Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  For the next seven years, Pollitzer periodically shared chapters with O’Keeffe, who started sending her regular stipends for the work between 1953 and 1956. The artist called for less accolades and more historical accuracy. After Pollitzer praised her talent as unique, O’Keeffe corrected her: “Don’t forget Mary Cassatt. . . . We probably all derive from something . . . so much so that we can not escape a language of line that has been growing in meaning since the beginning of lines.”7 Pollitzer politely agreed, trying to accommodate O’Keeffe’s directions. “I’ll watch out for extravagances that are untrue,” she wrote.8 (When Pollitzer showed her manuscript to potential publishers, they wanted less enthusiasm and more facts. Pollitzer would continue to work on the project for another ten years.)

  While in New York to help Anita, O’Keeffe and Edith Halpert installed fifty-three watercolors from between 1916 and 1917 at the Downtown Gallery. This unusual show of O’Keeffe’s early work attracted the attention of critics who were unfamiliar with the beginnings of her nonobjective painting. A few recast O’Keeffe as a precursor to the color field painting being done by younger artists. (A 1963 Jules Olitski—Untitled 6—bears a startling resemblance to the 1916 Specials.) One critic observed that her watercolors “predate styles that are currently being taken as up-to-the-minute modern.”9

  Encouraged by these encomiums for her abstract efforts, O’Keeffe painted two large nonobjective canvases upon her return to Abiquiu, saying that the subject “becomes simplified till it can be nothing but abstract.” Blue I consists of a central vertical stripe of ultramarine flanked by stripes of light gray and platinum, traversed by a ghosty white. Blue II places the vertical bands of blue and pewter on either side of a central panel of black with the vaporous white form. Blue and White Abstraction introduces black wing-shapes and a beryline arc. It seems that O’Keeffe could not remain in the arena of pure color without reference to the natural world.

  After her Blue Series, she returned to the familiar Pedernal as seen through the reddened oval of a pelvic bone in Pedernal—From the Ranch II and completed another small oil of the Austrian copper rose.

  Sometime in the summer of 1958, she painted the captivating Ladder to the Moon. She recalled leaning against the ladder that was propped against her roofline and looking at the dark line of the mountain and the bright moon against the turquoise night. She prepared for the painting with a small oil sketch of the scene without the ladder and quickly realized what was missing. She positioned the ladder in a twilight sky between the crescent moon and the dark shape of the Pedernal. “Painting the ladder had been in my mind for a long time and there it was . . . all ready to be put down the next day,” she said.10

  One can scarcely help but wonder if the deaths of the O’Keeffe sisters’ loved ones led her to paint the mystical and symbolic allusion to an afterlife. She was pleased with the painting and made it one of the last inclusions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s October survey Fourteen American Masters, where she was the only woman selected and given an entire room in which to hang her work.

  In November, O’Keeffe visited the man who had written most perceptively about her work over the years. The retired Henry McBride lived modestly in an apartment in Peter Cooper Village. Apparently, O’Keeffe left him a “bounteous Christmas gift.” His thank-you note reassured her that the interest on his savings yielded as much as his salary at the Sun. This time, he did not return her gift: “You did a generous deed and the angels in heaven have probably marked it down to your credit,” he wrote.11

  At the outset of 1959, Francis O’Keeffe passed away. Georgia’s older brother had lived in Cuba since 1936, where he had married a well-to-do woman and opened an architecture practice. He was estranged from his siblings. Soon after his death, the aging O’Keeffe sisters began writing and calling one another about the surprising barrage of correspondence from his son, also named Francis O’Keeffe. Although the adolescent had never met his extended American family, he wrote from his home in Havana to his aunts and uncles requesting money to immigrate to the United States. The Communist regime of Fidel Castro had assumed power, and he was among the many Cubans attempting to leave the island. The wealthy and grieving Anita was his first touch, but O’Keeffe quickly intervened to say that her estate was tied up in lawsuits, so he should “stop bothering her for money.” She reprimanded him, “You speak of going into your father’s business. I don’t even know what that business is. It did not seem to do very well and I assume that he knew more about it than you do.”12

  The young Francis had even less luck with Catherine, whose husband, Ray Klenert, president of the First National Bank of Portage, discouraged his efforts. Undeterred, Francis again wrote O’Keeffe to say that he was applying to study architecture at various universities in the United States, as there was no work in Cuba. Education was O’Keeffe’s vulnerable point. She agreed to send him six hundred dollars as well as one hundred dollars a month for his education “but for nothing more—specifically not a wife or family.” When Francis made the mistake of extolling the virtues of his fiancée, O’Keeffe told him that if he married, she would quit sending him money.

  A month later, she suggested he attend architecture classes at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “As I am probably going to have to pay for you I believe it is best for you to be nearby where I can keep some track of what you are up to,” she wrote. “If you marry—do it on your own. I will not help you in anyway.”13

  In June, Francis made it as far as Florida. O’Keeffe sent him money, but his many subsequent letters chronicle his woes with visas and college applications. He then returned to Cuba, ostensibly to be treated for a urinary tract infection. He claimed that he could not afford an American doctor. It must have seemed a farfetched excuse to O’Keeffe. When he pleaded for more funds, he found she had lost patience with him. If he wanted her money, he had to play by her rules, the cardinal one being that he remain single. Instead, Francis remained in Cuba and started writing to Claudia for money. O’Keeffe warned her sister not to be taken in.

  The vehemence of her correspondence with Francis echoes O’Keeffe’s earlier remarks about the marriage of her brother Alexius, not to mention her reservations about her own marriage. Even though O’Keeffe benefited socially and financially from her union with Stieglitz, she viewed the institution of marriage as rife with legally binding limitations rather than conjugal bliss. She never ridded herself of the subconscious residue of growing up with unhappily married parents, especially her mother, and with her spinster aunts, who had viewed men as incompetent and untrustworthy.

  After so much death and disappointment in her family, O’Keeffe was eager to see old friends in the summer. After Kiskadden’s stay, she was overwhelmed by feelings that usually lay dormant. “I could not say anything as you drove away for fear I might cry,” she later wrote to her friend, adding that she was so fond of Kiskadden, it was hard to cash her check for the painting of golden cottonwood trees.

  When the Webbs arrived that summer, Lucille asked where she could buy one of the colorful dresses worn by Native American women. O’Keeffe volunteered the seamstress services of Pilkington, so the young woman drove with Lucille to town to buy the necessary multicolored fabrics. That night, after one of O’Keeffe’s nutritious dinners, Todd went to bed, but Lucille was eager to get on with her project.

  “Betty and I were sitting there tearing up the twelve yards of different fabrics for the skirt and we were laughing and giggling,” Lucille recalled fondly. “Georgia came along and said, ‘If you two girls are going to sit here and laugh all night, I am too. She brought out a nightgown she was making, and we all three sat up all night and made the skirt and the gown and laughed and giggled like young girls. We had a wonderful time.”14

  In the spring of 1959, the year that Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum opened in Manhattan, O’Keeffe joined a small group on a luxury tour around the world. Although she had once quipped that she “didn’t have time to
cope with India,” the three-and-a-half-month trip included seven weeks on the continent, from subtropical Bombay to the Himalayan foothills of Kashmir. They continued to Japan, Taiwan (then Formosa), and Hong Kong. There, in a small shop, she bought a bronze hand in the position of abhaya mudra, meaning “fear not.” She mounted it on the wall at the end of her bed, where she could see it easily and where it remains today.

  From East Asia, the tour continued through the Southeast Asian counties of Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Instead of looking for the exotically unexpected, the seventy-two-year-old O’Keeffe sought that which corresponded to her existing tastes. “Wherever I go, I have an eye out for rocks,” she said. “Outside my hotel in Pnom Penh I picked up a stone and carried it back around the world in my purse. . . . Stones, bones, clouds—experience gives me shapes—but sometimes the shapes I paint end up having no resemblance to the actual experience.”15

  The group went on to Pakistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordon, Israel, and, finally, Rome. Despite her Catholic upbringing, the last stop did not impress her. “The cherubs on the walls in the Vatican—dreadful . . . extraordinarily vulgar.” She added, “By the time I get home I should have seen enough to satisfy me for the rest of my life.”16

  O’Keeffe’s travels to the Far East had a profound effect on her late work and her approach to life. Although she had studied the art of Japan through Dow and used his Japanese exercises in charcoal and watercolor, this was her first exposure to the actual temples and gardens, and the first occasion for her to see the distinctive Japanese use of space, texture, and color. O’Keeffe’s awareness of a minimal aesthetic would combine with her aerial observations of the world’s geography to bring about some remarkable paintings.

  “When I flew around the world I was surprised to see how many large spots of desert we went over—with a large river or river bed crossing over the sand,” she wrote later. “I made many drawings about an inch high—that later, when I was home, I made them into larger drawings and after that paintings.”17

  Using her inch-high sketches, O’Keeffe made expanded versions while on the road. On the stationery of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, she sketched a drainpipe curve with a V shape shooting off of one side. Back in her Abiquiu studio, the slight sketch was finished in charcoal on 24×18-inch paper and titled Drawing V; the drainpipe shape, in pewter, casts a shadow. She repeated the forms in sooty and inky shades of charcoal on the same size paper in Drawing X and reiterated the shapes without the shadows in Another Drawing, Similar Shape. All of the drawings are significantly similar to her cane-shaped charcoals from the 1916 Specials, which were based on Dow’s system of composition.

  Four tiny sketches of wiggly lines in blue ballpoint pen are O’Keeffe’s interpretations of rivers seen from the air. These winding shapes coalesce in Drawing II, a serpentine coil of charcoal on paper. A sketch of a river bending inward and tendrils spiraling outward was expanded into Drawing IX.

  Raffles stationery was employed again for two black pen sketches of a thick pillar in the center of the page with smaller tributaries meandering off the sides. When finished in charcoal, Drawing III and Drawing IV could easily be seen as leafless branches. Some sketches were done on the fly as a few spare lines on the perforated paper of her checkbook. She also did nine sketches of sailboats. Apart from the boats, most of these rough line drawings wound up as paintings. A black pen sketch of a reverse S shape on Raffles paper was painted directly onto a 30 ×26-inch canvas in pale salmon color surrounded by ocher, It Was Yellow and Pink I. Another version was titled It Was Yellow and Pink II.

  In keeping with her usual direction, O’Keeffe’s sketches grew progressively abstract. It Was Red and Pink consists of fields of copper, persimmon, and sage; Only One is an ultramarine and violet ground with an arc of bronze. Two canvases of 30 × 36 inches are soaked with the varietals of azure, sapphire, and sky and appropriately named Blue A and Blue B. While these pictures are less obvious lifts from her sketches, their liquid and organic aspects point to their riverine sources.

  At some point, O’Keeffe recognized that the rivers from the air emulated the shapes of leafless trees, and she painted From the River—Pale using a cottonwood branch posed next to her easel. Webb made a photograph in 1963 showing one of these river canvases on the wall, a blank canvas on an easel, and a leafless tree branch posed as a model on a table.19

  All of O’Keeffe’s river-inspired pictures embody her earliest principle of organizing space in a beautiful way. Back in her studio, she continued to make dozens of small line drawings of the contours of hills, rivers, and trees to find sources for shapes in abstractions. Incomplete, they are ideas roughed out in sizes from 3 × 5 to 11 × 13 inches. A large arrangement, Tan, Orange, Yellow, Lavender, is loosely based on the outlines of certain drawings, as is Untitled (From the River), a picture of the sandy wash of a dry stream bed painted with intentional ambiguity in ivory and umber.

  Even O’Keeffe’s titles emphasize the priority of flat areas of color and open space over particularized content. After Pollock’s death in 1956, there was growing support among critics for the less gestural abstract painters. Clifford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman in particular were focused on the expressive possibilities of color, something O’Keeffe had spent her life pursuing. She related to their work both aesthetically and in terms of the influence of metaphysics, the idea that non-objective painting could facilitate a spiritual interpretation.

  Since the early 1950s, before the trip to the Far East, O’Keeffe had assiduously devoured books on Buddhism. She also read all four volumes of Oswald Siren’s History of Early Chinese Art and asked her assistants to read to her from Matsuo Basho’s book of haiku, Narrow Road to the Deep North.

  When she was still in her twenties, O’Keeffe had challenged Arthur Jerome Eddy’s theories on art as a spiritual undertaking, writing in the margins of his book on Cubism and Post-Impressionism, “Art has nothing to do with spirituality. Art is a form of sensation.” But after Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe quietly came to believe that sensation, rather than being divorced from spirituality, was the manifestation of it. This shift in belief, which never included an overt admission of faith in any religion, had an impact on the art O’Keeffe produced between the 1950s and the 1970s; great effect through economy of means.

  She bought the 1943 edition of English poet and art historian Laurence Binyon’s Flight of the Dragon: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Art in China and Japan, which was first published in 1911. Always intrigued by hidden meaning, she penciled a line along a page of remarks on the symbolism of color, noting that certain hues have correspondence with emotions, with music, with senses and flavors.

  During her formative years as an artist, between 1915 and 1918, O’Keeffe had studied Asian art and later read the hefty 1912 two-volume Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art by Dow’s mentor, Ernest Fenollosa. Fenollosa was instrumental to the philosophy evolved by Kakuzo Okakura, advisor to the Department of Japanese and Chinese Art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The Book of Tea, Okakura’s introduction to Japanese thinking through the ceremonial ritual of tea, was one of O’Keeffe’s enduring favorites.

  Most of O’Keeffe’s late paintings move away from realism, demonstrating instead a return to simplicity and a conscientious evocation of harmony in spatial relationships. Fenollosa said, “Relationships are more real and more important than the things which they relate.”20 The objects of her study were chosen for a very private symbolism and inherently reductive form—a door in a wall, a curved road against a white field or, in the 1960s, clouds arranged in the sky like so many buns on a plate. She painted in series, and her work repeatedly refers to the asymmetrical, spare Japanese aesthetic. She hung Hiroshige’s three-panel woodblock print of a snowstorm in her Abiquiu studio, and her dog-eared copy of Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji was a model for her multitudinous studies of the Pedernal. “Success doesn’t come with painting one picture,” she said. “It results fr
om taking a certain definite line of action and staying with it.”21

  Borrowing from such Japanese sources, her painting of Mt. Fuji—which she saw in Japan—is executed as a white triangle surrounded by a pale pink field. Her actual first impression of the country was of a field covered in such hard-packed snow that you could walk on top of it.

  O’Keeffe was fervent in her admiration of Chinese aesthetics, as well. She could understand Chinese poetry “because it’s visual. Witter Bynner sent me some and I loved it.”22 The connection was noted in 1946 by Dr. F. S. C. Northrop, head of the Yale philosophy department, who wrote about O’Keeffe’s art and reproduced her watercolor Blue Lines as the frontispiece to his popular text The Meeting of East and West. He wrote that the aim of her art was “to convey the aesthetic immediacy of things without intellectually added references and interpretations; without, at times, even the things themselves being shown . . . one is thereby forced to apprehend the aesthetic component of reality by itself and for its own sake.”23

  The black rectangular openings of the Patio Door series certainly underscore Northrop’s interpretation, but they also held personal symbolism for the artist. In her autobiography, O’Keeffe stated that one of her best paintings, Flagpole, was completed and exhibited in 1923. This picture of an elongated flagpole in front of the refurbished greenhouse where Stieglitz developed his photographs has been lost to history. Only a black and white photograph of it was reproduced in her autobiography. As mentioned earlier, in that painting, the black door to the darkroom signified Stieglitz’s creative power. Was it her visit to his retrospective that inspired O’Keeffe to recreate the painting in 1959, with an emphasis on the black door? At the time, she was also concluding what she thought to be her most important late paintings of the black door in the patio.