Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  The Vietnam War escalated after Hamilton graduated and, with his Presbyterian background, he declared himself a conscientious objector. He entered Claremont Graduate School in Southern California and studied sculpture for one semester before dropping out to marry an art historian with a specialization in Japanese and Chinese art.

  In 1969, the Hamiltons went to Japan for six months, three of which were spent living with the family of a Japanese fisherman off the Oki Gunto Islands in the Sea of Japan. Although Hamilton spoke little Japanese and the seventy-four-year-old fisherman spoke no English, they dived together for abalone and climbed the rocky island cliffs to collect Bonsai samples.

  It was not the first time that Hamilton had bonded with a person much older than himself. As a child in Venezuela, he had befriended the older neighbors. “I have noticed that I would become friends with my father’s friends,” he said. “Sometimes I talked more with older people than with people of my own age. I think it was that perception of their wisdom that I admired,” he admitted.5

  After their travels in Japan, the young couple moved to Vermont, and Hamilton built a cabin on land owned by his wife’s family. The two made ceramic pots and grew organic vegetables. After two years, however, they divorced.6

  By 1972, Hamilton was unemployed and living with his family in New Jersey. His parents’ Presbyterian connections led him to take a job in the kitchen of the Ghost Ranch conference center. After seven months at Ghost Ranch, Hamilton had still not seen the famous artist, though he had been impressed by the 1968 issue of Life magazine that featured O’Keeffe on the cover. As he noted, “There was a simplicity to her world, that business of being in the desert and walking in the hills. The magic sense of light.”7

  Santa Fe gallery owner Jean Seth—herself a Presbyterian—once asked O’Keeffe how she got along with the Presbyterians at the conference center. The artist said dismissively, “I just don’t see them.” She had in fact been forced to develop a somewhat cooperative relationship with the administration at Ghost Ranch. She also paid many of the church’s employees to do odd jobs and errands for her, and when a fire destroyed the Presbyterian Church’s headquarters, O’Keeffe gave director Jim Hall a check for fifty thousand dollars.

  One day, she called the head of maintainance, Ray McCall, and he asked Hamilton to come along. Hamilton remembered, “She looked right past me as if I were transparent.”8

  Jim Hall took Hamilton on the next call, to help unload a wood stove from the back of a truck. Hall presented him by way of explaining that he’d heated his house in Vermont with an antique wood stove. O’Keeffe turned around and snapped, “This is not an antique wood stove.”9

  Hamilton, however, was undeterred. He was keen to work for the artist and had heard that she needed help. He followed the advice of the writer Virginia Kirby, who had done some secretarial work for O’Keeffe. She suggested that he simply show up early one morning and ask for work. O’Keeffe’s housekeeper, Candelaria Lopez, answered the back screen door of the kitchen and went to the studio to retrieve O’Keeffe. The artist answered, “Work? I don’t have any work.” Hamilton, who was rangy and attractive, with tousled dark hair, turned to leave. Suddenly, O’Keeffe changed her mind and asked if he could pack a shipping crate.

  The next day, as he helped her with the menial job, she said, “You speak pretty good English. Did you finish high school?” When she learned that he had finished college and two semesters of graduate school, she leapt to the next question. “Can you type?”10

  For several months, O’Keeffe referred to Hamilton as her “boy” or, when introducing him, would say, “This is . . . what’s your name?” But the stacks of unanswered mail from professionals and fans slowly dwindled, and O’Keeffe grew friendlier toward him. She enjoyed his cynical sense of humor and appreciated his usefulness as a craftsman. Hamilton spoke fluent Spanish, had built his own home, and enjoyed the austere lifestyle of early mornings, hard work, and hearty meals. Most important, he was an artist, with sensitivity toward O’Keeffe’s career and her work, whether it was packing paintings or writing letters to collectors and dealers.

  Calvin Tomkins, art writer for The New Yorker, arrived at Ghost Ranch three weeks after Hamilton. Tomkins noticed that Hamilton treated the venerable artist in a teasing and unusually intimate manner: “He did not treat her like the Queen of Sheba.”11

  During the four days that Tomkins stayed, Jerrie Newsom was off duty, and O’Keeffe was doing the cooking. Tomkins came running when he heard an explosion in the kitchen. The gas had been left on, and when O’Keeffe opened the oven door, she had singed her eyebrows. Barely fazed, she went on to prepare a delicious meal comprised of eight different kinds of squash from her garden.12

  Soon, O’Keeffe asked Hamilton to join her in the evenings as she listened to recordings of Beethoven’s piano sonatas performed by Sviatoslav Richter. Her new assistant grew accustomed to the fact that she would listen to the same recording over and over again, sitting in her white studio, with the latest in her long line of chows, Jingo and Inca, at her feet.

  In the early months of 1974, when the Girards told O’Keeffe of their plans for a trip to Morocco, she hinted, “I’ve never been to Morocco.” They invited her, and she accepted, saying, “I think I’ll bring Juan. You know, for packing and carrying.”13

  Hamilton recalled, “We traveled three thousand miles around Morocco with a car and driver. We left from Casablanca, to Fez, up through the Atlas Mountains, down to the southern desert, back up the coast. It was really an ancient culture. It was almost like walking back to biblical times. Everybody was on donkeys and it was primitive. What she enjoyed most was walking in the countryside, not really being around towns and people.”14

  But already, O’Keeffe was arguing with Hamilton. At one point during the trip, an annoyed O’Keeffe stalked off by herself. Her blurred eyesight led her to wander accidently into a hotel room, where she surprised a complete stranger as he was shaving his beard. Frightened and a little humbled, she came back to Hamilton and admitted what had happened. Hamilton laughed. He had not worked for her very long, but Susan Girard noticed that he was flip and irreverent. “It was his age,” she said, “but O’Keeffe loved that about him.”15

  O’Keeffe’s age and her poor sight made travel difficult. The hired young girls from Abiquiu and Doris Bry were not going to carry her luggage and provide the same sense of safety as the strapping Hamilton, who soon became her regular travel companion.

  Before their departure for Morocco, Hamilton stayed the night at her Abiquiu house. He let the bathtub overflow, flooded the bathroom, and left it, along with a mess of empty beer cans that he littered around the house, for Newsom to clean up. (After their return from Morocco, Newsom tendered her resignation saying, “Miss O’Keeffe, I am not going to look after your help.”)16

  During their trip to Morocco, O’Keeffe finished the notes that were to accompany a portfolio of reproductions of her works on paper issued by Atlantis Editions, Some Memories of Drawings. O’Keeffe’s moving commentary and pictures were published as a small book in 1988. Doris Bry supervised both projects. Looking back over her sixty-year career O’Keeffe was surprisingly unguarded. Of her charcoal drawings and watercolors from 1915 and 1916, she recalled poignantly, “This was one of the best times in my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing—no one interested—no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own, unknown—no one to satisfy but myself.”17

  Akin to O’Keeffe’s assessment of her art made before her two large retrospectives, this later confession reinforced her ambivalence about Stieglitz’s effect on the development of her art. Reviewing the same drawings before her Whitney show, she had said, “I never did any better.”18 Despite her success, she still felt that her earliest work had been her strongest. This conviction soon led her to return to watercolor to paint dramatic, spontaneous abstractions that echoed her efforts from 1915.

  Hamilton re
fused to live with O’Keeffe, but in 1974, with her financial help, he was able to buy and remodel a house in nearby Barranca.

  He drove to O’Keeffe’s house at dawn to accompany her on the morning walks. He kept her appointment book, answered her correspondence, and acted as chauffeur. Their relationship evolved gradually. “I was an employee who became a friend,” he said. “I am still and always was very much an employee and my work relationship wasn’t altered because of the friendship. I still did as much work if not more.”19

  In remarks that sounded startlingly similar to those of Doris Bry, Hamilton noted, “I was trained by Miss O’Keeffe to become her eyes in checking the quality of reproductions and layouts. It was an apprenticeship. Trust evolved over a period of time. It’s not as though she woke up one morning and said, ‘My God, not only can he work but I like him.’ I think she was surprised to find how much she cared for me. She even asked her doctor if she was getting batty.”

  “I think she had a remarkable ability to see that if she wanted to continue her lifestyle and independence in her later years, she would need to set that up,” Hamilton continued. “She found out that . . . I’d done a lot of things that were useful to her.”20

  Hamilton and O’Keeffe were, in some ways, similar in temperament. He did not display the fawning or submissive tendencies of some employees, and his experience in Japan and familiarity with Zen gardens and Japanese pottery were attractive to O’Keeffe. “We both had strong feelings about aesthetic things,” he explained. “We both took great pleasure in remodeling old adobes, building our own homes, making our own worlds. We were both difficult to get along with because we were demanding and wanted things a certain way. We couldn’t just leave it for someone else to do. But she had a lot more wisdom and experience than I did.”21

  As time wore on, Hamilton found that working for O’Keeffe could be exhilarating, but it was also exhausting and personally draining. Like Newsom and Chabot, he quit and was rehired from time to time.

  Hamilton began a series of round ceramic sculptures in homage to O’Keeffe’s 1971 paintings of boulders. O’Keeffe approved this work, but when Hamilton mentioned having an exhibition she cautioned, “You have some very nice things, but you don’t have a body of work.”22

  She encouraged Hamilton to commit to ceramics and bought him a kiln. The day that it was delivered, the crane on the truck nearly unloaded it on top of her, but the elderly artist was still nimble enough to jump out of the way.

  After O’Keeffe fell and dislocated her shoulder in October 1974, Hamilton taught her to make small pots out of clay coils. (Perhaps he could cite the precedent of Impressionist Edgar Degas, who, as he lost his eyesight, turned to sculpture.) O’Keeffe found solace in using her hands to build shapes that she could no longer see. She was humbled by the effort. “I rolled the clay and coiled it . . . I tried to smooth it and I made very bad pots.” Hamilton told her, “Keep on, keep on—you have to work at it—the clay has a mind of its own.” He helped her until she had several pots that she called “not too bad” while admitting, “I cannot yet make the clay speak—so I must keep on.”23

  After a couple of years, it became apparent that Hamilton’s charm was more than matched by his temper. Kiskadden, who had been coming to stay at Ghost Ranch for more than twenty years, found him to be difficult from the outset. When O’Keeffe had trouble with her dislocated shoulder, Kiskadden volunteered to stay with her during her recuperation. Upon her arrival, Hamilton announced that he was glad she had come since he could finally take his vacation in the Rocky Mountains. As an afterthought, he asked if they would need the Mercedes for their round-trip drives to the doctor in Santa Fe. When Kiskadden said yes, Hamilton grew sullen. When she suggested he take O’Keeffe’s Ford station wagon, he snapped that such a car couldn’t make the trip. Kiskadden reasoned that her own children had often driven into the Rockies using her old, American-made cars. “Well, your children are so special,” he said sarcastically, stalking out of the room.24

  Hamilton got into another altercation in the spring. On April 27, 1975, twelve of O’Keeffe’s major New Mexican paintings were shown in the Governor’s Gallery at the State Capitol in Santa Fe. (O’Keeffe had received the state’s first annual Governor’s Award the previous October). It was only her second solo show in her adopted state, and Alexander Girard helped Hamilton hang and install the exhibition. When Hamilton arrived to pick up the paintings at the conclusion of the exhibition, he roughed up the employee who had slapped seals stating “Property State of New Mexico” on the backs of O’Keeffe’s paintings. The seals covered the provenance stamps from the Stieglitz galleries. As a friend explained, “These kinds of things got Juan nervous.”25

  Hamilton was extremely fortunate to have found a position as associate of one of the richest and most respected of living artists. But O’Keeffe, who felt herself to be naturally lucky, considered it especially good fortune to have Hamilton. As he recalled, “She thought that it was her magic to some extent, that someone would knock on the door and it would be me.”26

  The previous year, O’Keeffe told Tomkins:

  The truth is I’ve been very lucky. Stieglitz was the most interesting center of energy in the art world just when I was trying to find my way. To have him get interested in me was a very good thing. My going to Texas was lucky, and, of course, my finding [Abiquiu]. And then, somehow, what I painted happened to fit into the emotional life of my time. . . . Often, I’ve had the feeling that I could have been a much better painter and had far less recognition. It’s just that what I do seems to move people today, in a way that I don’t understand at all. Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, how ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead. But then I realize that to someone else it may not seem ordinary.

  Gazing at the adobe wall of her home, she added, “I just think that some people are very lucky.”27

  In January 1976, O’Keeffe avoided the bitterly cold Abiquiu by going to Antigua with Hamilton. There she spent each day taking a slow walk along the white sandy beach to collect seashells, as she had done years before on York Beach, Maine. For the first time in four years, she made drawings. With a felt tip pen, she sketched her impressions of the palm trees, and when she got home, she translated them into charcoal drawings. The drawings are based both on what O’Keeffe could see, and on her memories.

  She had renewed her friendship with Ansel Adams and his wife Virginia and visited them in 1976 in Carmel. At the Adams home, she made charcoal sketches of the California redwoods. The Adamses approved of O’Keeffe’s new companion. “I thought Juan was very good for her,” Virginia Adams said. “Doris Bry had always made her be over precious. Juan kidded her and she laughed, which she hadn’t done for a number of years. You don’t expect a young man to take responsibility for someone like that. They kept talking about marriage but I didn’t think it was anything serious.”28 The following October, O’Keeffe and Hamilton went to Tucson, Arizona, for the opening of Adams’s retrospective exhibition.

  O’Keeffe, eighty-nine, was upset to learn of the deaths of Paul Strand and Daniel Catton Rich, both of whom were younger than she was. Yet with Hamilton at her side, she was able to continue her travels, and they visited her sister Anita in Palm Beach. They also went to New York to celebrate the publication of her autobiography, Georgia O’Keeffe, by Viking Press.

  Since Pollitzer’s death in 1974, O’Keeffe was able to draw from much of the information that she had shared with her. In addition, O’Keeffe had asked Virginia Robertson to take down other recollections. She had compiled photographs of paintings and scraps of text, but her failing eyesight prevented her from coping with the complicated logistics of layout and editing. She asked Calvin Tomkins to fly to New Mexico and review her notes to see if they could become a manuscript. Tomkins recalled, “It was typical O’Keeffe. She couldn’t just have them copied and sent to me. She had no hesitation to make demands on people.”29

  Realizing that O’Keeffe h
ad no intention of letting anyone write an authorized biography, Tomkins put her in touch with his agent, Robert Lescher, who negotiated an ironclad contract with Viking, which gave her control of the text, photography, color separations, and the unusual 11 × 14-inch page size. Hamilton took charge of the project and, working with editor David Bell, put together the first volume of images and text based on the artist’s view of herself and her art.

  A compilation of O’Keeffe’s most vivid memories and observations, the heavily illustrated memoir is the only document authorized by the artist. O’Keeffe minimizes Stieglitz’s role in her life, mentioning him only a few times and not at great length.

  Shortly before the book was published, she told Tomkins, “I really grew to be very fond of Stieglitz.”30

  Thus the great American love affair between two artists was summed up: fondness had replaced passion in O’Keeffe’s view of the way things really were.

  In a way, Stieglitz held a sort of reverse influence over O’Keeffe’s last coherent body of work. In the course of completing the book, she reviewed the myriad details of her childhood, her early schooling, and her lovers—a process that led her back to a long-simmering resentment. What she most minded about Stieglitz was the way he kept her off her own track. Several times over the course of her career, O’Keeffe indicated that her work was more potent before she moved in with Stieglitz.

  As an old woman who was nearly blind, O’Keeffe painted a series of watercolors using the same primal forms that she had invented as her own visual vocabulary in 1916. She painted a pale blue ball hovering above a horizontal blue stroke. A trio of sidelong blue barriers with balls placed above and below them was titled From a Day at Esther’s—a reference to Esther Johnson. The same shade was employed for the myriad horizontal bands and dots of Blue and Green Lines with Wash. Another untitled placed dots with sinuous vertical elements.