Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  In The Arts magazine, Dorothy Lefferts Moore compared O’Keeffe’s painting to the efforts of members of the New York Society of Women Artists who were showing at the Anderson Galleries. Moore felt that these “pictures can be traced to the influence of some masculine painter.” By contrast, Moore wrote that O’Keeffe “has painted as a woman feels, without confusing her vision with that of men. . . . O’Keefe, having succeeded with an extraordinary power of concentration, inevitably gives us a woman’s personality. . . . she is capable of isolating a moment and making it seem eternal.”3

  Critic Edwin Alden Jewell wrote in the New York Times, “Some may reasonably feel that the present group of paintings represents some sort of transition period in her art. Just what direction the transition is taking seems not at the moment altogether clear.”4 The direction of that transition was not at all clear to O’Keeffe, either. Struggling to maintain her own identity and her time to paint, she was frustrated by Stieglitz’s desperate need for company. “He loved having people around the house all the time and I’d have to take three weeks off to do a painting,” she said. “And that’s no way to be a painter.”5

  For years, O’Keeffe had been willing to surrender her own needs to her husband’s demanding personality. But such tradeoffs seemed less appealing when she saw his relationship with Dorothy Norman gathering strength. In the spring of 1929, they argued frequently with Stieglitz bellowing and O’Keeffe in tears. She wrote to Kennerley, “That I haven’t thought much of how I feel is the way I like it. I am not talking much to Stieglitz.”6

  Years later, she frankly assessed her difficult marriage:

  I believe it was the work that kept me with him though I loved him as a human being. I could see his strengths and weaknesses. I put up with what seemed to me a good deal of contradictory nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful.7

  As she had done before when drifting into a period of introspection, O’Keeffe returned to highly realistic, privately symbolic renderings. 3 Eggs in Pink Dish, a particularly foreboding view of the East River, seen from inside the Shelton, bears a hopeful still life in the foreground. In another view, Pink Dish and Green Leaves, the compote bears a couple of lozenge-shaped leaves and rests on the window sill looking over the gray river. Both pictures are ineffably sad, as if the artist were that fragile piece of pink porcelain holding herself away from the grit and grime of urban life. O’Keeffe longed to spent time away from Stieglitz, perhaps to return to the Southwest. She heard glowing reports from many of the Stieglitz group who had visited Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. In his dramatic manner, Hartley claimed that the “redman’s primitive bond with nature” was “vastly superior” to that of New Yorkers. Rosenfeld had made the pilgrimage in 1926 and, after visiting the pueblo corn dances, claimed that Native American culture was more spiritual than that of the urban realm. Also in the summer of 1926, the Strands had rented a house from Dodge Luhan and later told their friends that they felt renewed by the freshness of the scenery and the eccentric residents. In part, they all took their cues from D. H. Lawrence, who extolled the virtues of Native American culture, “the oldest religion, a cosmic religion.”

  In March 1929, Strand showed photographs from this trip to northern New Mexico and Mesa Verde, Colorado, at the Intimate Gallery. Seeing the open landscape in Strand’s photographs revived O’Keeffe’s memories of her years in Texas. Around that time, in two abstract paintings of vertical panels, O’Keeffe returned to southwestern hues of red, orange, black, and brown.

  It was at this opportune time that the Honorable Lady Dorothy Brett took a room on the twenty-seventh floor of the Shelton. Brett, as she insisted on being called, was the eccentric daughter of the second Viscount Esher, a close friend and advisor to the British royal family. She became a member of the Bloomsbury circle while attending the Slade School of Art, where she met painters Dora Carrington and Mark Gertler, who introduced her to the writers Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, and D. H. Lawrence, with whom she was completely besotted. Portly, outspoken, and hard of hearing, she carried a large tin ear trumpet called Toby.

  D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, a cousin of the pilot Baron Manfred Richthofen, had come to Taos with Brett at the invitation of Dodge Luhan in 1923. They spent a year in the Pink House, across a small pasture from her adobe mansion, before moving to her ranch on the Lobo, fifteen miles north of Taos, which the Lawrences eventually acquired, naming it Kiowa. The property had three cabins. From the porch of their house, Lawrence could see nothing but piñon-covered mountains, and he wrote, “The world is wide here. . . .”

  The Native American culture and undisturbed wilderness led Lawrence to envision a utopian commune called Rananim, but his dream never materialized. The eight-thousand-foot altitude and the rough living conditions proved too taxing for his frail health: the Lawrences moved back to Italy, where he died of tuberculosis in 1930. Brett, however, remained a convert, staying at the ranch until she was able to build her own cabin on the property. When the winter grew too harsh for her rustic abode, she would move to Dodge Luhan’s luxurious house in Taos.

  Encouraged by Lawrence, Brett painted stylized versions of pueblo life and brought a selection of these paintings to the Shelton to show Stieglitz that winter. Although he liked Brett, Stieglitz wasn’t particularly keen on her paintings. Brett wound up exhibiting her work with the respectable dealer Frank Rehn, who also showed Edward Hopper. While Brett was staying at the Shelton, O’Keeffe came to appreciate her brusque, unconventional manner. The Englishwoman had nothing but praise for O’Keeffe and her paintings.

  Dodge Luhan, who kept a pied-à-terre at One Fifth Avenue, also visited New York that winter, and invited Stieglitz and O’Keeffe to pay a summer visit to Taos. After his recent angina attacks, Stieglitz had a perfect excuse not to travel, but O’Keeffe accepted with alacrity. Two years before, she had written, “Where you are makes no difference—so long as you have the peace—and the urge—for work.”8 But the peace was gone, and the urge was diminishing.

  Apparently, Beck had suggested to O’Keeffe that they go west together, allaying their husbands’ concerns about the safety of solo travel.9 As O’Keeffe grew more aware of her husband’s roving eye, she forgave Beck for the transgressions of 1922. She felt empathy as the Strands’ marriage had also become strained. It was decided that time apart from their spouses would do them all good.

  On April 28, the two women took the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago, where they stopped for a day to visit with O’Keeffe’s younger brother. The next day, Alexius, accompanied by his wife, baby, and in-laws, took the women to lunch at their new club. O’Keeffe visited the Art Institute, where she had studied more than twenty years before. The next day, the women continued their rail journey across prairies and plains. O’Keeffe wondered at the twists and turns of fate that had brought her such success and such difficulty and which now seemed to be bringing her back to the West.

  When they arrived in Lamy, New Mexico, O’Keeffe and Beck were met by a Harvey coach bound for Santa Fe. At La Posada Hotel, where rooms were let for two dollars and fifty cents, they found three letters waiting from Stieglitz.

  Though the town of adobe and territorial style buildings nestled in a valley had grown more sophisticated since O’Keeffe’s visit twelve years before, they did not linger.

  Their first mission was to see the annual corn dance at the San Felipe Pueblo, some twenty miles north of Santa Fe. It was there that Dodge Luhan and Brett met the two women and convinced them to ride in the comfort of their Cadillac to see the tribal dances and races at the Taos Pueblo.

  “Like the dawn of the world!” is how Dodge Luhan described the mystical qualities of Taos. Shadowed by what the Pueblo Indians call the Sacred Mountain and surrounded by the Jemez Mountains to the west and the Sangre de Christos to the north, the village had changed little since the middle of the nineteenth century. Trader Kit Carson’s house still stood near the plaza, just a few blocks from Dodge Luhan’s hous
e, Los Gallos.

  Situated under towering trees on twelve acres, Los Gallos was built in the pueblo style, with thick adobe walls and Spanish details, including hefty curvaceous mantels over great stone fireplaces, ornamental tiles, heavily carved wooden pillars, and moldings. Dodge Luhan’s bed was anchored by four huge twisted columns, nearly filling her bedroom. Her husband’s room was next door.

  Initially, O’Keeffe and Beck stayed in one of the fourteen guest rooms in the house. They were treated to breakfast in bed prepared by the staff, and in the evenings, they dined with an impressive and ever-changing roster of house guests, including the curator Daniel Catton Rich, Ansel Adams, and the Harvard-educated poet Witter Bynner and his lover, the poet Willard “Spud” Johnson, who edited a small literary magazine called Laughing Horse and worked part-time as Dodge Luhan’s secretary.

  Dinners were fueled by drink and every night promised some event—games of charades or a performance by Pueblo Indians invited by Tony Luhan who would dance and play drums and sing calls. Beck tried to arouse her husband’s jealousy by describing the “glistening bodies and rippling muscles” of the dancing Indians in their loincloths and feathers. When Luhan sang alone, accompanied by a drum, she wrote, “The beat is so insistent and deep, the voice high-pitched, broken ecstatic.”10

  But it was not the society that enticed O’Keeffe. It was the land. “You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here,” she admitted. “And finally feeling in the right place again—I feel like myself—and I like it.”11

  During the day, Luhan took O’Keeffe and Beck on driving tours of the area, as he had with Lawrence. He was a most effective spokesman for the pueblo. Adorned with turquoise jewelry, but otherwise dressed in white, the six-foot-tall Luhan kept his hair in traditional plaits and made an astounding first impression. He introduced O’Keeffe and Beck to the pueblo and its customs, as well as the natural glory of caves and waterfalls around the sacred Blue Lake. “The plum trees were in blossom and there were wild roses everywhere—the colors were just magnificent,” O’Keeffe recalled of one trip. “Tony, I just don’t think you like it around here as much as I do,” she said teasingly. Unaccustomed to her irony, the Indian was silent and perplexed for a long time before answering simply, ‘That’s why I here.’”12

  She adored the reticent, handsome Luhan. She asked him to teach her to drive and promptly smashed the car door against the side of the garage. Despite such tentative beginnings, she embraced this promise of freedom. After a few weeks of lessons, with more confidence than common sense, Beck and O’Keeffe asked Luhan to order a Model A Ford for six hundred and seventy dollars. (They named it “Hello” after Tony refused to have it named “Tonybel.” He grunted that they could only do that if they bought a Cadillac.)13 Luhan, Charles Collier, and Beck then continued to take turns teaching O’Keeffe the tricky business of negotiating a motor vehicle over unpaved roads. Fortunately, the state of New Mexico required no license. After weeks of near mishaps, Dodge Luhan proclaimed, “Georgia was destined to become a demon driver!”

  A typical ride involved O’Keeffe pointing one hand out the window at an aesthetically appealing cliff and yelling, “Look at that!” After making a sharp turn, she would head straight for it. After a couple of hours of motoring, she would return rejuvenated, while her driving companion, usually Beck, would drop into a chair in state of exhaustion.14

  After O’Keeffe and Beck had been in residence one week, Dodge Luhan confided in the women that she suffered from vaginal hemorrhaging, possibly the result of syphilis contracted from her first husband, Karl Evans.15 Dodge Luhan had to be treated at the hospital in Albuquerque, one hundred and fifty miles south, and left Beck in charge of the household. O’Keeffe later said that her departure was a relief. To save money, Dodge Luhan skimped on some basic amenities. “If she wasn’t there, we could take as many hot baths as we wanted but if she was there, we could never have any hot water,” O’Keeffe said. “She would turn the hot water heater off.”16

  Beck and O’Keeffe drove up to the Kiowa ranch to visit Brett, who answered the door outfitted in a Stetson hat, breeches, cowboy boots, and carrying a stiletto. On one of her visits to Kiowa, which overlooks a valley of pink rock and blue spruce, O’Keeffe was inspired to paint D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree, with its russet trunk and ebony leaves arranged against a nocturnal blue sky spotted with stars. Stylized in the manner of a Japanese wood block print, it was modeled after the vast oak standing outside the cabin where the Lawrences had lived. A carpenter’s bench was placed strategically beneath the tree. O’Keeffe recalled, “I used to lie on the bench and look up, and eventually there was nothing to do but paint that tree.”17

  Lawrence described the tree in his 1925 novella St. Mawr. “That pine tree was the guardian of the place. But a bristling, almost demonish guardian, from the far-off crude ages of the world. Its great pillar of pale, flaky-robed copper rose in strange callous indifference, and the grim permanence, which is in pine trees . . . they hedged one in with the aroma and the power and the slight horror of the pre-sexual primal world.”

  O’Keeffe had read St. Mawr, in which the female protagonist finds self-acceptance and redemption in the natural world and says, “For me this place is sacred. It is blessed.’”18 Doubtless, she held similar feelings as she painted this tribute to the tree. As in certain paintings of poppies and/or abstractions, she intended D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree to be viewable from any orientation.

  Exhausted after days of driving, exploring, and painting, Beck and O’Keeffe spent quiet evenings in their room sewing before the fire, playing cards and chatting. Beck’s glowing reports tantalized Strand as he worked on assignments in the sweltering city. He inquired about coming for a visit but Beck discouraged him, suggesting that there wouldn’t be enough room.

  Instead, O’Keeffe and Beck convinced Dodge Luhan of the suitability of John Marin as houseguest. When the laconic Marin arrived in June, he took the Cadillac for drives in the country. The looming peaks of the Sacred Mountain beckoned, and he tried to render them day after day. Accustomed as he was to painting the familiar seascapes of Maine, he was rarely pleased with the results of his western landscapes. Marin pronounced Taos “impossible.” “None of us can do it,” he said. He found it more satisfying to go fishing with Brett and the painter Andrew Dasburg. But after a few weeks he decided to extend his stay, to produce scintillating watercolors of the mountains, sagebrush, and adobes.19 Unlike Marin, O’Keeffe was pleased with her canvases of that summer, once blithely remarking, “In New Mexico, half your work is done for you.”20

  Even on vacation, O’Keeffe liked to document the architecture of a place. During her first weeks in New Mexico, she made a drawing and three watercolors of the round adobe studio behind the main house, with an emphasis on the bronze door against the tan wall. Yet she must have recognized that her relationship with New Mexico could not be confined by this one visit. Once again, she was painting the image of a door as she embarked on a significant transition in her life. These small pictures are precursors of the extensive patio door series of the 1950s and 1960s.

  In addition to her renderings of the studio, she completed an oil of monolithic brown and black rocks standing before a background of red, white, and blue titled After a Walk Back of Mabel’s.

  A short distance from Los Gallos, O’Keeffe and Beck were struck by the eerie appearance of a morada, the house of worship for the penitente sect of northern New Mexico. The women walked behind the adobe building and saw a crude, six-foot wooden cross that the penitentes had erected in the hills. Turning to the left, O’Keeffe saw Taos Mountain. She conceived a painting combining the two iconic images.

  Cross with Red Sky features a coal black crucifix set against a fiery red sky, with the navy blue Taos Mountain on the horizon. The startling sight of the cross behind the morada inspired Black Cross with Stars and Blue: the same crucifix set before the mountain but as seen on a starry night. O’Keeffe later explained, “I think it is a good pictu
re of this world here.” Later, she completed a drawing of a thinner, more rudimentary cross that seems bowed outward in Grey Cross with Blue.

  Black Cross, New Mexico truncates the top, bottom, and sides of the cruciform to dominate the canvas, and one can barely see the pegs binding the two struts of the black cross. In the distance, rows of nickel-colored hills extend to a horizon alight with bands of scarlet and topaz. This picture was inspired by a memory of a cross seen at sunset against the sand hills of Cameron, Arizona. Taken by the false sense of scale generated by such distances, O’Keeffe described them as “hills that look small until you see telephone poles like toothpicks going up and down and you know they are high.”

  The monumental scale of the crosses dominating the foregrounds of O’Keeffe’s pictures reflected an aspect of daily life in a state dominated by Hispanic culture and the Catholic church. As O’Keeffe recalled, “I saw crosses so often—and often in unexpected places—like a thin dark veil of the Catholic Church spread over the New Mexico landscape.”21

  Learning to drive had a significant impact on her painting that summer. She negotiated several miles of dirt road to find the Mission Church of Saint Francis de Asis in Ranchos de Taos. Despite its remote locale, the 1772 adobe church has been portrayed more often, by more artists, than any other church in the United States. Despite its perfectly charming front, Ranchos de Taos Church, as it has come to be called, is known largely for its west view, the apse end of the building most clearly visible from the road. Remarkable for its swollen buttresses and pneumatic shapes, this unadorned mass appears sculptural to the modern eye. And it was the rear of the church, isolated from figures or events, which was painted by modern artists, beginning with a woodblock print by Gustave Baumann in 1919 and a lithograph by Raymond Jonson in 1927.