Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  In these years, Anita Pollitzer worked on her biography, with Georgia’s approval. When she sent her the manuscript in 1968, as Life was preparing its feature on the artist, it was clear that their projects were at odds. O’Keeffe reread the manuscript before sending her friend a letter of rejection, copied to her publisher. “It is a very sentimental way you like to imagine me—and I am not that way at all….To call this my biography when it has so little to do with me is impossible—and I cannot have my name exploited to further it.” To make matters worse, Georgia offered to pay for her time. Anita never recovered from the shock; she died in 1975, after lapsing into senility.

  O’Keeffe refused to sanction her friend’s account for several reasons. Its tone was too intimate, and it did not support the legend that O’Keeffe had been honing about herself as someone whose achievements were due to hard work. She disdained Pollitzer’s view of her as happy: “I do not like the idea of happyness—it is too momentary—I would say that I was always busy and interested in something—interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happyness.” And she objected to Anita’s account of Stieglitz’s role in her life, coming just when she hoped to replace his myth of her with one of her own.

  The myth of O’Keeffe as self-sufficient recluse was in place when her retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum in 1970. She had just received the Gold Medal for Painting by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. For some time, writers had been promoting her as the sage of Abiquiu. (O’Keeffe “appropriated the 19th century image of the Pioneer Woman,” Robert Hughes wrote, “and, against all odds made it work.”) The retrospective included 121 works selected by Bry and Daniel Rich, a choice that conveyed “a clear, cool essence of acutely personal sensitivities distilled through tactful self-discipline,” John Canaday wrote in the first of three articles accorded the nearly eighty-four-year-old artist by the Times.

  O’Keeffe told Grace Glueck, who interviewed her for the occasion, that people who saw erotic symbols in her work were “really talking about their own affairs.” Her flowers, deserts, and mountains were “just what’s in my head.” In the same way, Sky Above Clouds IV came to her after she saw some large paintings and thought, “I could do a better one.” On the subject of her experience as a female artist, O’Keeffe said that the men she knew “made it very plain that as a woman I couldn’t hope to make it.” Then, with a “liberated smile,” she added, “Women have always been treated like Negroes in this country.”

  At this time, with the feminists of the 1970s looking to her as an icon, O’Keeffe must have seen that many women not only understood their second-class status but meant to do something about it. Yet although she was a lifelong feminist and a member of the Woman’s Party, she rejected the younger women’s calls for solidarity. She had achieved success through her own hard work; others should do the same. On occasion, she contradicted herself. To a writer who asked her about women artists, she bristled: “Write about women. Or write about artists. I don’t see how they’re connected. Personally, the only people who ever helped me were men.”

  By this time, O’Keeffe was a celebrity, with a new generation of enthusiasts for whom her art and legend converged. The Whitney retrospective, which traveled to Chicago’s Art Institute and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was featured in the national news; a procession of photographers traveled to Abiquiu for stories about her. Arnold Newman photographed O’Keeffe in her beloved Ghost Ranch landscape; Dan Budnik captured her with her hair down; Bruce Weber depicted her with her eyes closed, a nunlike figure in her black dress; Ansel Adams paid homage with a portrait of her wizened face resting on her still-elegant hands. At each session, she presented herself with the same composure.

  Jeronima (“Jerrie”) Newsom, her cook, housekeeper, and companion from 1966 to 1974, made sure that O’Keeffe’s households ran according to her standards. Hired because she made a good sponge cake, Newsom learned to bake bread the O’Keeffe way, accompanied her employer to Ghost Ranch each summer, received guests, and drove her to Santa Fe for hair appointments. As Georgia’s eyesight started to waver, Jerrie began to serve as her eyes.

  O’Keeffe first noticed a visual blur in 1971. The specialists agreed: She was suffering the loss of central vision due to macular degeneration. Soon she had difficulty seeing both color and line. Of this time, O’Keeffe reflected, “When you get so old that you can’t see, you come to it gradually. And if you didn’t come to it gradually, I guess you’d just kill yourself.” Over the next year, she managed to complete three studies of a polished black rock lit by a mysterious light emanating from within. Her last unassisted painting, The Beyond, depicts the horizon as a long white streak with a blue sky above and a black plain below. These late works appear to signal O’Keeffe’s sense of her situation.

  Her remarks about the aid given her by men notwithstanding, O’Keeffe relied on the female employees and friends who helped her maintain her independence. Jerrie Newsom saw to her domestic life and walked her around the courtyard when she could no longer go out in the desert. Maria Chabot visited her at Ghost Ranch and placed her facing her beloved Pedernal, which, O’Keeffe said, she could feel, though not see. Starting in 1971, Virginia Robertson spent weekdays at Abiquiu as her secretary and companion. When Robertson found a scrap of prose by O’Keeffe, she urged her to write about her paintings, and Georgia began the lengthy process of dictating to Robertson, who transcribed her remarks, read them to her, and helped her revise. O’Keeffe announced her plan to set up a foundation for her art, with Robertson in charge, and to include her in her will, but the young woman demurred, having foreseen the problems that might result, and told O’Keeffe that she would have to leave her employ. Visibly upset, O’Keeffe told her, “No one is ever going to leave me again.”

  By then, according to Carol Merrill, who spent weekends at Abiquiu to organize the library, O’Keeffe’s retinue resembled a medieval court full of intrigue. Before Robertson left in 1973, she told Merrill that if she was to stay on, she “must maintain the mystique.” By then O’Keeffe’s celebrity status was attracting young artists of all sorts as well as people at loose ends, who went to Abiquiu in search of inspiration. When Gloria Steinem arrived at her door with a bouquet of roses, O’Keeffe refused to see her. Some supplicants were turned away, others invited to spend the night.

  Curiously, the day after Robertson announced her decision to leave, a lanky young man came to Ghost Ranch looking for work. His initial attempt failed; on his return, O’Keeffe tested him with practical tasks, such as building shipping crates and trimming hedges. One day, he cleaned O’Keeffe’s shoes, which were too scuffed for a woman of her standing, he thought; soon he became part of the household.

  John Bruce Hamilton, known as Juan, was twenty-seven and down on his luck when he entered O’Keeffe’s employ. Raised by missionaries in South America, he spoke fluent Spanish. Hamilton had found work in the Ghost Ranch compound’s kitchen (it had become a conference center) in hopes of one day meeting the artist, whose image he first encountered in the 1968 Life feature. Having trained as a potter, he was eager to reconnect with his art but unsure how to do so. O’Keeffe gave him more exacting tasks, like handling her correspondence. Merrill, who was already doing this work, had to accept his new role as O’Keeffe’s helper. The young man had the advantage of an artist’s sensibility and his dark good looks; moreover, he amused O’Keeffe, who was bored with the worshipful attitude of most young people.

  As it happened, Calvin Tomkins came to interview the artist for The New Yorker three weeks after Hamilton arrived. Tomkins saw that the young man O’Keeffe called her “boy” meant to get on well with her. She voiced her concern about Juan’s future and her hope to build a kiln at Ghost Ranch so that he could return to pottery and she could stay there with him year-round. Tomkins encouraged her to work up the notes she had been jotting down about her art, and she asked him to return to Abiquiu to advise her on their publishability.
She also “flirted imperiously” with him. When Juan brought out a poster showing a feminist version of Leonardo’s Last Supper with O’Keeffe as Christ, she teased, “I never deny anything anybody says about me.”

  Hamilton soon became indispensable. In 1974, when friends asked O’Keeffe to join them on a trip to Morocco, she announced that he would go with her. (Over the next few years, Hamilton would accompany her on trips around the country and to Antigua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Hawaii.) Given her age and failing eyesight, he gave O’Keeffe the support she needed, assuring her well-being and keeping her spirits up by not kowtowing. Juan occupied a room in her house until, with her help, he bought his own. He came early each day to take O’Keeffe on walks, made appointments and took her to them, ate with her, even cutting morsels that she could not manage to do herself. Some of her staff were not taken with him. Newsom resigned that winter, after telling O’Keeffe, “I am not going to look after your help.”

  When O’Keeffe bought Hamilton a kiln, he taught her to make small pots from clay coils. While his larger ones were “near to sculpture,” she thought, the clay had a mind of its own: “I finally have several pots that are not too bad, but I cannot yet make the clay speak.” Hamilton also helped her with the book that she was writing about her art. She arranged to have this memoir published in 1976 to her specifications—unpaginated, oversize, with high-quality illustrations and telling images of herself, like the final one, which shows her in Hamilton’s studio, stroking one of his pots. Hamilton is not named as the artist who made the clay speak, but he is prominently thanked in the acknowledgments.

  Georgia O’Keeffe was notable for “how much O’Keeffe left out,” Sanford Schwartz wrote in The New Yorker. Stieglitz was mentioned in passing; family members were not identified. She seemed to have “no contemporaries, close friends, or critics, nor does she mention artists and writers from the past who might have influenced her.” Yet O’Keeffe’s remoteness expressed her way of life: “Her painting, with its images of romantic isolated purity, became an embodiment of an individual who was strong enough to live out her life exactly as she wanted….For many Americans, especially in the twenties, thirties, and forties, O’Keeffe was a living symbol of self-assertion.” Recalling Stieglitz’s portraits, Schwartz concluded that she was a great actress. In her book as in his photographs, “she isn’t mugging or impersonating, she’s entrancing herself.”

  Acclaim for the artist came at the highest level when she was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Gerald Ford in 1977. By then (O’Keeffe was almost ninety), Hamilton had become indispensable as her confidant, travel companion, and facilitator in the larger world—including sales of her paintings, two of which were sold that year without Bry’s knowledge. Ironically, Bry believed that in 1973, the year of Hamilton’s arrival in Abiquiu, she and O’Keeffe had finalized an agreement naming her exclusive agent and executrix, with an annuity for Bry in her will. When news of the recent sales reached Bry, she protested—to no avail. Hamilton had for some time been aggravating O’Keeffe’s discontent with her as agent. Now, given his centrality in her life, Georgia informed Bry that their arrangement had come to an end: Bry was to return all works in her possession by herself and by Stieglitz.

  When Bry did not respond, O’Keeffe went on the warpath. She sued Bry for the return of her property, and Bry countersued for breach of contract, charging Hamilton for damages caused by “malicious interference.” Their suits were not settled until the 1980s, when most of Bry’s claims were rejected. O’Keeffe had not, in fact, established the protections that Bry understood to be in force. Both Bry and O’Keeffe declined to discuss the case, but Hamilton felt that he had nothing to hide. “There is prejudice against us because she is an older woman and I’m young and somewhat handsome,” he told People. Denying rumors that he and O’Keeffe had married, he added, “That’s not to say the relationship isn’t as meaningful as a marriage.”

  By then, people seeking access to O’Keeffe understood that they must go through Hamilton. With his encouragement, the filmmaker Perry Miller Adato succeeded in persuading the artist to let her make a documentary about O’Keeffe, in which Hamilton appears. Adato’s proposal, to have O’Keeffe present her work on her own terms, helped her to come across as relaxed. (“Just don’t cross her,” Adato noted. “She’s a tough cookie.”) The film complemented her memoir’s emphasis on her integrity as an artist: O’Keeffe made it clear that she had struggled to maintain her stability after being promoted as a highly charged sexual being. The film, released on public television for her ninetieth birthday, exposed neither her frailty nor her blindness.

  By 1978, having effectively presented herself as an uncompromising loner who cared only for art, O’Keeffe concluded that she had set the record straight concerning Stieglitz’s role in her success. Weston Naef, of the Metropolitan Museum, approached her that year about plans to hold an exhibition entitled “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz,” and O’Keeffe and Hamilton worked with him to select fifty-one prints, which were then reproduced in an elegant publication with the same name (from negatives made by Richard Benson from the original prints). The sequence, Hamilton explained, formed “a photographic diary of their relationship, from beginning aloofness through its evolvement into a passionate intimacy and then the later phase when O’Keeffe got more into her life.” This account also publicized the concurrent show of Hamilton’s “sensuously sculptural pots” and ran a photograph of him holding a Stieglitz image of O’Keeffe, as if he were now in charge of the narrative.

  The art critic Hilton Kramer took a different view. Despite its importance in the history of American art, the Stieglitz exhibition was “the story of a love affair…the most beautiful and moving photographic show in recent memory.” Kramer noted that it was also “Miss O’Keeffe’s and Mr. Hamilton’s version of the ‘story.’ ” Once again, there was no mention of her marriage, a detail that underlined the portrait’s poignancy. It was remarkable, he thought, that O’Keeffe had managed to preserve her privacy “while at the same time giving us an unforgettable account of one of the central experiences in her life.” Although few nudes were included, there was “a heat in these pictures we do not feel in the others.”

  That year, O’Keeffe gave Hamilton a broad power of attorney, and in 1980 she changed her will to name him her executor, the heir to Ghost Ranch and a number of artworks, and the person to choose all additional works to give to the institutions she had named. His marriage to a younger woman halted rumors about his relations with O’Keeffe but did not end the concerns among some of her friends and family (including her sister Claudia) that he was exercising undue influence over her affairs.

  Since 1979, O’Keeffe had been working with Sarah Greenough, a young historian of photography who was cataloging the Stieglitz bequest at the National Gallery of Art with the intention of holding an exhibition of his photographs there in 1983. During these years, Greenough went to Abiquiu to work with O’Keeffe and Hamilton, her cocurator and editor of the catalog; they also collaborated on plans for an O’Keeffe centennial. Greenough noticed O’Keeffe’s increasing frailty; by 1982, she was deaf as well as nearly blind.

  She was going over memories of those who had been close to her when John Walker interviewed her in 1981 for his film on Paul Strand. Stieglitz had been “a kind of idol to Paul,” she reflected, yet he sometimes refused to share work with him, perhaps because he was jealous. As for the Strands’ marriage, it had been unwise for them to live with Paul’s family. No doubt thinking of herself with the Stieglitzes, she remarked, “[Rebecca] had a hard time standing it.” She noted what she saw as their incompatibility: “Rebecca was a very lively, lean young woman and Strand was thick and slow. They were…not built to live together.” Georgia let on that she had been “amused” when Paul went to see Rebecca in Taos after their divorce but did not call on her. She did not mention Rebecca’s late blooming as an artist.

  O’Keeffe wa
s relieved when Bry vs. Hamilton concluded in 1982 (the settlement paid for Bry’s legal bills; Hamilton remained in charge of O’Keeffe’s affairs). The following year, Hamilton and O’Keeffe went to Washington for the National Gallery’s Stieglitz retrospective and then to New York for its installation at the Metropolitan Museum. During their stay, Hamilton arranged to have Andy Warhol speak with them for Interview magazine. Their exchange began with O’Keeffe’s complaint that she felt lost without her cane, to which Hamilton replied, “You can use me.” Juan had, she observed, “moved into my world and little by little he got into things. He knows more about my affairs than I do.” Warhol compared the artist at nearly ninety-six to another national monument, the Brooklyn Bridge, which had just turned one hundred. Reminded that she had painted the bridge, her thoughts turned to Stieglitz—until Hamilton prompted her to talk to Warhol about the Pedernal.

  After their return to New Mexico, O’Keeffe’s strength declined; a few months later, she had a heart attack. When the Hamiltons took her to live in Santa Fe, the doctor who looked after her found her lucid at times and confused at others. In 1984, Hamilton purchased a large property in her name, with ground-floor rooms for her and the staff, and the rest of the house for his family. One day when Christine Patten, her weekend nurse, was dressing her, O’Keeffe cried out, “I don’t know how I can get through another day and I don’t know why I have to!”