O’Keeffe continued to float flowers above the landscape in Red Hills and White Flower, which features a morning glory glowing like the moon, and Red Hills with Flowers, which depicts a pair of crimson sunflowers.
At Los Burros she also completed four paintings of wrinkled, ruddy hummocks under narrow bands of lapis or gray. Red Hills, No. I—New Mexico included a wisp of cloud in the sky. “The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone,” she wrote.
Badlands roll away outside my door—hill after hill—red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochers—orange and red and purple earthy—even the soft earth greens. You have no associations with those hills—our waste land—I think our most beautiful country.8
The tiny community of locals around Ghost Ranch soon knew about the odd woman who lived by herself, and her peculiar habit of walking around the desert to collect bleached bones. When an old steer died, a Navajo Indian who lived by the Chama River showed up at O’Keeffe’s door with the skull. She donated her drawing of the skull to the Packs, who reproduced it on Ghost Ranch stationery.
O’Keeffe began keeping detailed records of her paint combinations. In a large Solander box, she arranged paint chips in color-coded layers, separated by cardboard dividers. (This method accounts, in part, for the consistency of coloration in series of paintings completed over a number of years, even decades.)
Around that time, she painted From the Faraway Nearby, a deer’s head with three sets of heavily pointed antlers, suspended above the distant coral and cream hills. In this case, O’Keeffe made a paint chip that read: “May 23, 1937, Cobalt Blue 8/Poppy/with linseed oil/Venice turpentine.” Four other chips, ranging from very dark to very light blue, represent all the tones that make up the sky. Chips labeled “Rosa Angelico with poppy oil” became the distant hills. A batch of six shades of gray labeled “Terra Cassel Milan and zinc white” were used on horns and hills.
O’Keeffe originally called this significant painting Deer’s Horns Near Cameron, but the more evocative later title grasps the essence of her intention—to literally bring that which is “faraway” to the viewer’s attention, “nearby.” Marin once observed that artists were compelled in this effort. “Their far awayness is an inducement—an all worthwhile inducement—such that cannot be laid aside so that from his very nature he brings the far away up close in loving embrace. . . . The one with a full imagination loses the far away and he immediately begins peopling it with his imaginings.”9
Each morning, O’Keeffe rose with the sun and walked out to the desert to paint. In the dawn’s light, the pink and gold cliffs sparkled and the ruby hills were capped with halos. By eleven o’clock, when the sun blasted all shadow and subtlety from the scene, she brought the canvas back to the studio to continue the painting from memory. “These hills look so soft. Such good earth. I have wanted, sometimes, to take off all my clothes and lie back against these hills,” she said.10
The hills are solid stone rounded from erosion, having been the floor of a vast sea that covered most of northern New Mexico hundreds of millions of years ago. O’Keeffe saw them as soft and lent the scarlet crevices a beckoning tactility. She referred to the desert’s oceanic origins in a painting of white conch shells with coral, Two White Shells, One Black Shell. Smooth, rounded red, black, and white stones are laid atop one another in Three Small Rocks Big. Some of these studies of inanimate objects radiate such personal intensity that one senses a special identification felt by the artist. The Broken Shell—Pink depicts a small ear-shaped shell lying next to a propped-up scallop shell with a chipped rim. One shell is erect but broken; the other is supine but intact. The painting recalls her earlier pictures of leaves and still lifes that resonate with veiled analogy. She also completed two still lifes using horns of animals and feathers and a small study of a red amaryllis.
In early September, O’Keeffe traveled to Arizona and Utah with Spud Johnson, returning just in time to join Ansel Adams on a two-week camping excursion to Colorado and Arizona with David McAlpin, Godfrey Rockefeller and his wife, and the Ghost Ranch wrangler Orville Cox. Adams captured O’Keeffe’s frankly flirtatious smile at the shy cowboy. When Cox’s wife saw the photograph of O’Keeffe’s suggestive glance, she flew into a jealous rage and tore the photograph to pieces. Adams’s photographs taken during their wilderness escapade reveal a relaxed, smiling O’Keeffe, heavy in the hips and looking deeply content.11
Peggy Bok spent the summer of 1937 at Ghost Ranch with her children and her husband of two years, Rodakiewicz. The Johnsons had completed building their big house, on property purchased from Pack, and O’Keeffe painted a radiant sunflower dedicated to her friend Margaret Johnson. Ansel Adams played the Johnsons’ grand piano at their housewarming. Charles and Anne Lindbergh were guests, as was the conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom Brett became obsessed. She followed him to Philadelphia to complete a series of portraits, which she brought to Stieglitz. He refused to show them.
Writer Aldous Huxley and his wife brought the Irish author Gerald Heard, who made such an impression that O’Keeffe painted two pictures of a dead cedar trunk that he danced around, Gerald’s Tree I and II.
One night at the Ghost Ranch, the dancing was so lively that O’Keeffe went out on the floor with one of the Luhan’s ranch hands. Though she had complained about the visitors at Lake George, she thrived on the influx of her own friends at Ghost Ranch. She raved to Stieglitz, “I have never had a finer time with so many people at once—sort of sparkling and alive and quiet all at the same time.” She added, “You would have liked it too and been a nice part of it.”12
O’Keeffe had come to see Stieglitz as a business partner—a curmudgeonly old man to whom she was indebted for her career. As she internalized this perspective, and gained a sense of control over her own life, affection slowly made its way back into their relationship. In August, she told him, “You sound a bit lonely up there on the hill. It makes me wish that I could be beside you for a little while—I suppose the part of me that is anything to you is there—even if I am here.”13
Lonely in the penthouse, Stieglitz moved back to the Shelton in September. His latest acolyte was painter William Einstein, a distant cousin who had moved back to the United States from Paris in 1932. In October of 1936, Stieglitz had showed his work along with Adams’s photographs at The Place. Witty and diplomatic, Einstein became a confidant of both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz; Stieglitz hoped that he might take over the running of the gallery. But Einstein preferred his simple painter’s life, though he was happy to keep company with the old man. During his visit to Lake George that summer, he told O’Keeffe that Stieglitz “finds the time and energy to beat me soundly each day twice in miniature golf. He also wins regularly at croquet.”14
After O’Keeffe returned to New York in October, Stieglitz moved back to the penthouse to be with her. Her exhibition, opening two days after Christmas and continuing into the new year, demonstrated fresh confidence and resolution of long germinating notions. Her letters from New Mexico had been so remarkably descriptive and lyrical that Stieglitz printed eight of them in lieu of a catalogue essay. Suspended animal skulls over the desert horizon incorporated the tricks of Surrealism while remaining stubbornly mystical.
Summer Days was reproduced with a positive review in Time magazine. After overcoming years of mental and physical distress, however, O’Keeffe must have been discouraged to find her efforts being disparaged by the younger critics. Her floating skulls and red hills were lambasted by the abstract painter and critic George L. K. Morris in Partisan Review in March 1938:
The subject matter in your first pictures—the gigantic flowers—was arresting to begin with; but from the start your limitations were plain. You could ingratiate with an image, but the art of painting itself, the necessary technical equipment, did not come naturally to your fing
ers. This could have been overcome, as many great artists have overcome it, had you only understood. But you had been deluded. You felt that everything you touched was sensational and “artistic,” whereas in reality, there was only the sign of the painter’s slimy technique.15
Despite this cavalier assessment, O’Keeffe’s popularity increased. Elite critics could say what they would. A thousand people a week came to see her show.
In February 1938, newsstands everywhere received stacks of Life magazine, which proclaimed O’Keeffe to be “America’s most famous and successful woman artist.” Inside, the article credited Stieglitz with having “helped her to become the country’s most prosperous and talked-of woman painter.” It also illustrated three images from a portfolio of twelve color reproductions, which could be purchased for fifty dollars. This was a bargain considering that O’Keeffe’s paintings were selling for around five thousand dollars apiece when lawyers and doctors earned around four thousand dollars a year and you could buy a new car for less than a thousand.
The Life article was just one of many exhibitions and honors that were mounting for O’Keeffe. The previous year, she had been included in a show of five modern artists at the University of Minnesota Art Gallery. In the spring of 1938, Steuben Glass commissioned her to design an etching for a crystal bowl. This time, Stieglitz could not protest that fine artists reject commercial commissions—among the twenty-seven artists to accept the offer were Salvador Dalí, Isamu Noguchi, and Henri Matisse. O’Keeffe contributed two precise drawings of a jimson weed blossom to be etched on the bottom of the bowl so that the petals appeared to float in space. In addition to her fee, Steuben offered her one of the completed bowls, but, in a gesture of O’Keeffean perversity, she chose to keep the prototype of pure, unmarked crystal.
In May, she returned to Williamsburg, Virginia, to receive an honorary degree, the first ever granted in the fine arts, from the College of William and Mary. Her sisters Ida, Anita, and Claudia treated it as an occasion for a reunion in the southern city that had been proved the downfall of their parents.
O’Keeffe may not have bothered with the affair if not for a friend from her days in Williamsburg, Earl B. Thomas. A graduate of William and Mary, Thomas was an executive in the New York advertising headquarters of N. W. Ayer & Son. During his lengthy meeting with Stieglitz and O’Keeffe at their penthouse in February, he discussed old acquaintances and reminisced about the historic city. Not only did O’Keeffe agree to accept the honorary degree, Stieglitz loaned eight of his wife’s paintings. It was to be the first time that a selection of O’Keeffe’s art would be shown outside of New York City. She selected paintings from between 1927 and 1937, mostly her renowned flowers, but also New York, Night, two of the Southwest landscapes, and Deer’s Skull with Pedernal. At Stieglitz’s insistence, the college paid insurance to cover the paintings’ value ($50,000) for the May 4 to 9 exhibition. Stieglitz had the presentation rooms at the Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall painted bluish white and trimmed with silver gray. He sent William Einstein to oversee the installation and hanging. In support of the august occasion, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated her chalky White Flower to the college.
On the morning of May 7, college president John Stewart Bryan recognized the artist “for the revealing insight and the supreme artistry that transfuse her work.” In stark contrast to her usual somber attire, O’Keeffe wore a white shirred long skirt, a bow-collared white blouse, and open-toed, ankle-strapped high heels. A home movie shows her smiling and accepting the award—she refused to make a speech. She did offer a few words to the school newspaper, admonishing viewers not to “believe anything you read about a work of art except what you see in it yourself.”16
Many of the O’Keeffe’s neighbors from thirty years ago turned out for the event, though it was not an entirely cordial rendezvous. A few tried, without success, to solicit autographs. Gladys Guy asked the whereabouts of the portrait O’Keeffe had painted of her as a young girl with curly blond hair. The artist shrugged and said, “Painters learn to throw things away.”17
A likeness of young Turner Henley, who had become a Richmond lawyer, is still owned by his heirs, John and Julie Henley. It is a charming picture of a little boy with an upturned nose in a sailor suit. When Turner asked O’Keeffe to sign the old drawing, she told the Henleys, “I rarely sign anything . . . but I rather think the paintings are their own signature. What I am now isn’t what made the drawing you know—anymore than you are the little boy.”18
Back in her lavish penthouse studio, O’Keeffe was inspired by the Elizabeth Arden and Steuben Glass commissions to execute two imperial floral compositions. Two Jimson Weeds with Green Leaves and Blue Sky measures 48 × 40 inches, and the white blossoms appear to be carved from alabaster. Her slightly smaller pastel, A White Camellia , a more sensual, even lush painting, was purchased by Arden. (More casual exercises made at this point included a small oil of white lilacs with a pale pink carnation and white tulip, and another of geranium leaves in a pink dish.)
In April of 1938, Stieglitz suffered a near-fatal one-two punch: a heart attack followed by double pneumonia that kept him in bed for two months. Simultaneously, Dove contracted pneumonia after he and Torr moved into a converted post office in Centerport, Long Island. Learning of Dove’s condition left Stieglitz feeling desperate and martyred. As he slowly recovered, he used what little strength he had to make prints from his old negatives, though he could no longer take pictures.
Fearful that this would be his last summer at Lake George, Stieglitz asked O’Keeffe to stay with him. Referring to Ghost Ranch, he pleaded, “None of your particular friends will be out there this year—what will you do?” O’Keeffe responded firmly, “Be by myself—which I like—or make some new friends.”19 Still, she stayed with him longer than usual, not departing for Ghost Ranch until August.
O’Keeffe had a special reason to go west that summer. She had never been through the towering Sierra Nevada Mountains, and she was invited to go camping on horseback for seventeen days in Yosemite National Forest with David McAlpin, his cousin Godfrey Rockefeller, and Rockefeller’s wife, Helen. The tour was to be guided by Ansel Adams and accompanied by a cook, packer, guide, and a staff who would provide coffee at breakfast and martinis before dinner.
Adams was an old hand at touring Yosemite, yet O’Keeffe’s rapturous response energized him. “To see O’Keeffe in Yosemite is a revelation,” Adams told Stieglitz. “She says very little, but she looks, and once in a while something is said that sums everything up in a crystal, inevitable clarity.”20
Along with snapshots of a beaming, carefree O’Keeffe, Adams took serious photographs of the magnificent mountains. When he later sent prints to all the adventurers, O’Keeffe, who didn’t give paintings to members of her own family, scolded him for giving away his art to the wealthy McAlpin and Rockefeller. (With her own logic, she proceeded to ask Adams for numerous favors over the years, including the onerous task of repairing and making prints from Stieglitz’s negatives, without offering any compensation for his time.) In September, she traveled with the group to San Francisco, Monterey, and Los Angeles.
When she returned to Ghost Ranch in October, O’Keeffe did not paint the craggy Half Dome or Yosemite’s many waterfalls. That was Adams’s terrain. Instead, she completed two tangerine and honey-dripped paintings of the rock formations behind Rancho de los Burros. The Cliff Chimneys measures 36 × 30 inches. My Red Hill delineates no horizon but fills the canvas with color.
O’Keeffe superimposed spiral seashells against the vermilion landscape in Red Hill and White Shell and White Shell with Red. The shell also appeared in a pool of water and seaweed. Three still lifes of stones recall her work with Dow. A small henna stone resting atop an oval peach rock is a study in color and shape, round within oval, dark against pale. She combined the stones with the jawbone in Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth.
Perhaps O’Keeffe was discouraged by the previous year’s negative review, for she painted only one flo
ating skull, Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory. Branching antlers against a blue sky is the subject of Deer Horns. (She also painted the old cedar stump and a tiny oil of a kachina’s head.)
She returned to New York in late October in time to attend a show of Frida Kahlo’s work that included her self-portraits and paintings of literal bleeding hearts at the Julien Levy Gallery. O’Keeffe, who had just turned fifty, received many flattering letters from the younger artist and felt pleased to be seen as a role model for this fascinating woman at the outset of her career.
Having been decreed famous by Life magazine, O’Keeffe tried to use some of her clout to gain influence over who should show at An American Place. Supportive of a few of the painters living in New Mexico, she leaned on Stieglitz to exhibit the bizarre landscapes of Cady Wells. Stieglitz flatly refused, and O’Keeffe didn’t try to soften the blow when she wrote to Wells: “May I say to you without offending—that I do not find your self in your paintings—there is beautiful taste . . . some way the thing that makes a painting live and breathe isn’t there for me and I don’t know why.”21
When Wells angrily took issue with her criticism, she backtracked slightly, advising him, “Believing in what one does ones self is really more important that having other people pat you on the back.”22
Wells, who had an inheritance, was sufficiently mollified to buy two of O’Keeffe’s small still lifes, the kachina doll of that year and another, now lost, depicting seaweed and sea bean. O’Keeffe tried to talk him into buying her painting of deer horns against the sky, saying that for her it was “very perfect in a delicate kind of detail . . . subtle and to me lightly sad and gay at the same time.—It is of our country there without any of the feeling imposed by peoples who have lived there. . . . It is also one of my paintings that I least wish to give up.”23 But Wells was not persuaded, and clung to his first choices.
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