Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Possibly inspired by the reductive quality of the Zen Buddhist ink paintings in the show, she painted six more patio door pictures. Four are seen from an oblique angle so that the door is mutated into an obscure parallelogram floating against an adobe plane. Black Door with Snow is dotted with irregular white snowflakes the size of golf balls. Patio with Black Door and two other pictures have doors with convex tops and bottoms, so they appear as distorted shapes against the taupe wall. Green Patio Door is divided into three horizontal bands of blue, tan, and cream, with an aqua square in the center. It rides the perfect line between complete abstraction and representation.

  That summer, O’Keeffe reconnected with Todd Webb, who had been included in the publicized and popular exhibition of documentary photographs The Family of Man, organized by Steichen with Dorothy Norman at MoMA.16 With a $3,600 Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the early western trails, Webb walked, hitchhiked, and rode a bicycle along the old routes, arriving at O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu on July 7. He had to send her a card to alert her of his arrival since she still didn’t have a telephone. (At least, she said she didn’t. It turned out that she secretly kept a telephone but refused to give the number to any but her closest companions and workers. Her reputation as a recluse thus remained intact.)

  O’Keeffe, who was one of the sponsors of Webb’s grant application, gave him the guest room with windows looking out to the red mountains. He awoke to breakfast brought on a tray to his bedroom by the maid. “That was the first and last time that has happened to me,” he joked.17 Observing that he was clearly exhausted from his efforts, O’Keeffe drove him to Santa Fe, where an acquaintance, recently tossed from her new Vespa, was willing to sell the motorscooter cheaply. Webb bought it and proceeded more comfortably to the end of the gold rush trail in Sacramento. But he would soon become one of the most consistent links between her past and her present.

  O’Keeffe’s feelings of introspection may have stemmed from a serious surgery—a mastectomy. The cancer scare led her to write to Pollitzer about the nature of friendship. She asserted that her chows were her friends but wondered if the man who delivered wood or the young Abiquiu painter Jackie Suazo were her friends. Among her friends O’Keeffe cited her framer and the man who sent her salt herring, her secretary Betty Pilkington, her doctor Constance Friess, her cat, the wealthy Robert and Maggie Johnson, and her caretaker, Dorothy Martinez. “Names of interest are what would interest most people I suppose,” she continued. “It is another sort of human quality of human nearness and usefulness that has made what I call my friends.” Pollitzer might have wondered why she was not on this list, especially since she had spent the past five years working on O’Keeffe’s authorized biography.18

  The year that her aunt Ollie turned one hundred, O’Keeffe, a mere sixty-nine, decided to go to Peru. Even accompanied by the much younger Pilkington, the two-month trip was challenging. O’Keeffe later told Pollitzer that it was “the sort of trip one could only take in complete ignorance.”19

  Since she had read Isherwood’s The Condor and the Cows, O’Keeffe wasn’t completely ignorant of what Peru had in store. She had also read a book about the ruins of Machu Picchu when they were first excavated from beneath jungle vegetation in 1919 and had wanted to see it ever since.

  The two women began their adventure in Lima, where they attended bullfights in the eighteenth-century Plaza de Acho, one of the oldest bullrings in the world. (O’Keeffe wanted to see the Peruvian Yawar Fiesta, where a condor is placed on the back of the bull during the fight.) But they were soon out of the city; they drove along the coast for one thousand miles from Trujillo, with its brightly colored colonial mansions and precolonial religious sites, to Causimina. Along the way, they stopped in little towns tucked into mountain crevices. O’Keeffe was astonished by the sight of a llama trekking the path with its Indian owner, describing it as a “stately animal—a kind of cross between a sheep, an ostrich and a snake.”20

  One evening before dinner, their hotel caught on fire and, standing outside at night, O’Keeffe and Pilkington worried less about the building and their possessions than lethal insects. “There is a fly that may bite you after dark,” O’Keeffe explained. “The female bite is sure death—the male bite makes you very ill.”

  Despite such setbacks, she found compensation in the vibrant colors of the landscape. “I hate to own up to it but the natural scenery is way beyond anything I know in this country [the United States], but the traveling is difficult.”

  After driving for hours along a mountain road, they saw only one other car—it was hanging by its front tires on a bridge. “You always seem to see the best things in the worst places,” she joked. “Many nights I was surprised that I had survived the day and that I am home alive is rather a matter of luck. Of course one doesn’t have to go the places we went to but why go to Peru at all if you don’t do the good things?”21

  Although such travel was too rough to produce anything in the way of finished works of art, O’Keeffe chronicled her impressions in a sketchbook. After returning safely to her studio, she translated a dozen sketches into four watercolors of the Andean pinnacles washed with ultramarine blue and emerald green against open areas of white paper. They recall Chinese ink paintings of elongated and narrow mountains similar to those in Peru.

  Outside of Cusco, O’Keeffe had been impressed by the Incan ruin of Sacsayhuaman, with three massive ramparts running parallel for more than one thousand feet. The immense boulders used to construct the walls could weigh some three hundred tons and measure more than thirty feet high and thirteen feet deep. She executed six detailed drawings of the large square rocks mounted atop one another, probably in situ, and turned them into a painting of pale geometric shapes the following year.

  She had been home a week and was suffering from the lingering effects of dysentery when Webb arrived on July 11. He listened spellbound to her stories of Peru. “Here we have a little color and wonderful shapes, mostly the earth colors, brown and reds,” she said. “But in Peru, there are marvelous purples, violent colors. And the Andes are sparkling—they freeze at night and in the morning they glitter. I think it’s the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.”22

  Despite the excitement and natural splendor of Peru, O’Keeffe was pleased to be home. She had missed her chows Bo and Chia. But soon after her return, her devotion was marred by tragedy; Bo was hit by a truck and had to be put down. O’Keeffe, who had not cried at Stieglitz’s funeral, was devastated. Her anguish led Webb to extend his stay through the end of the month. He helped her bury her favorite dog under an old cedar near the White Place. She must have been thinking of Bo when she painted her only arboreal picture that year, Piñon with Cedar, a melding of two trees, one soft and green, the other barren and leafless, set before a sienna mountain.

  After Webb’s departure, O’Keeffe took sanctuary in her studio, reliving her impressions of Peru in oil paintings of the Andes and of Machu Picchu, which is so high in the mountains that clouds often obscure it from view.

  O’Keeffe also continued her series on the patio doors, this time viewed at a less oblique angle, so that the black door reflects depth. Patio Door with Cloud includes a wedge of sky and amber stones along the bottom of the canvas. Patio Door with Green Leaf is a poetic composition of tan wall, black door, and blue sky with a sharp green leaf hanging in space.

  As an experiment, she treated the mullioned panes of a window as a multicolored grid, but she was displeased with its cubist effect. She retreated to the familiar topic of her blue mesa seen at a great distance through the hole of a reddish pelvic bone in Pedernal—From the Ranch I.

  In June, O’Keeffe was visited by Sol and Mae Babitz and their daughters, Eve and Miranda. Sol was an avant garde violinist, and his close friend Igor Stravinsky probably provided the letter of introduction to O’Keeffe. Although she devoted her attention to him unreservedly, O’Keeffe offered no refreshments, and largely ignored the three women. Eve had been forced to memorize a Moz
art minuet to play for the artist, but it went badly. Eve, who later became a writer, mostly retained an impression of a woman living alone in the desert. “My mother wanted me to see the life of an independent woman artist. She wanted us to see that it could be done.”23

  Todd Webb brought his wife, Lucille, to meet O’Keeffe for the first time in the summer of 1957. They landed at the Santa Fe airport at seven in the morning and were astonished to find O’Keeffe and Pilkington waiting for them. O’Keeffe had arranged for the foursome to go camping in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. Lucille, who was not much of a camper, had to develop her own relationship with O’Keeffe. “More than anything, we respected each other,” she said. Lucille never took to camping, but she got along fine back at the Abiquiu house. Lucille remembered O’Keeffe as an excellent hostess. “Before she had company, she would stay for three days in the room they were going to have to make sure that there was everything they might want.”24

  During their stay, the folk singer Pete Seeger was in New Mexico for a concert. As he was a friend of Pollitzer’s, O’Keeffe invited him and his wife, Toshi, to lunch at her Abiquiu home. Before they arrived, she confided that his arrival was certain to be slightly embarrassing. “Pete made me a flute from the bones of a bird which I brought back from Lake Titicaca in Peru,” O’Keeffe explained. “And I sat on it and it broke.” At lunch, she confessed the accident to the singer, adding meekly, “But I have more bird bones.” The amiable Seeger agreed to construct another flute, so O’Keeffe brought the bones from a high shelf in her storeroom. The group then drove up the Chama valley to a nearby cave to test the instrument’s high-pitched tones in a place with optimum natural accoustics.25

  In the comfort of her studio, O’Keeffe worked from sketches to finish paintings of the scenery recalled from her trip of the previous year. Peru—Machu Picchu, Morning Light depicts the sacred mountain in ultramarine, illuminated by a shaft of white light and buttressed by a pair of jade and chartreuse hills. A smaller version captures the green and blue mountaintops ringed with clouds. Green and White focuses on the waterfall and spume pouring over the top of a verdant cliff. Three paintings portray the conical shape of a barren mountain on a deserted plane, partially obscured from view by a horizontal band of cloud. Misti—A Memory, measures 36 × 30 inches and features the cloud as a thick, nearly solid band, while an untitled version of the same subject depicts the clouds as transparent veils. A smaller oil sketch for the two larger pictures emphasizes the odd, ice cream cone shape of the mountain. Heartened, she attempted another experiment: Blue Sand portrays undulating dunes in shades of light, medium, and dark blue.

  In addition to her paintings of the Peruvian landscape, O’Keeffe returned to earlier themes. Goat’s Head features the bleached animal skull against ocher sand dunes. For the first time in many years, she painted flowers. White Iris No. 7 is a lavish rendition of the open-mouthed bloom. Five pencil sketches were developed into blood orange paintings titled Austrian Copper Roses.

  In September, Bry visited Abiquiu to keep O’Keeffe apprised of dealings in New York. In November, O’Keeffe traveled to Chicago to see the Picasso exhibition, despite her earlier disinclination to meet the artist himself. In December, she traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, where she and Pilkington had spent three weeks in March. This time they went with Alexander “Sandro” Girard, an architect and interior designer, and his wife, Susan. Renowned for their advanced taste, the Girards had moved to Santa Fe in the early fifties. As a respected designer for Herman Miller, Sandro Girard pioneered bold, graphic textiles and modern furniture exemplified in New York’s La Fonda del Sol restaurant. Raised in Florence, Italy, he had retained a child’s fascination with toys and miniatures. From the 1930s, he collected folk art from around the world. In 1978, the Girard Foundation left their collection of around one hundred thousand figurines and animal carvings to Santa Fe’s International Museum of Folk Art. The Girards sincerely admired O’Keeffe’s personal sense of style. Susan remarked that it was far from effortless: “I never saw her look in a mirror but the way she had that scarf wrapped around her head, it was always fabulous,” she said. “Even if she was going to a black tie dinner, she always went as herself, in black and white, and what could be more stylish than that?”

  Susan recalled spending the night at Ghost Ranch and waking to find O’Keeffe already up, eagerly anticipating her friends’ reaction to the view of the Pedernal at dawn. The Girards were incorporated into her core group of close friends. Every New Year’s Eve, they stopped by her house with the Porters and others to partake of a huge pot of posole, a traditional hominy stew.

  In the winter of 1957, O’Keeffe brought Pilkington to spend Christmas with the Girards in the Hotel Marques del Valle in Oaxaca, which the artist described as “the nicest place I’ve found in Mexico.” Susan remembered coming down for breakfast as O’Keeffe was returning from the outdoor market: “She was bringing our Christmas present, a big bowl made by a local potter and completely planted with various cactus that she had chosen herself.”

  The Girards, who made several trips with O’Keeffe, marveled that she never complained about travel conditions and was thoroughly interested in every detail. Her sister Claudia, on the other hand, was labeled a “complainer.” On one trip to Mexico, the Girards planned a side trip to a small town but worried it might be rough going for Claudia. “Leave her,” O’Keeffe instructed imperiously. And leave her they did.26

  IV

  On a cold day in February 1958, O’Keeffe picked up an urgent message left at Bodes General Merchandise. Her sister Anita’s husband, Robert Young, had committed suicide. Young had suffered from intermittent bouts of depression since the death of their only daughter, Eleanor, in a 1941 airplane crash. More immediately, he had been accused of cash-skimming and other irregularities that led to the bankruptcy of the New York Central Railroad, of which he was president. Tragically, two days after he shot himself in the billiard room of his Palm Beach mansion, Young was acquitted of all charges. Shareholders sued his personal estate, estimated at around one hundred million dollars, temporarily blocking Anita from her inheritance.1

  O’Keeffe flew to New York and stayed for several weeks with Anita at her apartment in the Waldorf Towers, only a block from the artist’s former home in the Shelton. It was a difficult time, and she attempted to divert her sister by accompanying her to concerts and luncheons and taking her on shopping excursions. Together they flew to Florida. “I want to help her get into her house alone,” O’Keeffe said sadly. “It’s hard when you have never been alone.”2

  After accompanying Anita to Florida, O’Keeffe flew to Washington, D.C., in March for a retrospective of Stieglitz photographs at the National Gallery of Art.

  Around this same time, Claudia’s companion, Hildegarde, passed away after prolonged ill health. For O’Keeffe, the recent deaths in her extended family, combined with the memories of her relationship with Stieglitz, brought up unresolved pain from her past. She lamented, “My Stieglitz doings were very difficult.” She left her imprint on the show, however. It included none of the one hundred and fifty photographs that Stieglitz had taken of Dorothy Norman.

  Unwilling to be erased from history, two years later Norman prevailed upon Aperture to publish Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, a memoir-cum-biographical tribute that not only bore her photograph of Stieglitz on the frontispiece but included five of his portraits of her along with six of O’Keeffe.

  (In 1968, Norman assured her place in the history by establishing the Alfred Stieglitz Photography Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She donated her own collection of eight hundred photographs, mostly by Stieglitz, including the portraits of her, many of them nudes. She also donated three hundred of her own photographs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She continued to champion Stieglitz until she died in 1997.)

  After the opening of the Stieglitz retrospective, O’Keeffe returned to New York to be with Anita, who could not absorb what had taken place. “It was one of the saddest times
I ever had tho’ nothing was said about what had happened,” she confessed.3

  Although it has been reported that O’Keeffe disdained her sister’s rich life style, she enjoyed the lavish surroundings. “Her house is fantastic,” O’Keeffe enthused. “She has made my pictures look better than I’ve ever seen them any other place.”4

  On April 27, O’Keeffe received a sad letter from Pollitzer with the news that her biography of the artist had been rejected by Edward Aswell, senior editor of Doubleday.

  The biography had a lengthy history, beginning with a 1949 article that O’Keeffe had written about Stieglitz for the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Upon seeing the edited version, O’Keeffe wrote in high dudgeon to the editor, Lester Markel. “Received your fantastic revision of my Stieglitz article,” she wrote. “Kindly print the article as I wrote it or do not print it at all.”

  “I would prefer not to mention the fact that I was married to Stieglitz,” she continued. “I have always considered that a personal affair and have never seen any point to publicizing it. I think my achievement as a worker can stand without it.”5 The chagrined editor sent a telegram assuring her that her article would be printed according to her specifications.

  O’Keeffe’s exchange with Markel illuminates the ferocity with which she was determined to carve her own identity into the rock face of art history. Unlike Norman, she wanted to distance herself from Stieglitz. Although she never wavered in her support of Stieglitz’s talent, she wondered who would be equally concerned about her own stature after she’d passed on.

  The following year, Pollitzer was asked by the Saturday Review to write a memoir of her famous friend. “That’s Georgia,” as the article was titled, began by drawing a parallel between her friend and a poem of the Chinese sage Sou Tsen-Tsan: “I forgot wealth and glory / I love calligraphy / I think of neither life nor death / I honor painting.” Pollitzer wrote a glowing account of the “real Georgia,” but did not receive a thank-you from the artist. Instead, O’Keeffe protested, “I had the odd feeling of there being something religious in your way of doing it.”6 Nonetheless, she gave permission to her oldest friend to expand the article into an authorized biography.