Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  On her way back from Europe in April, O’Keeffe stopped in New York to prepare for her forthcoming retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She wanted to avoid any of the last-minute complications that had plagued her Texas retrospective three years before.

  She continued to be honored for her artistic accomplishments. In May, she received the Distinguished Service Citation in the Arts from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, and she was named Benjamin Franklin Fellow by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers, and Commerce in London.

  By the time she returned to her adobe sanctuary in June, O’Keeffe was exhausted and suffered a recurrence of the shingles that had plagued her in 1950. When she recovered in September, she returned to Lake Powell, Glen Canyon, and the Colorado River. She traveled first with a group, and returned in October with Tish Frank.

  Trained in modern dance, Frank had a special rapport with the artist, despite being forty years her junior. According to Frank, if someone asked O’Keeffe for her impression of the canyon, she would say, “Go find out yourself.”20

  When O’Keeffe mentioned that she wanted to return to Glen Canyon to see stone walls that looked as soft and opaque as black velvet, Frank arranged for a private plane to fly them there.

  Back in Abiquiu, O’Keeffe had assumed the role of patron in the little town where, apart from the owner of the general store and the Catholic priest, she was one of the few Anglos among the Hispanic and Indian population. The previous year, construction was completed on the local gymnasium that O’Keeffe had funded; she underwrote improvements to the water system, and for years, she paid for needy children to attend school.

  When O’Keeffe moved to Abiquiu, the children had nowhere to go when it got dark. “They’d play out in the street in front of the cantina until sundown and then sometimes they would come in here to see me,” she said. “After a time, I took to sending them in my car when they had games with other schools. Once a week, I sent them to the movies in Española.”21

  O’Keeffe met with various doctors to discover if her eyesight was weakening from age or stress. Although poor eyesight suppressed her desire to paint, O’Keeffe continued to notate shapes in a sketchbook. In these drawings, she reworked some earlier subjects: the patio door, the kachina doll, which she also sketched in oil, the cliffs and the landscape, and many of the “sky holes,” the space formed by the wedge-shaped rocks at the canyon. She also made abstract drawings using the wave and zigzag shapes that reappeared in paintings throughout her career.

  Despite her limited vision, she applied herself to an exacting picture that appears to reverse the vacancy in the center of a pelvic bone. The rounded space in the bone was rendered instead as a solid ovoid. She completed half a dozen drawings of a rock resting on a pedestal. These drawings recall O’Keeffe’s 1963 painting of a brown rock, sitting like an egg on a piece of wood. Black Rock with Blue III, which shows the irregular onyx sphere upon a slightly curved ivory base against an azure background, was O’Keeffe’s last study of this haunting subject.

  O’Keeffe so enjoyed her final painting of the series that she hung it in her white-carpeted Abiquiu studio.

  VII

  In 1970, Doris Bry and Lloyd Goodrich, who was then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, co-organized Georgia O’Keeffe. Although it was her fifth retrospective, it was the first major presentation of the artist’s work to be seen in New York since her 1946 Museum of Modern Art show. Reviewing her earliest watercolors and charcoals from 1915, 1916, and 1917 in preparation for the show, O’Keeffe suddenly turned to Bry and said, “We don’t really need to have the show, I never did any better.”1

  This startling remark unmasked more than a little covert insecurity; it contained an element of truth. O’Keeffe’s personal commitment to abstraction, executed so freely before her exposure to Stieglitz and his colleagues, led her to wonder whether she might not have continued such work without him. Although the shapes of her 1919 oil abstractions were derived from the earlier charcoals, her paintings rarely were so unfettered after the sexually nuanced reviews that framed her 1923 exhibition. As she looked through photographs of her paintings for her 1970 retrospective, O’Keeffe wondered about her choices in life and art, and whether she had challenged herself enough.

  The Whitney retrospective contained twice as many works as previous shows and included her early abstractions as well as her most recent accomplishments, like the mammoth Sky Above Clouds IV.

  At the time of this exhibition, Bry was at the apogee of her power, and considered by all as the spokesperson for the aging artist. It was Bry who made the decision to hang the show thematically rather than chronologically, in an attempt to bolster the credibility of O’Keeffe’s later work by encouraging connections with the earlier pictures. Bry, who had spent many years working for the difficult O’Keeffe, felt that she was ready to reap some of the rewards. There were still plenty of late paintings and Bry would receive commissions for sales.

  O’Keeffe kept the Whitney staff working nights to hang the show. A museum director remarked, “Dealing with Georgia is very easy, provided you do exactly what she wants.”2The opening reception at the Whitney was crowded with faces that were unfamiliar to the eighty-two-year-old artist. O’Keeffe’s old beau from Canyon, Texas, sauntered up and introduced himself, exclaiming, “Georgia, it’s Ted Reid!” Staring at him with an honesty unmitigated by the intervening fifty years, O’Keeffe replied, “My, you look old.”3

  Daniel Rich, a trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, had moved to New York to write a book on Henry McBride. After touring the retrospective, he wrote O’Keeffe, “The whole show is full of a wonderful controlled elation.”4

  The Whitney exhibition produced a hefty catalogue, and, for the first time, there were a handful of color plates. After the show, O’Keeffe’s retrospective traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Art. The exposure to a wider audience, to art students and scholars looking to establish a place for women in the history of modern art, led to a fresh surge of adulation. In May, O’Keeffe received the prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Painting.

  O’Keeffe’s work had never been more popular and she was inundated by letters from aspiring artists seeking guidance. Her advice was simple: “Go home and work.”

  “That’s all I can tell anyone,” she said. “You can’t help people that way. I think one of my best times was when nobody was interested in me. That may have come from my not being the favorite child in the family, and not minding that I wasn’t—it left me very free. . . . I never cared anything at all what other people thought. Oh, if I’d followed people’s advice it would have been hopeless.”5

  The Whitney show brought O’Keeffe to the attention of a generation of budding feminists, many of whom visited New Mexico to pay homage to the pioneer feminist. Gloria Steinem, the founding editor of Ms. magazine, showed up at O’Keeffe’s door with a bouquet but was turned away. Judy Chicago fabricated a Georgia O’Keeffe plate molded with wildly exaggerated labia as petals around a floral vagina for her sensational installation The Dinner Party. Having fought the label of being a “woman artist” throughout her life, O’Keeffe now found herself contradicting the politics of a faction she did not understand.

  Although she had been a lifelong member of the National Woman’s Party, she felt strongly that the establishment of the “separate but equal” categorization of women’s art was a mistake: she saw it as voluntary ghettoization.

  O’Keeffe was not one for solidarity with her sisters, but she did feel that individual women deserved the same acclaim and representation in the history of art as their male counterparts. Yet she was quoted as saying, “Personally, the only people who ever helped me were men.”6 Of course, men had been the only people with power and the wherewith all to help O’Keeffe when she was developing. She once mused, “I often wonder what would have happened to me if I had been a man instea
d of a woman.”7

  After all of the excitement of her retrospective, O’Keeffe looked forward to a November trip to Texas with the Girards and the welcome calm of Abiquiu. Nineteen-seventy had been a strenuous year for her. Gazing above her beloved crimson hills, she was troubled. The deterioration of her eyesight was more obvious to her in the familiar surroundings of her own home. As she confided to a friend, “The sun is shining but it looks so gray.”

  In 1971, O’Keeffe completed a single painting. Black Rock on Red presents a bronzed ovoid reflecting the sun on a wooden base surrounded by persimmon.

  O’Keeffe’s ability to paint was nearly at an end. The Tamarind Institute, a pioneering lithography studio associated with the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, sent her a lithography stone to make prints for them. She sent it back after several months saying, “I didn’t have time to do it.” When Tamarind’s Mary Adams probed the subject of her failing eyesight, O’Keeffe said, “We don’t talk about my eyes.”8

  O’Keeffe’s loss of vision was slow but relentless. The artist tried to maintain some hope of a cure, including the Bates Method of eye exercises. The Bates Method did not help her condition, but she was able to keep her failing sight a secret from most people. She had 12 × 18-inch cards printed with phone numbers, and her assistant arranged them when she wanted to call someone on the telephone.9 When actor and art collector Dennis Hopper visited O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, he recalled, “She walked me away from the others to the garden and with her cane, pointed toward the valley below.” Hopper held out his arm in imitation of the scene. “She said, ‘I can’t see to the end of this cane. I’m almost totally blind. I’m doing all of this by memory. Don’t tell the others.’”10

  When a blood vessel burst in O’Keeffe’s eye in the beginning of 1971, she was forced to acknowledge the seriousness of her condition. “My world is blurred,” she cried to Kiskadden.11 Kiskadden promptly flew to New Mexico and then brought her back to the best doctors in Los Angeles. O’Keeffe was diagnosed with macular degeneration, an irreversible condition that slowly obliterates the central vision. Eventually, she was left with only peripheral sight, and that too would be lost in time. She could barely accept this devastating news. She had won against so many adversaries and overcome so many trials.

  It didn’t matter to O’Keeffe that she was awarded honorary degrees from Brown and Columbia universities in June and the M. Carey Thomas Prize from Bryn Mawr College in October. It didn’t matter that her friends, including the writer Blanche Matthias, who visited her that May, rallied to help.

  The only thing that had ever really mattered to O’Keeffe was being taken away—her eyesight and, therefore, her ability to work. She admitted sadly, “If you didn’t come to it gradually, I guess you’d just kill yourself when you couldn’t see.”12

  What O’Keeffe could actually see had little to do with the images that haunted her imagination. In 1972, she completed Black Rock with Blue Sky and White Clouds, an iconic ovoid glimmering with celestial radiance, framed by sky and clouds, and resting on a chalky wooden pedestal.

  More troubling was O’Keeffe’s painting The Beyond, a 30 × 40-inch view of the horizon in which the sky is mottled ultramarine blue while the lower half of the canvas is flat, undifferentiated black. Portentous and tragic, The Beyond was O’Keeffe’s view of her immediate future.

  Out of despair, O’Keeffe went to see yet another doctor in Los Angeles in the spring of 1972. Tish Frank brought her to Dr. Glenn Dayton Jr., who asked questions about O’Keeffe’s family history. Frank, who was holding O’Keeffe’s hand, felt it tighten when the doctor offered little hope for a cure. After O’Keeffe returned to Abiquiu, she remembered something that could have provided a clue: She wrote to Dayton that her grandfather in Budapest had gone blind. She added, “My left eye has become much more cloudy, and it’s as if my right eye is beginning to cloud. I assume that I should know there is nothing that could be done about it. Am I correct? . . . I would go to see you again but from what I understand, there would be no real reason for me to go.”13

  Shortly after her visit to Dr. Dayton, O’Keeffe decided to rewrite her will so that all of her works of art would be left to the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University. (O’Keeffe’s decision was influenced by the fact that Kiskadden’s son, Derek Bok, was president of the Ivy League institution.) Rich, who had taken the one-year museum course at Harvard, approved O’Keeffe’s choice of the Fogg over the Whitney. Bry was appointed executrix of the estate.

  The following June, O’Keeffe was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard. During the ceremony, she was moved to tears as Bok, the little boy who used to visit Ghost Ranch with his mother, draped the velvet hood of the degree recipients over her shoulders.14

  More awards poured in. In May, she received an honorary degree from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, followed in August by the Edward MacDowell Medal from the MacDowell Colony. In October, she was awarded a Certificate for an Honorary Membership to the American Watercolor Society. The watercolor award had special meaning for O’Keeffe, who had completed her last unassisted oil painting but continued to work in watercolor and charcoal for another six years.

  Virginia Christianson, a local Abiquiu woman, worked as O’Keeffe’s companion, chauffeuring her from Abiquiu to Ghost Ranch in the artist’s white Lincoln Continental. Several times a week, Christianson took O’Keeffe to Santa Fe to see the eye doctor. After each visit, O’Keeffe would drop her head in her hands to hide her tears. Angry over her fate, she grew increasingly contentious, arguing with Christianson over how to preserve ginger, how to fold a blouse, how to arrange a bouquet, how to make tea. O’Keeffe said accusingly, “You’re like me. You can’t stay put. One day you will fly.”15

  Although it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, when Christianson finally quit, O’Keeffe broke down and cried out of fear and frustration.

  VIII

  Pretending that her eyesight wasn’t an issue, O’Keeffe continued to meet her professional obligations. In May 1973, she traveled to New York to receive a medal from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. That fall, Rich came to her home in Abiquiu. Her blindness was no secret from him.

  Virginia Robertson had replaced Virginia Christianson as O’Keeffe’s secretary. Within weeks, O’Keeffe began erasing the line between employer and employee. Soon, she asked Robertson to stay with her during the week and only return to her home in Albuquerque to spend weekends with her husband. In the evenings, she asked Robertson to sit with her and listen to recordings of classical music. O’Keeffe explained, “My tastes in music stop at the seventeenth century.”1

  Adopting the ruse of many an elderly person, O’Keeffe promised to revise her will in Robertson’s favor if she stayed on. Robertson felt uncomfortable with her increasing responsibilities and decided that it was time to leave. Her last night was the Thursday before the Labor Day weekend of 1973. As the two women sat on the patio listening to music, O’Keeffe, eighty-six, asked if there was anything that might change Robertson’s mind, but Robertson was decided. On Friday morning, the twenty-six-year-old John Bruce Hamilton knocked on O’Keeffe’s door to ask if she had any work to be done.2 The poet C. S. Merrill, who worked for O’Keeffe intermittently between 1973 and 1979, wrote a poem that aptly captures Hamilton’s arrival:

  One worker came to the sliding door

  long hair, mustache, and a little slumped

  asked to trim Russian Olive hedge.

  She said no at first, then yes.

  He said in a slow sentence

  the great painter should not

  scuff around in unpolished shoes.

  He oiled & polished her worn flats,

  they shined, slick, like new.3

  Hamilton is a man about whom there are seemingly no neutral feelings: he is adored or disliked. Even his friends describe him as “difficult.” Yet his appearance in O’Keeffe’s life was uncannily fortuitous—he arrived when she was at her most vulnerable. O’Keeffe would put up with h
is cantankerous personality in exchange for his help with her life and her career. She lost friends and colleagues over this decision, but even Hamilton’s enemies grudgingly admit that it was he who masterminded her popularity to increase the prices of her paintings, further secured her place in art history, and enhanced the quality of life during her last decade.

  Hamilton was born in Dallas on December 22, 1945. Having spent the first fifteen years of his life in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, he was nicknamed Juan. His father, Allen Hamilton, was a lay worker in the Presbyterian Church who taught at the Evangelical Seminary in Costa Rica and elsewhere in Latin America.

  The Hamiltons moved frequently before returning to the States in 1960 and settling in the suburbs of New York City. After high school, Hamilton attended Hastings College in Nebraska, a small school founded by the United Presbyterian Church where religious studies were required and alcohol was forbidden. He began his studies in English literature and drama, but after taking a few art classes, he decided to pursue a double major and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in American literature and fine art.

  In college, he pursued sculpture. His 1968 graduation show at the Hastings College art gallery included an eleven-foot-tall man made of steel. “I cut him down afterward. He was huge, weighed a ton and I couldn’t afford to move him,” Hamilton recalled. The show also held one hundred pieces in different media—ceramic pots, woodblock prints, and watercolors. “I was eager,” he said.4