5. Tomkins, “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine.”
6. Ibid.
7. Tomkins, Notes.
8. GOK to Russell Vernon Hunter, late Aug. 1931(?), cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 204.
9. GOK to Ettie Stettheimer, Aug. 24, 1929.
10. Ralph Looney, O’Keeffe and Me: A Treasured Friendship (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995), p. 31.
11. Tomkins, “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine.”
12. Corn, The Great American Thing, p. 248.
13. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
14. Norman, Encounters, p. 103.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Lowe, Stieglitz.
18. GOK to RSS, Oct. 6, 1931, YCAL. By Aug. 1912, Lee Stieglitz and Amanda Liebman Hoff had been having an affair for ten years. He had fallen in love with her in 1890 but honored his engagement to Elizabeth. In 1902, he met Amanda again, now married to Samuel Hoff. She became one of Lee’s patients and his mistress. During odd-numbered years, Lee, Lizzie, and their two daughters took European vacations with the Hoffs. During the summer of 1912, Lee broke the tradition and traveled alone to meet them at the Swiss resort of Sils-Maria. He was holding hands with Amanda on the terrace of the hotel and was discovered by Samuel. Lee came back to Lake George, where he was nursed to health by his wife after an attack of angina pectoris. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 313.
19. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Oct. 1931?, YCAL.
20. McBride, “Skeletons on the Plain,” New York Sun, Jan. 1, 1932.
21. O’Keeffe, exhibition brochure, Georgia O’Keeffe: 33 New Paintings (New Mexico), Dec. 27, 1931–Jan. 31, 1932, An American Place, 1931.
22. Tomkins, “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine.”
23. GOK to Dorothy Brett, mid-Feb. 1932, YCAL.
24. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 534.
25. GOK to Dorothy Brett, mid-Feb. 1932, YCAL.
26. Paul Strand: Sixty Years of Photographs, edited by Michael Hoffman (New York: Aperture, 1976), p. 153.
27. PS to RSS, Dec. 13, 1966, PSC, CCP.
28. Paul Strand: Essays on his Life and Work, edited by Maren Stange (New York: Aperture, 1990), p. 449.
29. Tomkins, Notes.
30. GOK to Blanche Matthias, Apr. 1929, YCAL.
31. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Sept. 1932, YCAL.
32. GOK to Russell Vernon Hunter, Spring 1932, cited by Cowart, Hamilton and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 207.
33. GOK to Dorothy Brett, Sept. 1932, YCAL.
34. GOK to Catherine O’Keeffe Klenert, Fall 1931?, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 386.
35. GOK to AP, Dec. 13, 1949, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 286. Ida O’Keeffe did receive a master’s degree in fine arts from Teachers College, Columbia, in 1932.
36. Kuh, The Artist’s Voice, p. 202.
37. GOK to RSS, Oct. 6, 1931, YCAL.
38. Letter from Donald Deskey to Laurie Lisle, Nov. 7, 1978, cited in Lisle, Portrait, p. 257.
Chapter XII
1. AS to PS, Feb. 13, 1933, PSC, CCP.
2. McBride, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Exhibition,” New York Sun, Jan. 14, 1933.
3. Ralph Flint, The Art News, Jan. 14, 1933.
4. GOK to William M. Milliken, Nov. 1, 1930, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 202.
5. Sharyn R. Udall’s observation in “Beholding the Epiphanies,” From the Faraway Nearby, pp. 110–11.
6. Edward Alden Jewell, “Another O’Keeffe Emerges,” New York Times, Mar. 29, 1933.
7. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 545.
8. GOK to Marjorie Content, Spring 1933, YCAL.
9. AS to Arthur Dove, May 24, 1933, ASA, YCAL.
10. GOK to George Bradshaw, July 12, 1933, Property of Kenneth W. Rendell, Newton, Mass. I thank Paige Rense for bringing this to my attention.
11. GOK to RSS, Nov. 1933, YCAL.
12. GOK to PS, Dec. 26, 1933, PSC, CCP.
13. Cynthia Earl Kermer and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 204.
14. GOK to Jean Toomer, Jan. 10, 1934, YCAL; Robinson, in A Life, maintains that their affection was platonic, based on a reference to “the bundling bed,” the Puritan practice of placing a board between an engaged couple when they slept together.
15. GOK to Jean Toomer, Jan. 10, 1934, YCAL.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. GOK to Jean Toomer, Feb. 8, 1934, YCAL. According to Robinson, A Life, p. 403, it is probably the picture Birch and Pine Trees—Pink, 1925.
19. Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 293.
20. GOK to George Bradshaw, Nov. 25, 1933, Property of Kenneth W. Rendell, Newton, Mass. I thank Paige Rense for bringing this to my attention.
21. GOK to RSS, sometime between Dec. 1933 and Feb. 1934?, YCAL.
22. GOK to Jean Toomer, Feb. 14, 1934, YCAL.
23. GOK to RSS, Apr. 26, 1934, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 220.
24. O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings.
25. GOK to Jean Toomer, Feb. 14, 1934, YCAL.
26. GOK to Jean Toomer, Mar. 5, 1934, YCAL.
27. GOK to RSS, Apr. 26, 1934.
28. GOK to MDL, Winter 1933–1934, YCAL.
29. O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings.
30. Eisler, American Romance, p. 452.
31. GOK to RSS, Apr. 26, 1934, cited by Cowart, Hamilton and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 221.
32. Toomer, “City Plowman: The Hill,” America and Alfred Stieglitz, p. 301.
33. GOK to Ron Pisano, Aug. 18, 1972, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 412.
34. Lee’s twin brother, Julius, who lived in Chicago, had lost his first wife to illness and decided to marry Dr. Mary Meda Reising, his colleague and former student from the University of Chicago, who was twenty-two years his junior.
35. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
36. Tomkins, Notes.
Chapter XIII
1. Lewis Mumford, “Autobiographies in Paint,” The New Yorker, Jan. 18, 1936.
2. Marsden Hartley, “A Second Outline in Portraiture,” An American Place brochure, 1936, n. p.
3. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
4. Ralph Flint, “Lily Lady Goes West,” Town and Country, Jan. 1943.
5. AS to Ansel Adams, Apr. 6, 1936, CCP, ASA, YCAL.
6. Claude Bragdon to Dorothy Brett, July 22, 1946, YCAL.
7. GOK to William Einstein, June 1937, ASA, YCAL.
8. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
9. Balge-Crozier, “Still Life Redefined,” The Poetry of Things, p. 65, quoting from Cleve Gray, ed., “John Marin by John Marin,” undated ms., p. 54.
10. Kotz, “A Day with O’Keeffe.”
11. According to Ansel Adams’s widow, Virginia Adams, Cox’s grandchildren wrote to the photographer with this story and were sent a work print as a thank-you note. Author’s interview with Virginia Adams, Big Sur, Calif., Feb. 1990.
12. GOK to AS, Aug. 20, 1937, reprinted for An American Place brochure for O’Keeffe exhibition, Dec. 27, 1937–Feb. 11, 1938.
13. Ibid.
14. William Einstein to GOK, Sept. 6, 1936, YCAL.
15. George L. K. Morris, “Some Personal Letters to American Artists Recently Exhibiting in New York,” Partisan Review, Mar. 1938.
16. Kate Alfriend, “Georgia O’Keeffe Says Art Is Only What You See Before You,” The Flat Hat, May 10, 1938, University Archives, College of William and Mary. This account comes from Ann C. Madonia, curator of collections, Muscarelle Museum of Art, who restaged the 1938 exhibition as Georgia O’Keeffe in Williamsburg: A Re-creation of the Artist’s First Public Exhibition in the South, at the College of William and Mary, from Jan. 27 to May 27, 2001. Barbara B. Lynes was advisor.
17. Ruth S. Intress, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sept. 2, 1984.
18. Author’s interview with John and Julie Henley, Rich
mond, Va., Oct. 29, 1989. I thank them for allowing me to read the undated letter from O’Keeffe to Turner Henley, 1988.
19. GOK to William Einstein, July 19, 1938, ASA, YCAL.
20. Ansel Adams to AS, Sept. 10, 1938, CCP, ASA, YCAL.
21. GOK to Cady Wells, Feb. 3, 1938, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 222.
22. GOK to Cady Wells, late Feb. 1938, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 224.
23. GOK to Cady Wells, Spring 1939, cited by Cowart, Hamilton and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 227.
Chapter XIV
1. O’Keeffe, exhibition brochure, Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils and Pastels, An American Place, 1939.
2. Ralph Flint, “New Exhibitions of the Week: A Show of the Most Recent Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe,” The Art News 36, no. 19 (Feb. 5, 1938).
3. GOK to Carl Van Vechten, n.d., postcard mailed on Feb. 8, 1939, YCAL.
4. “O’Keeffe’s Pineapple,” Art Digest 17, no. 11 (March 1943), cited by Jennifer Saville, “Georgia O’Keeffe in Hawaii,” From the Faraway Nearby, p. 116.
5. GOK to Ettie Stettheimer, Mar. 1939, Wailuku, Maui, YCAL.
6. “News About Town: Ends Visit Here,” Hilo Tribune Herald 11 (April 1939): 1, cited by Saville, From the Faraway Nearby, p. 118.
7. The Pineapple Bud advertisement was published in Woman’s Home Companion, Nov. 1940, p. 59, and in Ladies Home Journal, Oct. 1940, p. 61. The Heliconia—Crabs Claw Ginger ad was in the Saturday Evening Post, April 1940, p. 115, and in Vogue, Feb. 1, 1941, p. 58. As researched by Saville, From the Faraway Nearby, p. 122.
8. GOK to Cady Wells, Spring 1939, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 227.
9. GOK to HMB, July 22, 1939, Archives of American Art.
10. GOK to William Einstein, June 8, 1939, ASA, YCAL.
11. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 566.
12. O’Keeffe, exhibition brochure, Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils and Pastels, 1939.
13. Henry McBride, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hawaii,” New York Sun, Feb. 10, 1940.
14. Maria Chabot, unpublished article, 1941, Maria Chabot Archive (hereinafter MCA), Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Santa Fe, N.M.
15. GOK to Cady Wells, n.d., Archives of American Art.
16. GOK to HMB, early 1940s?, Robinson, A Life, p. 461.
17. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
18. Author’s telephone interview with Van Deren Coke, June 10, 1987.
19. GOK to Claudia O’Keeffe, n.d., prob. 1941, Museum of Fine Arts Library and Archives, Museum of New Mexico, by permission of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation.
20. Seiberling, “Horizons.”
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Barbara Buhler Lynes, Introduction, Maria Chabot–Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence, 1941–1949, edited by Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, and Sarah King (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2003), pp. xiv–xxi.
24. GOK to AP, A Woman on Paper, p. 234.
25. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Author’s interview with Ben Brewer, June 7, 1998, Memphis, Tenn.
29. GOK to Maria Chabot, Dec. 16, 1941, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
30. GOK to Maria Chabot, Nov. 19, 1941, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
31. GOK to Maria Chabot, Dec. 14, 1941, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
32. Maria Chabot to GOK, Nov. 22, 1941, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
Chapter XV
1. GOK to Maria Chabot, Nov. 17, 1941, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
2. Maria Chabot to GOK, May 11, 1942, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
3. GOK to Maria Chabot, Jan. 6, 1941, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
4. GOK to Maria Chabot, May 22, 1942, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
5. Maria Chabot to GOK, May 26, 1942, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
6. Webb, Looking Back, p. 177. Maria At the Party, 1942, was later destroyed.
7. Maria Chabot to GOK, Dec. 23, 1942, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
8. Robinson, A Life, p. 441.
9. Daniel Catton Rich, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paintings 1915–1941 (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1943), p. 40.
10. GOK to Maria Chabot, Feb. 22, 1943, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
11. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
12. Maria Chabot to GOK, Jan. 4, 1943, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
13. Maria Chabot to GOK, Mar. 18, 1943, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
14. Seiberling, Horizons.
15. Maria Chabot to GOK, Oct. 31, 1943, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
16. GOK to Caroline Fesler, Dec. 24, 1945, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 242. O’Keeffe later gave the painting to Wright claiming that Stieglitz had discouraged gifts, saying, “Yes, it would be alright if you were alone—but it wouldn’t be while I’m around.” GOK to Wright, May 1942, cited by Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 233.
17. O’Keeffe, Georgia of Keeffe.
18. GOK to Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, Feb. 10, 1944, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Arts and Letters, p. 235.
19. Taylor, “Lady Dynamo.”
20. Lynes, Chabot–O’Keeffe, p. xxv.
21. Maria Chabot to GOK, Jan. 12, 1944, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
22. GOK to Maria Chabot, Jan. 18, 1944, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
23. AS to Arthur Dove, Sept. 11, 1943, ASA, YCAL.
24. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
25. Ibid.
26. AP to AS, Aug. 1, 1945, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 285.
27. Maria Chabot to GOK, Oct. 14, 1944, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
28. GOK to Maria Chabot, Mar. 27, 1944, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
29. Webb, Looking Back, p. 30.
30. AS to Dorothy Norman, Oct. 28, 1929, YCAL.
31. Niven, Steichen, p. 585.
32. AS to Ansel Adams, April 8, 1938, cited by Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 565.
Chapter XVI
1. GOK to Claudia O’Keeffe, n.d., prob. 1944, Museum of Fine Arts Library and Archives, Museum of New Mexico, by permission of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation.
2. Webb, Looking Back, p. 43.
3. GOK to Maria Chabot, May 16, 1946, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
4. Webb, Looking Back, p. 45. So the evening would not be too taxing for him, Stieglitz was taken to dinner before the show by Anita Pollitzer and Edson Charlier.
5. GOK to James Johnson Sweeney, June 11, 1945, cited in Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 241.
6. Henry McBride, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” New York Sun, Jan. 15, 1944.
7. Clement Greenberg, The Nation, June 5, 1946.
8. James Thrall Soby, “To The Ladies,” Saturday Review, July 6, 1946.
9. Lisle, Portrait of the Artist, p. 333.
10. AS to GOK, June 5, 1946, A Woman on Paper, pp. 249–50.
11. Webb, Looking Back, p. 51.
12. Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper, p. 251.
13. Author’s interview with Dorothy Norman, 1987, Apr. 2, 1987, New York City. Parts of this interview were published in my article “Six Decades of Life with American Art: Dorothy Norman Recalls 20s to Present,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, May 18, 1987.
14. Author’s interview with Dorothy Norman, Apr. 2, 1987, New York City.
15. Nancy Newhall to Ansel Adams, July 15, 1946, CCP.
16. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
17. Maria Chabot to GOK, Dec. 23, 1946, MCA, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
18.
Webb, Looking Back, p. 53.
Book Three
Chapter I
1. Author’s interview with Dorothy Norman, Apr. 12, 1987, New York City.
2. GOK to Margaret Kiskadden, 1947, YCAL.
3. Juan Hamilton, “In O’Keeffe’s World,” Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 10.
4. GOK to Donald Gallup, Mar. 31, 1952, cited by Cowart, Hamilton and Greenough, Art and Letters, p. 262.
5. GOK to Steichen, Mar. 17, 1957, Museum of Modern Art Library.
6. Author’s interview with Doris Bry, Dec. 16, 1989, New York City. Bry invited me to the apartment she owned, in a Beaux-Arts building designed by Stanford White on East Seventy-third Street in Manhattan. The spacious rooms were treated in a modern, O’Keeffean manner, painted brilliant white with uncarpeted wood floors and large louvered windows. No art was hung on the walls, but floor-to-ceiling bookcases were filled with volumes on the American moderns. White sheets were draped over formal furniture, and everywhere there were stacks of boxes and bursting file folders. Then sixty-seven, Bry’s hair was white and swept back, her posture slightly stooped. She was tastefully dressed in gray flannel slacks, a russet blouse, and suede flats.
7. Ibid.
8. Donald Gallup, Pigeons on the Granite: Memories of a Yale Librarian (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1988), pp. 221–26.
9. Robinson, A Life, p. 473.
10. Margaret Prosser to GOK, July 26, 1946, YCAL.
11. From lecture on exhibition The Poetry of Things by Phillips Collection curator Elizabeth Hutton Turner at Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, N.M., 1999.
12. Tomkins, Notes.
13. Ibid.
14. GOK to Russell Vernon Hunter, Oct. 30, 1948, YCAL.
15. Author’s interview with Maria Chabot, Apr. 21, 1999, Santa Fe, N.M.
16. Tomkins, “The Rose in the Eye Looked Pretty Fine.”
17. Pollitzer, “That’s Georgia.”
18. Avis Berman, “Arthur Wesley Dow,” Architectural Digest, Mar. 2000.
19. Tomkins, Notes.
20. Sharon Niederman, “The Active, Artful Life of Maria Chabot,” Santa Fe Reporter, Aug. 12–18, 1992.
21. Author’s interview with Maria Chabot, July 15, 1997, Santa Fe, N.M.
22. I thank Steven Watson for offering his notes on Virgil Thomson.
23. Gail Levin, Edward Hopper, An Intimate Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 409.
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