Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  William Einstein did not take over An American Place as Stieglitz had hoped, but the painter did become one of O’Keeffe’s close friends, advising her on many career decisions. When Bry was ill, he worked with Halpert to put many of O’Keeffe’s works in storage in New York. In exchange, she wrote an essay for Einstein’s exhibition at Associated American Artists.

  Earlier in the year, Einstein had helped her sort the last papers to be sent to the Beinecke Library at Yale. In preparation for the donation, she hired a woman to chronologically arrange and date her correspondence with Stieglitz. Einstein helped her switch the storage of her work from suite 1710 to another space in the building at 509 Madison Avenue.

  But none of these mundane chores equaled the task of helping O’Keeffe destroy her paintings. In the autumn, she invited Einstein and his wife to spend three months with her. Together they spent weeks sorting through the paintings, finally deciding to burn forty of them in November. O’Keeffe had long been committed to editing work that did not meet her exacting standards, and she demonstrated no remorse over the latest round of assassinations. Instead, she reported the difficult action tersely to Claudia: “Went through all my paintings and destroyed many.”18

  III

  In February of 1953, O’Keeffe’s work was the subject of a third retrospective. Edith Halpert organized twenty-nine pictures for An Exhibition of Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Mayo Hills Galleries, Delray Beach, Florida.

  That spring, O’Keeffe completed one of the strangest paintings of her career. Easter Sunrise portrays the view east from her studio, with the road winding around the distant hill and a cross radiating white light suspended in the middle of the picture. Unlike the crosses she’d painted in New Mexico and Canada in the 1920s, Easter Sunrise is a frankly symbolic representation of the resurrection. The cross glows like a sparkler before the sere landscape, but in the distance, the mountains and sky are rosy. O’Keeffe kept this painting in her collection. It was a painting that she had made for herself, a memory of her largely forgotten Catholic upbringing, and was rarely, if ever, seen.

  In May, at the age of sixty-six, O’Keeffe made her first trip to Europe. She had never wanted to travel to Europe with Stieglitz. “I couldn’t imagine being in a place where I couldn’t talk, and where Stieglitz would have said everything I wanted to do was impossible. I couldn’t have proved that it wasn’t.”1

  Europe was a less frightening proposition with Mary Callery, who had lived in Paris as an expatriate until World War II forced her return to New York. In May, the Webbs accompanied the two women to the dock and watched as O’Keeffe waved excitedly from the deck of the ocean liner. After a rough crossing, they docked at Le Havre and toured Brittany by car before arriving in Paris.

  Callery offered to set up a meeting between the titans of European and American modernism, but O’Keeffe refused to meet the great Picasso. “He doesn’t speak English, I don’t speak French, what would we have to say to each other?”2

  Staying at the Hotel Regina in Paris, O’Keeffe went to several museums, including the Louvre, but she was able to remember only one painting, a work by Fra Angelico. She preferred the Chinese bronzes and vessels at the Guimet and was captivated by the Museum of Man. She referred to Paris’s Museum of Modern Art as “a duty.” At one museum, she ran into Brancusi, whose first American show had been held at 291. She was hardly comforted by the reaction of the sculptor who had once admired her paintings. Upon recognizing her, he cried, “Georgia O’Keeffe! But I thought you were dead.”3

  At the insistence of Van Vechten, O’Keeffe called upon Alice B. Toklas, who, since Gertrude Stein’s death in 1946, had lived alone. At the time of O’Keeffe’s visit, the curtains were hanging in shreds and most of the collection of modern paintings had been put into a vault. Toklas said she didn’t mind too much for her memory was fortunately a good deal better than her eyesight. When O’Keeffe mentioned that she was continuing to Spain, Toklas commented that she would like to see the country again. O’Keeffe asked, “Why don’t you put on your hat and coat and come along?” But Toklas did not join them.4

  O’Keeffe and Callery went on to visit the gardens of Versailles and spent nearly two days at Chartres. She called her experience of the cathedral “the first startling moment for me.” “Chartres was the first building that seemed wonderful to me like tall trees—but I’ll take the trees if I must choose,” she said.5

  Chartres was followed by a visit to Sainte Chappelle that led her to admit, “I never imagined anything like it.”6

  They continued south to Aix-en-Provence. Staring with astonishment at the jagged ocher rock and scrubby plants of Mont Sainte-Victoire painted by Cézanne, O’Keeffe thought back to her years with Stieglitz and “the men” and the hours spent in debate over the merits of the impressionist. She thought, “How could they attach all those analytical remarks to anything he did with that mountain?” She felt, “All those words piled on top of that poor little mountain seemed too much.” As far as she was concerned, it compared poorly to the distinctive silhouette of her Pedernal.7

  O’Keeffe seems to have experienced equal measures of curiosity and homesickness as she traveled. She felt that many people travel as a way of “hunting the unknown that they will never find. Maybe I am queer that I am so singularly pleased with the life I have in N.M.”8

  She had honed every aspect of her world just as a river soothes a stone, until she was perfectly comfortable with herself and her way of life. What people often tacitly admired in O’Keeffe was her ability to be completely content with herself and her life. To make certain that she lived in the best of all possible worlds, however, she continued her ambitious travel every year until she was in her eighties.

  Given her enthusiasm for the Hispanic culture of New Mexico, it was not surprising that she preferred Spain to France. Generally, she was critical of museums and their contents. “I mentally destroy the pictures I look at. I’m very critical,” she said. (Once, upon walking out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she told Ralph Flint, “I like the way I see things better.”) She admitted, “I was surprised when I went to the Prado . . . because everything there was so exciting to me,” especially the works of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, which she enjoyed “as much as [those of] any other Occidental artist.”9

  Callery was one of the few woman artists able to maintain a close, if competitive, friendship with O’Keeffe. Upon their return from Europe in June, O’Keeffe arranged a dinner in New York for Callery and curator Alan Priest. Afterward, the perceptive Priest asked O’Keeffe, “Do you collect belligerent and bossy females? Mary W. [Wheelwright], Mary C. [Callery], Doris, Maria—and who else? Do you have any nice comfortable easy going female friends?”10 Particularly as she grew older, she enjoyed the company of those considered by others to be prickly in temperament and individualistic in outlook. People who were accommodating, comfortable, or timid bored her.

  Once at home in Abiquiu, O’Keeffe received visits from her sister Claudia in July, Marjorie Content in August, and Constance Friess in September. She also purchased a new Ford convertible.

  With the retrospective and the travel, she had had little time to paint and completed just seven pictures. Ignoring her own admonition about painting “the last door,” she painted a serenely pretty rendition, Wall with Green Door. In the early winter months, she painted cottonwood pictures, while Green Tree portrays a pair of cottonwoods in spring.

  In September, Los Angeles curator Frederick Wight came to Abiquiu to discuss the possibility of a retrospective at what was then called the Los Angeles Museum of Art, now L.A. County Museum of Art. O’Keeffe discouraged him. She was exhausted by the machinations of art institutions. That had been Stieglitz’s domain, and when confronted by the possibility, she admitted that “such things as an idea made me so tired I want to crawl into a hole.”11

  In November, O’Keeffe traveled to New York, making certain of a return to Abiquiu in time for Christmas, wh
en, once again, Callery was her guest.

  The excursion to Europe piqued sufficient interest to prompt O’Keeffe’s return the following year with her secretary, Betty Pilkington, daughter of an Abiquiu mechanic. O’Keeffe wanted to concentrate on the large and diverse country of Spain for three months, from March until May, so they could experience the fiestas associated with the holy week before Easter Sunday.

  Their first weeks were spent in Madrid, where O’Keeffe enjoyed the baroque architecture, the medieval city center, and the park, El Retiro. But the highlight of the visit was her trip to the Prado Museum, which again held her in thrall. O’Keeffe’s New Mexico neighbor Richard Pritzlaff met her in Madrid. The threesome drove south to Seville. The elaborate Moorish influence in the architecture and tile work could be seen in the enormous minaret, La Giralda, and the gardens of Alcazar Palace. Before taking a boat to Tangiers, Pritzlaff introduced O’Keeffe to bullfighting, for which she developed an immediate passion.

  The combination of seeing thousands of paintings at the Prado and her own Texas retrospective of the previous year had a rejuvenating effect on O’Keeffe’s creativity. Back in Abiquiu that summer, she picked up her brushes, gessoed a canvas in blazing white, and got down to work. After all of her travels, her subject was home country.

  She began by making a drawing of antelope horns that someone had given her, followed by an evocative painting, Antelope, in which the skull is cropped so that only the eyes and antlers emerge from the base of the painting, while a pale pink sky extends upward from a sandy desert floor. She considered it to be “one of the best.”

  O’Keeffe also painted three pictures of wintery cottonwoods along the Chama River valley, whose soft clouds of whitish leaves swirl against strong twisting trunks. She titled her painting of a leafless tree awash in pheasant golds A Memory Late Autumn.

  One night in the middle of August, she stayed up watching a summer storm, which she described as “Great columns of light shooting up into the sky from the horizon and many lesser streaks racing horizontally fairly high in the sky. Then sheet lightning that gave the whole valley that strange brightness that comes in flashes in the night.”12

  The terrific vision drove her to paint a 4 × 6-foot canvas of jagged yellow arcs on an orange and red background, From the Plains II, which was loosely based on her 1919 painting of the same title. She told Halpert that the color was straight “out of the tube—red and orange to lemon. It shocks me so that Im [sic] rather struck with it.” The unmodulated colors were used again on the 4 × 7-foot Black Door with Red. Chromium yellow bands the top and bottom of the red canvas, bracing the dark vertical door posed above a dozen pale orange horizontal rectangles. While the palettes of these pictures may have been indebted to Goya, who deftly employed blacks and reds, the scale was influenced by the younger artists working in New York whose paintings could cover an entire wall.

  Throughout the 1950s, the O’Keeffe sisters began making regular visits to O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu. From Portage, Wisconsin, Catherine Klenert often came with her married daughter Catherine Krueger, and Catherine‘s two children, Ray and Georgia. From Beverly Hills, Claudia came with her companion of thirty years, Hildegarde Hohane, and O’Keeffe’s married niece June Sebring visited. From Palm Beach, Anita Young also made the occasional appearance. They exchanged advice on finances and on diets and exercise regimens, with O’Keeffe ever urging her sisters to get into shape. Constantly complaining of ill health, Claudia in particular was hounded on the benefits of eating well and exercising. O’Keeffe wrote letter after letter to her youngest sister insisting on the value of a system of exercise taught by the venerable Madame Mensendieck, which was meant to integrate mental and physical discipline. According to one account she sent to Claudia, the system teaches conscious control of every moving segment of the body by working the direction of pull against the opposing sets of muscles. Doubtless, this isometric system contributed to O’Keeffe’s erect posture and the graceful, deliberate movements noted by many in her later years.

  O’Keeffe also advised her sisters to take a tablespoon of safflower oil everyday, to read nutritionist Adelle Davis’s books, and to drink protein supplements. She sent special congratulations to Claudia whenever she shed a few pounds.

  The scars from the financial deprivations of their childhood drove four of the five O’Keeffe sisters to become prudent about money and, in the case of Anita and Georgia, prosperous. Only Ida had difficulties. Following her 1933 and 1937 shows at the Delphic Studio, she had tried to succeed as a painter, but without an impresario like Stieglitz at her side, she was unable to support herself. During World War II, she turned her talents to commercial drafting for Douglas Aircraft in Whittier, California. Like many women who worked during the war, her services were no longer required after the men returned to work. After the war, she was often unemployed.

  Georgia, Anita, and Claudia supported Ida for the rest of her life with monthly stipends of a few hundred dollars. Still, Georgia was strict about personal finances and required Ida to give her the mortgage on her house in Whittier as security when the loans mounted to five thousand dollars. (She assured her sister that she would never actually take the house but that she wanted some form of security.) The warm-hearted Ida, who had nursed Stieglitz, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Georgia herself, was the only O’Keeffe sister not to attain a measure of success. When she died of a stroke in 1961, at the age of seventy-one, Georgia wrote to Claudia, “In some ways, it is a wasted life.”13

  Claudia had moved from New York to California in 1939. With Hohane, she founded a Montessori school in Beverly Hills. They asked Georgia for a loan of two thousand dollars. Georgia had been giving Claudia money for many years and was forthcoming about the loan but also insisted on receiving their house mortgage as “security.” After demanding the house mortgage, she urged Claudia not to be stingy in starting her business, noting, “It does not pay.” Georgia regularly loaned her own paintings, as well as works by other artists in her collection, to Claudia and Hildegarde. Good-naturedly, she accepted their return when Claudia and Hildegarde decided they would prefer another artist or style. In exchange, Claudia sent her eldest sister boxes of California dates, woolen blankets, and the occasional rare plant, such as the white bird of paradise.

  Since Georgia had raised Claudia after the death of their mother, the younger sister was accustomed to receiving bouts of maternal advice from Georgia. When Claudia sent the promotional material for her educational venture, The Hildegarde School, “an exclusive school for the children of particular parents,” Georgia shot back, “It sounds a bit snooty to me.” Nonetheless, the school was a success in Beverly Hills, where snooty is an asset, and Claudia eventually bought rental properties that provided an income. Although not as rich as Georgia, she and her companion were comfortable.

  After closing the school in 1954, Claudia and Hildegarde came every summer to Abiquiu to tend the garden. There was much excitement over the cultivation of a two-pound tomato. In fact, the garden grew to be one of O’Keeffe’s greatest pleasures, despite the requisite donations of time and money. Her correspondence was rife with accounts of each plant and flower along with requests for seeds and nutrients. “I have been working—or trying to work my garden into a kind of permanent shape—so that if I live for twenty-five years it will be pleasant to walk about in by the time I am too old to do anything else,” she told Pollitzer. “I have three rose bushes so full of red and yellow roses that they look on fire . . . and an odd iris—dirty lavender petals reaching up—a pale lavender mixed with yellow that greys it and yellow petals mixed with a little lavender drooping down—very handsome.”14

  But Georgia and Claudia tended to argue with one another about the ways and hows of raising this tuber or that perennial. To avoid their sibling squabbles, Georgia decided to move to Ghost Ranch whenever Claudia was in residence at Abiquiu.

  Without consulting O’Keeffe, the Packs sold their Ghost Ranch acreage and lodgings to the Presbyterian Church i
n 1955. Upon hearing the news, O’Keeffe flew into a fury. She drove her Buick over to the Packs’ house, burst in without knocking, and, paying no attention to the Presbyterian officials who were present, indignantly asked, “Well, of all the things I have ever heard of in my life. Why did you give [the ranch] to a church?” Arthur Pack calmly explained that the Presbyterians had developed the valley, creating schools and stores. Undaunted, O’Keeffe said, “Why didn’t you give it to me?” Phoebe Pack tried to placate the artist by explaining that it cost a fortune to maintain and that, after the war, there wasn’t much interest in the ranch. Undeterred, O’Keeffe, countered, “Well, you could have done better than giving it to a church. I suppose this place will be creeping with churchy people from now on. Well, you can tell them to stay away from my house!”15 With that, she turned her back on the Packs and the Presbyterians, got into her car, and floored it, leaving a cloud of dust.

  Eventually, she made peace with Jim Hall, director of the Presbyterian Center, but she installed a separate driveway and a plethora of “No Trespassing” signs.

  O’Keeffe’s paintings of the patio doors and the cottonwoods were included in her exhibition at the Downtown Gallery in March of 1955, her third solo show with Halpert, who had moved the gallery to East Fifty-first Street.

  Before returning to Abiquiu, O’Keeffe stopped in Chicago to see an exhibition of Japanese art at the Art Institute.