Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  There are times when one recognizes an image as though seen in a previous life. So it was for O’Keeffe when she saw the door to the hacienda. In 1959, she recreated her 1923 painting—what she considered the triumph of the exhibition that first brought her to the attention of the public. Her late painting of the black door of the darkroom honored the teachings of Stieglitz as well as those of Dow; this door from her past opened the way to her future.

  But her black patio door had secondary symbolism that she kept a secret. It represented her own creativity: behind that door, O’Keeffe stored her paintings.

  V

  After flying to New York in January of 1960, O’Keeffe decided to continue the river-shaped abstractions as seen from the air. When she returned to the Abiquiu studio, she painted Blue, Black, and Grey in the drainpipe and V shape of the previous year’s drawings. Working on 30 × 40-inch canvases, she completed two more pictures of serpentine trails defined by their colors: It Was Yellow and Pink III and It Was Blue and Green. A vertical picture of slaloming curves, Pink and Green references the slender Japanese format. Two olive ribbons cross a marigold canvas diagonally to meet in a circle in Green, Yellow and Orange. O’Keeffe also finished a 48 × 84-inch version of White Patio with Red Door, but the original architecture evaporated to abstraction with her concentration on the rose band at the top, rectangles running along the bottom, and the door itself on the chalky surface. All five of the pictures were ambitious, museum-scale abstractions meant to impress O’Keeffe’s old friend and sophisticated observer, Daniel Catton Rich.

  Rich came to Abiquiu in July so that O’Keeffe and Bry could help him finalize the details of organizing a retrospective at the Worcester Art Museum. Rich noticed that, since Stieglitz had passed away, O’Keeffe had returned to themes from her earliest work, as an adult might walk a path familiar from childhood to revive lost sensations. (As O’Keeffe noted, “The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for the other things that make one’s life.”) Rich embraced her work of the past few years, and in his catalogue essay, he asserted that the artist’s paintings of doors, rivers, and trees were based less on direct observation than on memory. In their embrace of abstraction, they recalled her earliest efforts. “It is not surprising that their shapes and rhythms go back to some of the artist’s basic drawings of 1915–1916,” he noted.

  A painter’s later work often returns to his youthful experiments, enriched by what has been learned since. . . . Her work shows a complete organic growth. There have been no sudden reversals, no abrupt shifts in style. . . . The 59th Street Studio of 1915 and In the Patio I of 1946 set a similar problem: how to organize a pattern in space from an architectural subject, respecting at the same time the two-dimensional character of painting, itself, and quite as important, how to suggest the kind of life lived in such a spot.1

  Rich was familiar with the kind of life lived in Abiquiu from his frequent visits. He had left the Art Institute of Chicago, where he organized O’Keeffe’s first retrospective, to become director of the central Massachusetts Worcester Art Museum, known for its collection of American Impressionist paintings. For the show Rich selected forty-three key canvases, including sixteen from the 1950s: patio doors, cottonwoods, and rivers seen from the air. O’Keeffe’s efforts to produce exciting, dynamic work at the beginning of the year were not in vain; Rich selected the blue and green serpentine and the white patio door for the exhibit.

  O’Keeffe tried to emulate her late husband and manipulate Rich into buying a painting for the museum. Although he had happily acquired Black Cross, New Mexico in Chicago, Rich’s budget was restricted at the smaller museum. He could neither buy a painting nor move the opening date of her show to accommodate her upcoming travels.

  In October, O’Keeffe and her sister Anita attended the opening reception for Georgia O’Keeffe: Forty Years of Her Art. Afterward, the sisters drove to Boston and boarded an airplane to San Francisco and on to Cambodia. As always, O’Keeffe’s decision to travel was marked by ambivalence. “I have no yen to go anywhere,” she said, “But I go around the world anyway to see what’s there—and to see if I’m in the right place.”2

  With seven others, O’Keeffe, seventy-two, spent the next six weeks on a tour of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Saigon, Bangkok, Fiji, Tahiti, Korea, the Philippines, and Honolulu.

  Instead of the rivers, O’Keeffe began sketching the clouds that she saw outside of her airplane window. One sketch later became Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II, on which bands of pale blue and yellow top a white canvas. In Japan, O’Keeffe again saw Mt. Fuji. When she returned to her studio a month later, she completed two paintings of Fuji, one at the scale of four by six feet, representing the mountain as a white triangle surrounded by a pale pink field. Traveling around the South Pacific and East Asia reinforced O’Keeffe’s interest in Eastern philosophies. “To me, the Indians seemed to relax to their problems,” she wrote to Kiskadden. “We rush about and struggle and I’m not sure that it gets us anywhere.”3

  But O’Keeffe’s serene outlook was upset as soon as she returned to Abiquiu. The man who stretched her canvases had been drunk for ten days and was jailed, a fact as inconvenient as it was shocking. With no canvases at the ready, she resorted to doing eleven rough drawings of the road curving in front of her house.

  Finding and keeping staff was one of the artist’s recurring complaints. After Pilkington left her employment to attend college, with O’Keeffe paying her tuition, O’Keeffe hired a deaf woman as housekeeper. The absence of idle chatter was appealing, but O’Keeffe had to write notes to convey what needed to be done. “One can have a hard time even with simple country life,” she sighed.

  As if to prove the truth of her observation, over the Christmas holiday her chow promptly killed a kitten that O’Keeffe had brought home from the vet. “It was spectacular and terrible,” she wrote. “Chows just think they have to kill cats.”4

  O’Keeffe traveled to New York in the spring of 1961 to help install her April show at the Downtown Gallery. One afternoon, she delivered a painting while the African American painter Jacob Lawrence was in the gallery office with Halpert. Upon seeing what O’Keeffe had brought, Halpert sighed, “Oh, Georgia, is that another flower?” The artist snapped, “No, it’s my ass!”5 This testy exchange led O’Keeffe to reconsider her relationship with Halpert.

  Halpert was indisputably aggressive about sales. In thirteen years, between 1950 and 1963, she sold some two hundred of O’Keeffe’s oils and works on paper at prices ranging from $150 to $12,000. Stieglitz had sold only two hundred paintings, mostly oils, in twenty-nine years, between 1917 and 1946. Though she enjoyed the profits, O’Keeffe was concerned that Halpert did not demonstrate Stieglitz’s discrimination in his choice of collectors.6 She returned to the Abiquiu studio feeling demoralized by the effect of her New York exhibition. She told Claudia that her show had looked “very well but I don’t know that it is worth the effort.”7

  Ever since Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe had been refining her skills in career management. Realizing that Stieglitz had not maintained detailed inventories, she had hired Rosalind Irvine to catalogue her work in the late forties. O’Keeffe systemized the ranking of her work by allotting a star to pictures she considered to be of the highest quality. She often selected pictures from her own collection to be shown in retrospectives, which suggests that she saw such shows as potential sales opportunities. Through such savvy marketing initiatives and receiving the imprimatur of museum approval, she was able to increase her prices over the years and succeed in the tricky business of art.

  That spring, her sister Ida passed away. O’Keeffe keenly felt the erosion of her remaining family. The reminder of her own mortality made it difficult to work, and she managed to complete only two pictures that year: Road—Mesa with Mist, a composition of pale rocks shrouded in white, and Mountains and Lake, an unusually clumsy picture of azure and emerald peaks.

  O’Keeffe relied increasingly on her extended family of
friends in New Mexico. The Webbs had sold their home on St. Luke’s Place in New York and moved to Santa Fe, where they opened a bookstore on Canyon Road in January. O’Keeffe was a regular customer, and they were frequently invited to lunch at her home in Abiquiu.

  Lucille Webb, who remained somewhat intimidated by the artist, was occasionally asked to be of service. When she noticed some branches of the tree needed pruning, O’Keeffe asked her to do it and proffered a large wastebasket for the refuse. A few snips later, Lucille looked into the can and said, “Georgia, I can’t do this.” The artist asked, “Why not?” Lucille said, “Because one of your paintings is lining the trashcan.” O’Keeffe growled, “Well, that’s where it belongs!”8

  In the summer, after O’Keeffe spent a week entertaining her niece Catherine Krueger and her children, she noted, “I enjoyed them very much but I am tired—really tired.”

  In August, she joined the Webbs on an eleven-day voyage down the Colorado River to Glen Canyon. The rest of the party consisted of Tish Frank (Mabel Dodge Luhan’s granddaughter), Bry, the Girards’ son, Marshall, Eliot Porter, his son and daughter-in-law, and Mike Harding, a young friend of O’Keeffe’s. Although the river was overrun with powerboats, one would never suspect it from Webb’s photographs of the sculpted cavern of striated rock and the dwarfed figures of O’Keeffe and Bry. He showed O’Keeffe putting real effort behind the oar as she rowed the raft, and looking pleased with herself. Outfitted in a red sundress, sneakers, and black cowboy hat, the seventy-four-year-old artist walked the miles of narrow ledges and sand spits. They traveled almost two hundred miles, much of it in a rubber boat, from Hite, Utah, to Page, Arizona. O’Keeffe, who still read books about adventurers and explorers, told the timid Claudia, “You probably think me crazy. We slept every night in the sand—one night in a real sand storm—another it poured rain most of the night. But I saw wonderful things.”9

  The river rafters competed with one another to collect unusual stones on their voyage, and Porter found a perfectly round, shiny black rock. He loved telling the story that O’Keeffe took one look and suggested he donate it to her windowsill collection. He refused, saying it was for his wife. The following Thanksgiving, O’Keeffe was invited to their home, and Eliot mischievously placed the rock in the middle of a black marble table in the living room. She not only spotted it, she sereptitiously put it in her pocket when she thought no one was looking. The Porters did not know whether to be amused or annoyed. “I eventually confronted her with that, and she gave it back—not at all embarrassed,” said Porter. On their next visit to her house, the Porters donated the stone to her collection. When she told the Life magazine photographer John Loengard that it was her favorite, he photographed it in the palm of her hand.10

  For the trip to Glen Canyon, Webb had given O’Keeffe a small Leica and taught her how to take photographs. Although she was married for twenty-two years to one of the world’s most celebrated photographers and had used photographs as the basis for paintings for years, apparently she had never learned to use a camera. “She didn’t photograph a lot, she was interested in using photography as sketches,” Webb said. “She made pictures of the area overhead between the walls of the canyon. She called those ‘sky holes.’ She wanted to photograph those sky holes to get the shapes.”11

  Afterward, she gave Webb the film and he printed contact sheets for her. She began translating those shapes to her paintings over the next decade, most emphatically in her Canyon Country pictures of 1965.12

  In the fall, O’Keeffe and Chabot patched up their relationship long enough to attempt a week-long painting excursion to Colorado. “Maria doesn’t mind sitting by the road waiting for me,” explained the artist. The “aspens were at their best.” A light snow capped the mountains, and “the brown and red scrub oak was particularly colorful.” Nevertheless, as though disappointed that the fish weren’t biting, she admitted, “I didn’t get anything.”13

  After her return to Abiquiu, she attended a surprise party in December for Porter’s sixtieth birthday. The celebration continued into the following month, when his photographs were exhibited with those of Webb and Laura Gilpin at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. Although the museum had never given O’Keeffe an exhibition, she gamely went to support her friends. O’Keeffe always had a coterie of close friends who were fine art photographers. Except for “the men” of the Stieglitz circle, O’Keeffe did not bond with many other painters. Mary Callery was a safe choice because she was a sculptor. O’Keeffe liked, as she said, to be first, and that left little room for other painters in her world.

  The holiday season always brought visitors to O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiu. This year, she had a surprise visit from Charles Collier, who, unfortunately, brought his dog. The hapless pet was barely out of the car when the most recent addition to O’Keeffe’s collection of chows, Bobo, grabbed it by the back of the neck and refused to let go no matter how much shouting and kicking was carried out by its owner. Finally, Collier managed to pinch Bobo’s nose to stop its breathing, and it released his howling dog. Recounting the story to Claudia, she did not sound particularly horrified when she wrote, “Oh, we had a time!”14

  In the spring of 1962, O’Keeffe embarked upon a trip to Egypt with Daniel Rich and his wife, Bertha. They had barely begun their journey when Bertha became seriously ill and they all had to return to the States. When O’Keeffe got back to New York, photography collector David McAlpin tried to alleviate her disappointment by taking her to see the sand dunes and sheiks in the cinematic extravaganza of the year, Lawrence of Arabia.

  Claudia came to visit in April and Catherine Klenert came a few months later. In her Abiquiu studio, O’Keeffe began an experiment. With her new Leica, she photographed the road to Española from her studio window. Using the prints, she made a series of radically simplified pictures, including Blue Road, slate on white curving in from the lower left corner and exiting in the middle of the left side of the canvas.

  She also returned to the previous summer’s subject in ballpoint pen sketches of boats with angular sails, though they were never realized as paintings.

  Although her trip with the Riches had been brief, it inspired paintings based on the view of clouds from an airplane window. She called it “the best working period I have had in a long time.”15

  Sky with Flat White Cloud is a 5 × 61⁄2-foot horizontal canvas with bands of milky blue and green at the top of the picture that leave the bottom two-thirds in white. It is an entirely abstract picture apart from its title. But O’Keeffe defied the painting’s status as a nonobjective work, explaining that her largely white canvas was “almost photographic” in capturing the view from the airplane window.

  “Usually, what I paint is something that I see,” she said. “There was a line around the whole horizon. It was an extraordinary effect. Here was this great white field of clouds solid against the blue.” She preferred the scale to her similar composition from the previous year. “I thought for a while about doing it on the wall and just painting it completely around the room,” she said. “But that would take too much time, so I settled on this one.”16

  Having decided against the mural, she hung the painting in her living room. This was an exception. “I’m rarely ever pleased with a picture I do,” she explained. “So I make a point of not having them up. Having a painting up is like looking at your own thoughts. It annoys me having them around. I’d rather look at a blank wall.” Mischieveously, she added, “Now and then, though, there’ll be one I like to hang up to surprise people. It amuses me to watch their reaction. That picture is one of them.”17

  After these daunting, monumental efforts, it must have been a relief to paint An Island with Clouds, a funny embryo of celadon floating in a sea of bright blue and dotted all over with wads of white cloud. It was based on a drawing that she had made in 1960.

  In addition to painting, it was “with pleasure” that O’Keeffe spent the summer reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She also replaced the end wall of h
er Abiquiu living room with a plate glass window to get a better view of her garden and the gnarled tamarisk tree. She was so content with her work and her home that she reneged on her promise to visit Kiskadden in Beverly Hills. “Pretty mean it was but that is the way I am,” she wrote to her friend. She preferred to have the floors varnished.18

  She did make her last trip to Wisconsin to see her sister Catherine in Portage. They visited their childhood home in Sun Prairie and a few of their many cousins still living in the area.

  In October, a journey to the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park reminded O’Keeffe that some of the world’s most spectacular sites were within a day’s drive of her home. Her niece June O’Keeffe, married to Frank Harbison Sebring III, came for a visit, and she took them to the Taos Pueblo and introduced them to the head of the village.

  Sebring had brought her three young children, and it was hard to keep them from being bored in the remote area of Abiquiu. O’Keeffe suggested they put on a play. The children, all under the age of seven, acted silly. Exasperated by their energetic antics, O’Keeffe asked Contance Friess, who was visiting for the afternoon, “Do all children behave like this?” The doctor turned to O’Keeffe and said, “Yes, if they’re healthy.”19

  But O’Keeffe wasn’t accustomed to a crowd of visitors, even family. “Not everybody could live out alone like this, but I like it,” she insisted. “I prefer being alone. There aren’t many people I like to talk to. I can get more done. I just can’t work with someone talking to me. I imagine many people would find this kind of country offensive and even useless. But to me it’s wonderful. I’ll never live anywhere else. This is a place you can hear the wind. I love to listen to the wind.”20