five weeks, the devoted Johnson, who had traveled to Mexico with D. H. Lawrence in 1923, remained O’Keeffe’s chauffeur and companion. Together, they lunched with artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Rivera had had trouble with his Radio City Music Hall mural but for different reasons than O’Keeffe. He had been dismissed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was offended by the inclusion of Lenin among the teeming workers in one panel. O’Keeffe remained supportive of Rivera, recalling his visit to her show in the early 1930s when he looked at every painting, “carefully considering it.” “I thought to myself, ‘If one person like that came every year and looked that way I would paint much better.’”12 O’Keeffe corresponded from time to time with Kahlo and visited the artist twice at Casa Azul, her home outside Mexico City.

  After her own devastating experience at Radio City Music Hall, O’Keeffe was impressed by the complexity and enormity of the murals around Mexico City painted by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. Struck by the violence of the color and revolutionary spirit, she observed, “You feel it as a part of their lives.”13

  In Mexico City, the artists stayed with Miguel Covarrubias, whom O’Keeffe had met in Taos in 1929. Covarrubias and his wife, Rose, took their American friends to the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan, waking before dawn to watch the sun rise over the pyramids. O’Keeffe called it “a kind of world of the Gods.” They went on to Cuernavaca, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara. “I liked it all but . . . it was very hard work—5600 miles of driving,” she recalled.14 It also entailed much shopping as O’Keeffe purchased quantities of pottery, fabric, and decorative objects for her homes.

  After their strained parting on the highway, it would be a few years before her erstwhile traveling companions felt inclined to invite O’Keeffe to their Tesuque home, but Eliot Porter felt indebted to Stieglitz for showing his photographs, which in the 1950s included rapturous color pictures of clouds, an homage to the elder photographer’s Equivalents. Thanksgiving seemed an opportune time to let bygones be bygones. A truce was established and O’Keeffe eventually considered the Porters to be close friends.

  In April, August, and October, Bry visited O’Keeffe at Abiquiu. Around this time, O’Keeffe grew interested in the idea of publishing her New York correspondence with Stieglitz, and discussed the idea with Daniel Rich and with her physician and friend Constance Friess, who visited Abiquiu in August. With Stieglitz’s estate more or less settled, she was increasingly interested in establishing her own place in history. She proposed exhibiting her many pastels, which Stieglitz had done little to promote or sell, to Halpert.

  In November, when Frances O’Brien arrived, O’Keeffe drove her to Tucson to see Ettie Stettheimer and revisit Taliesin West.

  Shortly thereafter, O’Keeffe took interest in one of the “bad little boys” of the village, Jacobo Suazo. “But he likes to paint and has some ability,” observed O’Keeffe. She decided to start giving him art lessons. “He comes on Sunday and paints . . . and comes every afternoon.”15

  America’s postwar optimism was shaken when troops from Communist North Korea invaded and occupied South Korea in the summer of 1950. The United States was at war for the second time in five years. As the conflict ground to a stalemate after two years, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb on Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands, obliterating the mile-long island and frightening scientists with its force. Although Americans enjoyed unprecedented material comforts, there remained a lurking fear of Communism, especially after the Soviet Union exploded its own hydrogen bomb in 1953. Even O’Keeffe, usually distanced from such mass hysteria, had a bomb shelter built at her Abiquiu house.

  The cold war escalated, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared that the United States would go to the brink of war—nuclear war—to combat Communism. For liberals who had embraced the spirit, if not the letter, of Socialism, the cold war seemed extreme. The Atomic Energy Commission fired their consultant, the esteemed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, for associating with “Communist” friends and “lacking enthusiasm” for the H-bomb project.

  Republican senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee sought out anyone who could be linked to a remotely left-wing sympathy—artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and, especially, Democrats. The 1952 election of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower did not slow his attack. As hearings were convened to grill innocent suspects about their political allegiances, O’Keeffe was in a state of high dudgeon. Despite the fact that she had no communist allegiances, she was one of many artists targeted. She took pride in the fact that she was on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” Ultimately, McCarthy was defeated in his run for Congress in 1954 and died in 1957, but his crusades so incensed O’Keeffe that, for the next three decades, she provided generous donations to liberal causes ranging from George McGovern’s presidential campaign to a movement to save the condor.

  O’Keeffe’s neighbor Pritzlaff was not a political creature, but he could be counted on in an emergency. And call on him she did after her standard poodle Pancho was struck and killed by a car. Pritzlaff’s emergency aid took the form of a pair of the blue chow puppies from a litter of his own purebred dogs. O’Keeffe named the puppies Bo and Chia and made three sketches of one curled up asleep. (They are among the few animal pictures that O’Keeffe ever attempted.) She was besotted with Bo, and as he grew older, she became ridiculously proud of his ferocity, happily pointing out the scars acquired in fights with village dogs.

  In March, Kiskadden came for her annual visit. While at the house in Abiquiu, O’Keeffe completed eight loose sketches and two paintings, Mesa and Road East I and Mesa and Road East II, documenting the view to the east from her studio, where the highway curved between a grove of cottonwoods and a verdant hill. These would serve as the basis of her simplified 1963 composition of white and brown, Winter Road. From her studio window, she could see the cottonwoods growing along the road as they went through their seasonal changes. After a couple of casual drawings, she painted Grey Tree by the Road and Winter Trees with Flower, a small picture with a pink apple blossom posed in the corner. In two larger pictures, Autumn Tree and Cottonwoods, she filled the entire canvas with swirls and veils of golden leaves. In June, she traveled to the Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. It had been more than a decade since she had traveled to Yosemite with Adams, but this time, she did not leave the spectacular scenery to the photographer. She made two paintings, Waterfall I and Waterfall II, based on views of churning white waters spilling over steep mountains of rock.

  In the summer, she moved back to Ghost Ranch and returned to her familiar themes of rock formations in Lavender Hill with Green and Ghost Ranch Cliff.

  Rose Covarrubias visited in September, as did Bry, who stayed for eight weeks to continue working on a catalogue of Stieglitz’s photographs. In October, Alan Priest, curator of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, came to Abiquiu. Their friendship was based on their mutual love of Asian art, and O’Keeffe learned a great deal from him. He brought her a Buddha, saying she could keep it only if he could find a place it would look well, which turned out to be a niche in the dining room.

  Even more than Priest’s erudition, she adored his antics. When he escorted a group of wealthy women around China, Mary Wheelwright kept a diary of the adventure. When her friend borrowed the diary and showed it to Priest, he insisted on taking it to bed with him. By morning he had written many factual and interpretive corrections into the diary, which quite naturally infuriated Wheelwright. She told him off but he wasn’t chastened; he later asked O’Keeffe if she could get the diary back so he could make more changes.16

  Nineteen fifty-two was a year
of honorary degrees for O’Keeffe, who received one from Mount Holyoke College in June and another from Mills College in November. Despite these honors, O’Keeffe worried about the direction of her art. She returned to familiar subjects but found them wanting. Her painting of Pink and Yellow Hollyhocks is pretty but lacks the crisp power of observation that made her earlier flowers so stunning. After sending the picture to Halpert, she noted, “It isn’t a show painting.”

  Similarly, she returned to the cedar stump at Ghost Ranch for inspiration, painting it in sanguineous tones against an acid background. Red Tree—Yellow Sky seems rather brutal, with its torn branches and grating color. It did not agree with O’Keeffe, who put it away for two years before sending it to Halpert.

  She revisited the subject of a 1919 painting of lightning surging over the flat terrain of Canyon, Texas. From the Plains, painted on a 4 ×7-foot canvas, is an entirely abstract sawtooth pattern of yellows and oranges arcing over the red and brown horizon.

  Using a canvas of the same dimensions for My Last Door, she painted a neat ebony door in the center of the long gray and white picture with soft, slate horizontal rectangles along the base, the stepping stones, and a band of the same color at top and bottom. Explaining that she felt it could have used another coat of white, she told Halpert, “I hope it is my last door.”

  Though it would not be her last door painting, O’Keeffe’s remark reveals a measure of exasperation as she pushed her work to a new level. She was reworking familiar subjects, as she always had, but finding that they presented fresh challenges. With the massive canvases of artists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko in mind, she began working at an enlarged scale and with a freer range of color. She felt less kinship with Jackson Pollock and the more gestural painters of the New York School, with their notion of releasing repressed emotion onto canvas. “I never think about expressing anything. I’m not so wonderful that my thoughts should be expressed that way,” she explained. “I like to be interested. And I paint what interests me.”17