Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  Her interest in local ways grew once Chabot began supervising the restoration of O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu house, which would take four years. Chabot laid out the rooms, chose the cedar logs for the ceiling, turned the stable into a studio, set tiles at the door to the enclosed patio, all while adapting vernacular designs. Bricks were made from earth on the site, then finished by the village women: “It was a bright clear day and is quite wonderful—women on scaffolds against the sky…men mixing a vast pile of mud for the women to plaster with. It is really beautiful to see and the mud surface made with the hand makes one want to touch with the hand—and there it is soft against the sky.”

  O’Keeffe’s response to her new home reflected her ties to Chabot, which were not, however, without disagreements. “I don’t want to know about the private lives of people who work for me,” she declared. Their rapport was muddied by the fact that Chabot worshipped her employer. “You told me honestly that I was not the type you would have as a friend,” Maria wrote after a quarrel. “What I’ve been to you amounts to utility, and what you have been to me was and is enlightenment.” Years later, after O’Keeffe had dismissed Chabot, the young woman admitted that their relationship had been unbalanced. But their bond was not sexual, as some have thought it was: “I would not say in any sense of the word was Georgia a lesbian. Her life was about work, not sex. She was not interested in human relationships.”

  What did interest Georgia were her surroundings. She described her Abiquiu vista to Arthur Dove as one painter to another: “I wish you could see what I see out the window—the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north—the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky…pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars—and a feeling of much space.”

  The sense of being both inside and outside was equally pronounced on the patio. “The wall with the door in it was something I had to have. It took me ten years to get it—three more years to fix up the house so I could live in it—and after that the wall with a door was painted many times.” Her fascination with this site would produce the increasingly abstract patio paintings that meditate on her home’s embeddedness in the earth from which it was made.

  When the Abiquiu house was completed, Georgia turned her attention to the garden. Describing it like a canvas, she told McBride, “lots of startling poppies along beside the lettuce—all different every morning—so delicate—and gay—My onion patch is round and about 15 feet across—a rose in the middle….I dont know how I ever got anything so good.” Georgia took charge of ordering seeds, planting, weeding, composting, and watering the garden. She told a friend, “It has surprised me to feel what a warming difference a garden can make in ones life.”

  Visits by friends brought other satisfactions. In 1949, Georgia invited Beck to spend Christmas with her. If Beck had small candles and holders, they could trim the tree outside. “If you haven’t,” she said, “we will fix up something anyway—We always have.” The next year, Spud Johnson and Brett drove from Taos for Thanksgiving. It was “stimulating and satisfying to be with her,” Spud wrote; Brett was inspired to pick up her paints on their return. Other guests included Georgia’s sisters Catherine and Claudia; Doris Bry, who was acting as her agent in New York; and Anita Pollitzer, who was writing an article about Georgia. Anita was surprised to find life in Abiquiu “as comfortable as on 54th Street.” Still, Georgia emphasized that she was not a social being: “There are so many wonderful people whom I can’t take the time to know.”

  Not all visits turned out well. After Henwar Rodakiewicz’s divorce from Marie Garland, he went to see Georgia with his new wife, Peggy Bok, who became her close friend; soon they, too, divorced and Peggy remarried. In 1947, Henwar persuaded Georgia to take part in a film about New Mexico for a State Department series on artists. The short black-and-white film presented a stern-faced O’Keeffe hauling in bones from the desert: It was not a flattering portrait. She and Henwar quarreled; their friendship came to an end. The release of Land of Enchantment in 1948 launched O’Keeffe as icon, the reclusive artist attuned to her austere landscape.

  Pollitzer’s article for The Saturday Review, “That’s Georgia,” developed the legend of her friend as desert dweller. She compared her to the Chinese sage Sou Tsen-tsan, whose verses—“I think of neither life nor death / I honor painting”—introduce the article: “A solitary person, with terrific powers of concentration, she is so in love with the thing she does that she subordinates all else in order to win time and freedom to paint.” On reading the piece, Georgia told Anita of her “odd feeling of there being something religious in your way of doing it.” Rereading it, she noted, “You seem to be on the way to becoming an authority on me,” and agreed to Anita’s plan to write a full-length biography of her.

  O’Keeffe liked to say that she had given away everything that tied her to the past. But it kept catching up with her, she informed Schubart, when a truck came from New York with crates of her belongings. Alfred was still with her, she told Peggy (Bok) Kiskadden, who helped her sort his remaining letters: “I wrote to him from this table so many times—so he is always here—and when you were in Abiquiu he seemed vaguely present—as you drove out of the gate—it was as if that thing he had been in my life for so long was going again—driving off into the dawn.”

  With the departure of this part of her life, O’Keeffe’s return to painting took a less passionate course—one in which a sense of detachment reigns. “The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for the other things that make one’s life,” she told an interviewer in 1962, when her well-appointed home and garden, relations with the staff and villagers, and then her beloved chow dogs brought calmer satisfactions. In these years, she painted the cottonwoods along the riverbanks, large-scale flowers, and twisted tree stumps; few are handled with the intimacy of her earlier work.

  At the same time, she depicted her patio wall and door in all colors and weathers, as if they defined the terms of her removal to an enclosure of her own. Two large abstractions, From the Plains, I and II (1955), hark back to the Texas oils of the same title with swaths of orange and yellow flashing across their skies; Ladder to the Moon (1958), in which a luminous ladder in the night sky suggests a passage to an elsewhere, recalls O’Keeffe’s ability to infuse some works with an otherworldly glow.

  Since the closing of the Place, O’Keeffe had shown her work at Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, one of the few New York venues that Alfred had favored. Over the next decade, Halpert would do well by O’Keeffe, selling nearly two hundred works at prices that often outdid those obtained by Stieglitz. But O’Keeffe had doubts about Halpert’s taste as well as the prices she set for her work. “I’m conceited enough to know what pictures I paint will sell,” she told a journalist. “The success I’ve had has come from a strange combination of luck and my rather odd ability to paint pictures people would buy.”

  Along with the proceeds from her inheritance, O’Keeffe’s earnings from sales allowed her to do as she saw fit both at home and on the trips she took, starting in the 1950s. With Spud Johnson, the photographer Eliot Porter, and his wife, Aline, an artist, she went to Mexico in 1951 to inspect “the murals the boys [Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, and Covarrubias] have been doing.” Of these four, she preferred Orozco, whose art had “a feeling of violence and revolution,” but despite her admiration for him as a colorist, the trip did not inspire her to paint.

  She went to Paris for the first time at sixty-five, in 1953. The Sainte-Chapelle astonished her, as did Chartres Cathedral; the French countryside was enchanting; but Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire failed to impress her, and she turned down the chance to meet Picasso on the grounds that they could not talk to each other. In Madrid, she found much to enjoy at the Prado, particularly the Goyas. Recalling her return trip there a year later, O’Keeffe reflected, “I was very excited by the Prado, which made me think there must have been something th
e matter with me.”

  O’Keeffe was much more excited by her trip to Peru in 1956. The colors there were “unbelievable…marvelous purples, violent colors. And the Andes are sparkling—they freeze at night, and in the morning they glitter.” Driving along narrow mountain roads, she made sketches, which she drew on later to depict Machu Picchu washed with brilliant blues and greens, and the purple-hued Misti volcano. These mountains compared favorably with the Pedernal. But she was glad to get home: “Most of what I see travelling are people unsatisfied—hunting the unknown that they will never find. Maybe I am queer that I am so singularly pleased with the life I have in N.M.”

  In many ways, O’Keeffe preferred her small world to the larger one. “I have been working,” she told Anita, “trying to work my garden into a kind of permanent shape—so that if I live for twenty-five years it will be pleasant to walk about in by the time I am too old to do anything else.” Soon the garden yielded more than enough produce for her use and that of her friends. “It looked like a Persian miniature,” one of them thought. Inside the adobe walls “it was cool and shady, dappled with sun and hot spots, and full of a vivid mix of flowers and vegetables.”

  Another of the pleasures afforded by O’Keeffe’s “world” was that of eating well, something she began taking seriously in her sixties. Like her friend Adelle Davis, she believed in eating right to keep fit; moreover, she thought that good food enhanced creative work. A forerunner of the organic movement, O’Keeffe made yogurt, ground whole grains for bread, and drank smoothies. At Georgia’s request, her sister Claudia sent her nuts, dates, and brewer’s yeast from Los Angeles, where she ran a Montessori school. Georgia perfected recipes to please the eye as well as the palate, including brightly colored soups: purple borscht, carrot soup with herbs, spinach soup in black bowls to reflect the colors of the earth. Mainly vegetarian, she enjoyed homegrown potatoes cooked with Indian spices but also local recipes like chile verde. She required her housekeepers to adopt her beliefs and befriended those whose cooking met her standards.

  In the mid-fifties, Georgia was reconciled with Maria Chabot, who was again working for Mary Wheelright. After Maria and some acquaintances came to Abiquiu for lunch, Georgia wrote to a friend, “They just stopped and looked in a odd way that made me feel they were very surprised.” The house that Chabot had labored to restore for her was now “something that feels like my shell to live in.” With her organized daily life and respectful staff, O’Keeffe ventured out on occasion—balancing the satisfactions of home and the lure of the “faraway.”

  In these years, Doris Bry also worked part-time for her, a job that required trips to Abiquiu and, in New York, overseeing sales of her paintings. Like Chabot, whose jealousy of Bry on one of her visits to Abiquiu had provoked Chabot’s dismissal, Bry felt protective of O’Keeffe—to the extent of controlling access to her as well as to her work. Such was Georgia’s reliance on Bry that she asked her to critique Pollitzer’s draft of her biography in progress—a project encouraged by its subject, who gave her friend permission to quote from the embargoed Stieglitz-O’Keeffe letters at the Beinecke. Bry told Pollitzer that her research was commendable but her prose less so.

  While Anita’s sense of Georgia tended to be worshipful, her ideas about her friend’s approach to art were well founded. “We probably all derive from something,” Georgia noted in a letter. This recognition encouraged Anita to adapt the words of a philosopher who wrote of the meeting of East and West in O’Keeffe’s art: “You not only speak your inner self—but you let the Mountain speak for the Mountain, the flower for the flower.” Since O’Keeffe’s student days, when she absorbed Arthur Dow’s theories, she had pored over studies of Buddhism, Asian art, and classics like Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji. In 1959, she embarked on a three-month trip around the world, with extended stays in India, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Along the way, she made many small drawings, which were redone on a larger scale and then as oil paintings after her return.

  O’Keeffe felt a sense of recognition in Japan. Seeing Mount Fuji firsthand inspired her to paint this icon as a white triangle backed by a fading pink sky. Close in feeling to Japanese notan—an arrangement of shapes defined through the play of light and dark—this was her way of letting the mountain speak in its own language. Having long been familiar with another iconic item of Japanese culture, the kimono, she collected these robes in many styles, from formal black to gauzy summer silks, even an underkimono painted with an image of Mount Fuji. (She wore them as negligees, in the fashion of her youth.)

  She returned from Japan with souvenirs—silk and woolen suits, a silk coat, shoes, pashminas, and lengths of material; on a return trip the following year, she bought wooden sandals and a “Happi coat” to add to her highly personalized wardrobe, itself an unusual meeting of East and West. In the 1960s, she started wearing an American equivalent of the kimono, the wraparound—a dress without buttons or zippers that made its wearer look well turned out. The wrap dress, often in black, would become O’Keeffe’s uniform. (In 1962, she sent one to Beck to lift her spirits, a gift that moved Beck to write, “How good it has been to have a friendship with a woman that has been strong and warm and true.”)

  O’Keeffe’s round-the-world plane trips also gave her a new perspective—that of gazing out the window at the clouds below. In the early 1960s, she painted the Sky Above Clouds series, four canvases, each with a serene pink sky above the horizon, and below it, a sea of cottony clouds. Moving from a realistic treatment of the motif in the first painting, she completed the series with a monumental version twenty-four feet wide and eight feet high. “Such a size is of course ridiculous,” she wrote, “but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do.”

  As O’Keeffe’s trips deepened her sense of the interwoven patterns of art and life, they confirmed her belief that New Mexico was perfect for her. To Yousuf Karsh, who asked when he came to photograph her why she lived in such a remote place, she answered cheekily, “What other place is there?” In the same spirit, on the occasion of her retrospective at the Worcester Art Museum in 1960, she called Abiquiu “the most wonderful place in the world”—a statement that reflected her convictions but also her canny sense of how to present herself.

  When she went to New York in 1961 to install her Worcester show at the Downtown Gallery, Halpert is reported to have said, “Oh, Georgia, is that another flower?” By then, each found the other unyielding; it would be O’Keeffe’s last exhibition with Halpert. The critics were guarded in their praise. Robert Coates wrote in The New Yorker that O’Keeffe’s move to simplified forms “implies some casting about in search of inspiration”: He saw traces of Miró in Ladder to the Moon and hints of Albers in White Patio with Red Door. The Times remarked on her refinement of forms “from which she pared away all adventitious dross, to leave an image as lucid as the deserts she admires.”

  In 1963, Bry became O’Keeffe’s sole agent, an arrangement that paid a commission of 25 percent. Bry had recently published well received scholarly work about both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. As Georgia’s agent, she began limiting how much of her work came on the market and, on O’Keeffe’s instructions, buying back undervalued examples. Soon Bry was known for being protective of her employer. Like Chabot, she was also possessive, discouraging would-be clients unless they seemed worthy and telling those who sought to contact the artist not to bother.

  Meanwhile, curiosity about O’Keeffe was heightened by pieces in magazines like House Beautiful, House & Garden, and Vogue. Laura Gilpin, known for her images of the Southwest, had been taking O’Keeffe’s portrait since the 1950s. Shots of her interiors, collections of stones and bones, and the artist in front of her panoramic studio window appeared in “The Austerity of the Desert Pervades Her Home and Work,” Gilpin’s 1963 piece for House Beautiful, which treated her adobe as an artistic creation in its own right.

  Gilpin’s attention to detail set a preceden
t for those who followed, including Life photographer John Loengard. On his first visit to Abiquiu, in 1966, when he wanted to talk about Stieglitz, O’Keeffe refused to oblige. Immaculate in a black wrap dress, she posed for him in the garden, her studio, sitting on her bed with her eyes closed, and holding a favorite rock, which, she said with a grin, she had stolen from Eliot Porter. Loengard went back to New York with scores of black-and-white pictures, including one of O’Keeffe laughing, but the project was set aside due to doubts about its importance.

  That same year, Vogue sent Cecil Beaton to photograph the artist. In contrast to her diffident pose in Beaton’s 1946 portrait of her with Stieglitz, twenty years later she stands like a heraldic figure in a black coat with kimono-like sleeves in her adobe’s entryway, with its massive antlers on the wall. O’Keeffe was “a phenomenon,” the art critic E. C. Goossen wrote in the accompanying article, “not only because she is an extraordinary artist but also because she has survived the prejudice against her sex in art.” He added, “She is almost totally unsentimental and barely tolerates sentimentality in others.”

  Not to be outdone, Life sent Loengard back to Abiquiu for what would become a thirteen-page spread in the March 1968 issue—“Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico: Stark Visions of a Pioneer Painter.” Hoping for a striking cover shot, Loengard went with her to Ghost Ranch. She took him on walks, explained how to kill rattlesnakes, and climbed halfway up the ladder to the roof, where he photographed her in profile. Loengard later remarked, “She looks like she’s at rest, but she isn’t really. She is sort of coiled.” This introduction of O’Keeffe as the exemplar of a self-disciplined lifestyle came at the right moment. To a public seeking role models, her homes and her art were all of a piece, embodying an ideal in which the diverse elements of a life were congruent with one another.