Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Although Arthur Pack had good-naturedly sold his own house to O’Keeffe, it did not mean that he and his wife weren’t ambivalent about having her as a regular neighbor. O’Keeffe frequently argued with him and once described the scene gleefully: “I spared him nothing—I drew all the blood I wanted to and wiped my knife clean on what was left of him. He didn’t have a leg to stand on.”15

  O’Keeffe had fought hard for her independence and her stature as a major American artist. Stieglitz had played the dominant role in her relationships with collectors, museum officials, artists, and writers. Feisty and controlling, he expected total allegiance and obedience. As her husband’s power and influence waned, O’Keeffe began to assume his rigidity and perfectionism.

  That November, she traveled to Navajo country to see the fire dance and, upon her return, learned that Stieglitz had suffered a minor heart attack. She was so preoccupied with planned renovations of her new house that she did not return to New York until December, just as the Museum of Modern Art moved into its International Style building on Fifty-third Street and their photography department opened with a show called Sixty Photographs. Stieglitz came on opening day to see his prints of O’Keeffe’s hands sewing and the poplars at Lake George hanging alongside a group of photographs taken by Norman.

  Stieglitz and O’Keeffe reconvened to deal with the circumstances of their estrangement. They spent the spring of 1941 organizing and editing their work of the past twenty-three years, beginning with O’Keeffe’s paintings and moving on to thirty-six boxes containing Stieglitz’s photographs.

  Owning a home away from Stieglitz confirmed the reality of O’Keeffe’s transition to a life on her own terms. Despite her anger and despair over Stieglitz’s infidelities, she felt nostalgic for their life together. “I see Alfred as an old man that I am very fond of,” she wrote, “growing older—so that sometimes it shocks and startles me when he looks particularly pale and tired—Aside from my fondness for him personally I feel that he has been very important to something that has made my world for me.”16

  She continued to take responsibility for finding replacements for the old-fashioned clothes that he had worn for the past fifty years. “Alfred always insisted on wearing a certain kind of tie, a particular type of sock and underwear and shirt. I used to have to walk all over town trying to find those special kinds,” she recalled.17 There was little point in urging him to adopt the new styles, so a loden cape had to be imported from Germany by a friend.

  Nonetheless, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz continued to argue. Photography curator Van Deren Coke recalled a startling encounter. “I went to see Stieglitz at An American Place and O’Keeffe was on a stepstool hanging a show herself. He was yelling at her, ‘Put it up two inches, move it over, a little lower.’ That installation was a shocking experience. I was brought up in the South and you didn’t yell at women and certainly not in public. It shows what happened at home, how often they fought. But she dutifully got up on that stepstool and moved that picture over, and over again. I was amazed that Stieglitz was such a martinet.”

  He added, “She was quite a different personality when I went to see her in New Mexico. I was always trying to get her to talk about Stieglitz because that is what I was working with when I did my book in 1962. She was not very communicative with me. She wanted to know why I always asked about Stieglitz and not about O’Keeffe.”18

  Death must have been much on her mind at this point. After a weekend visit to the Johnsons’ farm in Oldwick, O’Keeffe painted canvases of headstones in an old cemetery. From New Jersey Weekend I depicts the unmarked cenotaphs before a somber sky and black, leafless tree. From New Jersey Weekend II features a pair of tombstones in the rosy shades of pink granite and a sunny background.

  After an April trip to Richmond and Charlottesville, Virginia, with David McAlpin, O’Keeffe drove to Chicago, then flew to New Mexico with Narcissa Swift. She had become such a friend that the artist dedicated to her the white pastel Narcissa’s Last Orchid. Another version of the pastel is rendered in yellow and green.

  Once O’Keeffe had settled at her home in Ghost Ranch in May, she wrote, “The country here is really fantastically beautiful—in all directions it has such a clean untouched feeling—I never get over being surprised that I am here—that I have a house and that I can stay.”19

  She finished a rough sketch and two oil studies of the dirt road to the blue Pedernal. Then she completed two paintings emphasizing the play of illumination on the jade, turquoise, and peach mesa. My Frontyard, Summer situates the mesa directly in front of her courtyard, just as she had portrayed her backyard in an earlier picture. Another version of the mesa was titled simply Pedernal.

  O’Keeffe also painted the blush and burgundy mounds behind her house with femur and vertebrae in the foreground, Red Hills and Bones. Powdered mandarin mounds under a cerulean sky became the subject of Near Abiquiu, New Mexico.

  The white-walled Ghost Ranch studio, converted from a dining room, was only adequate in size, but O’Keeffe enlarged the window to bring in light and views. There she painted another still life of the black clay pot filled with turkey feathers: it is seen from below resting on an adobe shelf. A fluffy plume in a white cup on the mantel of the adobe fireplace, White Feather, was sold to Cady Wells. In a humorous mood, O’Keeffe painted a kachina with a feather emerging from the top of its head standing in the desert. She also completed an oil sketch of mariposa lilies and Indian paintbrush.

  The raw isolation of Ghost Ranch was a privilege few could afford, as the possibility of American involvement in World War II meant gas rationing and shortages of food and water. O’Keeffe tried to grow vegetables, but Ghost Ranch simply did not take to domestication. “The dirt resists you,” she said. “It is very hard to make the earth your own. The ranch is really home to me. . . . All my association with it is a kind of freedom. Yet it’s hard to live at the ranch.”20

  She had to drive seventy miles round trip on a dirt road to get supplies and forty miles to get the laundry done. Visitors were rare. She bought her vegetables and fruit from what she called “the natives.” “One learns to eat differently,” she explained. “When there is no meat, we eat beans.” Despite the hardships, she insisted, “I like it better here than anyplace I have ever been. I had such a wonderful walk up the arroyo bed of a wide valley lined on both sides with high pink hills—a sort of waving ripple along the tops—a few cedar and pinon trees—earth ranging from pink through red to deep purple with streaks of green in it. At the head of the arroyo, the very high cliffs—fantastic shapes—it is a beautiful world—There is something clean about a world like that—it is like walking across new snow.”21

  The village of Abiquiu, some twenty miles south, at least had Bodes General Merchandise and a telephone. O’Keeffe began making inquiries as to the availability of property in the area and soon came across a derelict hacienda with a beautiful view. At that time, she was informed the property, which was owned by the local diocese, was not for sale. O’Keeffe was finding it difficult to gain access to the close-knit community. As she explained, “I’m a newcomer to Abiquiu, that’s one of the lower forms of life. The Spanish people have been here since the eighteenth century.”22

  Now that O’Keeffe owned Rancho de los Burros, she no longer had access to the amenities provided by Pack at Ghost Ranch. She needed assistance, and Maria Chabot, a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring writer, seemed uniquely qualified, when she approached the artist about working for her. Chabot was born in San Antonio in 1913. Her English grandfather, George Stooks Chabot, had been British consul to Mexico in the 1860s before settling in San Antonio in the 1870s. Chabot, however, seems to have chafed at her family’s respectable roots and was in search of adventure from an early age. She attended high school, then spent several years working as an advertising copywriter for the local department store. In 1933, at the age of nineteen, she quit her job and used her savings to travel to Mexico City, where her relative Emily Edwards, an artist and art histo
rian, was living. Chabot wanted to pursue her interest in painting and creative writing. While there, she befriended several women who lived in Santa Fe, among them painter Dorothy Stewart and her sister Margretta Stewart Dietrich, a leader in the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs.

  Chabot became intimately involved with Stewart and traveled with her by boat to New York, where she was first introduced to Stieglitz and Dorothy Brett. During this time, she wrote several short stories and submitted them to publishers, but none was accepted. Chabot returned to her family in San Antonio but in May 1934 moved to Santa Fe to help Stewart with a fresco project, living in Dietrich’s Canyon Road house while Dietrich traveled in Europe.

  After a few months, Chabot was employed part-time making a photographic and written record of Spanish Colonial artifacts in collections for Brice Sewell, head of the Taos County Vocational School. When she finished, she traveled to Mexico City to take classes in archaeology, ethnology, and Spanish. She returned to Santa Fe in January 1936 and began to write articles on Indian arts and crafts for Dietrich’s New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, which were published in New Mexico magazine. She was employed by the Work Projects Administration to visit various Indian reservations, surveying their arts and crafts, attending conferences, and writing reports on her findings.

  Chabot and Stewart traveled in Europe for sixteen months in 1937 and 1938, and Chabot took a one-month course for British colonial administrators at Oxford University. She returned to her family in San Antonio until March 1939, when she moved to Santa Fe to continue her work for the WPA.

  In April 1940, she was hired to investigate the grievances of the Navajo people and to write a report on her findings for the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs. It was Chabot who suggested that Indians be invited to bring their jewelry and crafts to Santa Fe for the Saturday market during the summers.

  Mary Cabot Wheelwright was supportive of Chabot’s endeavors, and Chabot was invited to stay at Los Luceros. She also helped Wheelwright with a manuscript, “Creation Story of the Navajos,” and classified Wheelwright’s collection of Tibetan objects. Wheelwright asked Chabot to join her on a visit to O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch in the fall of 1940.

  A few weeks after this meeting, Chabot drove O’Keeffe to the Chuska Mountains north of Gallup to attend a Navajo healing ceremony. En route and on their return, they went to the area around Nageezi in the Bisti Badlands near Chaco Canyon. O’Keeffe had already discovered the area and made two paintings of the area in 1936 but, over the next few years, would return many more times to camp there with Chabot.23

  Chabot had a brash independence and an autodidact’s pragmatism that O’Keeffe admired. For her part, Chabot was smitten with the difficult artist. No longer involved with Stewart, Chabot offered to perform errands and secretarial duties in exchange for room and board at Ghost Ranch. O’Keeffe gave her an allowance of fifty dollars a month to run the house, and whatever was left over was hers to keep.

  The dynamic Chabot must have seemed doubly valuable after O’Keeffe’s housekeeper, Bernie Velasquez, a young Abiquiu girl, grew noticeably pregnant that summer. Since there was no husband, the girl denied her condition until her time came, and O’Keeffe was obligated to rush her to the hospital. Instead of a dismissal, the girl was invited back to Ghost Ranch, where she cared for the baby with O’Keeffe’s and Chabot’s inexperienced help. “There wasn’t a finer baby in the region than we had that summer,” O’Keeffe remarked proudly.24The baby was named Maximiliano Alfredo after his father, Max Martinez, and Alfred Stieglitz. Having informed Martinez of his paternal duty, O’Keeffe arranged a wedding.

  O’Keeffe had longed to camp overnight on her painting expeditions in the desert but was afraid to do it alone. With Chabot, not only did she feel safe, but she was saved from having to perform those less entertaining aspects of camping like setting up, cooking, and cleaning up. In August the two began by camping near the ivory towers of gypsum around Abiquiu that O’Keeffe had named the White Place. Early in the morning, O’Keeffe could begin painting without losing precious time driving to the site. This proximity to the stone formations led her to paint them as pale wedges of stone framing a triangle of blue in White Place in Shadow and Blue Sky. These paintings reveal what O’Keeffe sought: “The unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big far beyond my understanding—to understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”25

  In September, Stieglitz was in bed with angina attacks. Since he was under the care of a nurse, O’Keeffe did not race back to New York. Instead, Chabot packed the station wagon with supplies, and the two drove along the vacant and roughly paved roads one hundred and fifty miles northwest to the sooty mountains. They went again in November, driving in the moonlight. When they awoke in the morning, it was so bitterly cold that she stood on a rug and wore gloves to paint the ominous scene Grey Hills.

  Chabot packed twenty pounds of venison. Each wrapped their dinner in bacon and roasted it over a cedar campfire at sunset. They had to sweep snow off the ground before putting their sleeping bags down. The next day, they drove even further in toward the Black Place, but rain-filled clouds approached. They pitched camp behind a hill, had a quick bowl of oatmeal, and went to bed. That night, the driving rain and wind shook the tent and caused first one corner, then another, to collapse. O’Keeffe propped up one side with a chair and put their clothes in the car to stay dry. All night, they listened to the tent flap and rattle with the effort of staying erect. The pale dawn “was as dismal as anything I’ve ever seen—everything grey, grey sage, grey wet sand underfoot, grey hills, big gloomy-looking clouds, a very pale moon—and still the wind.”26 The wind blew their breakfast coffee right out of their cups. Surrendering to the will of nature, they drove home over slippery, muddy roads. Chabot often wondered if people admiring O’Keeffe’s serene and seemingly effortless pictures realized that the artist endured driving rainstorms and freezing winds to gain a more profound experience of the landscape.

  A couple of years later, during warmer months, they traveled again to the hills. “I was up before the sun and out early to work,” O’Keeffe said. “Such a beautiful, untouched lonely-feeling place—part of what I call the Far Away. It was a fine morning, sunny and clear, but soon the wind began to blow and it blew hard all day. I went on working.”27 About fifteen paintings of the Black Place would come out of such camping excursions, though they were often painted from memory in the comfort of her studio.

  O’Keeffe portrayed these mysterious landscapes as the opposite of her pink and yellow Abiquiu cliffs. Somber and sultry, the canvases are cleaved down the center with dark mounds heaped on either side of the picture. Shadows fall in ragged, splintered fashion, and their aspect is far from inviting. As a group, the paintings stand out among her huge corpus of landscape painting, possibly reflecting her sober mood during the years when Stieglitz was slowly dying and the entire world seemed to be at war.

  O’Keeffe enjoyed her adventures with Chabot. After days of camping, the bedraggled women headed back to the Wheelwright ranch to clean up. The gardener and cook, Joseph and Mildred Posey, were visited by their nephew Ben Brewer. He remembered O’Keeffe borrowing Joe’s razor and, sitting on the front porch with a bowl of soapy water, hiking up her skirts and shaving her legs. This behavior so annoyed Mildred that O’Keeffe positioned herself so that Joe could get a clear look up her skirt.28

  In November, O’Keeffe flew back to New York, confiding to Chabot, “Stieglitz has lost much ground. . . . I feel quite helpless about it—a person gradually becoming less and less and there is nothing I can do.”29 Chabot, who was working on a novel, stayed on at the ranch after O’Keeffe’s departure and researched the possibilities of drilling for water, installing a butane gas system, and repairing the leaking roof. O’Keeffe was clearly grateful for all of Chabot’s effort. She sent her a check for three hundred dollars with a letter advising, “It is not
for the taxes or anything like that—it is to give you time to work. . . . I feel that the quality and vitality of your spirit are remarkable.”30

  O’Keeffe recommended that Chabot read Pearl S. Buck’s Of Men and Women and offered to send it to her. “I felt you a bit out of gear with the world in an odd way and I think it is because you are such a good healthy intelligent sort of female animal you have felt not like many people about who are wearing skirts and trading on their curls and fingernails. . . . Pearl Buck makes it very clear that the feminine and the womanly are two very different things.”31

  Chabot balked at taking the money but added, “I worked for you because I loved working for you . . . but I’ll keep it because of what you said to me about not caring where money came from if it meant going ahead w/ one’s work.” She offered to continue working in exchange for room and board because she believed that O’Keeffe is “one of the real painters.”32

  XV

  O’Keeffe had written a pensive letter to Chabot as she flew from New Mexico to New York and gazed out the airplane window:

  It is breathtaking as one rises up over the world one has been living in—It is very handsome . . . like marvelous rug patterns of maybe “Abstract Paintings.” . . . The world all simplified and beautiful and clear-cut in patterns like time and history will simplify and straighten out these times of ours.

  What one sees from the air is so simple and so beautiful I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race—rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.1

  Shortly after O’Keeffe confessed her hopes for the human race, Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor at sunrise on Sunday, December 7, 1941. In less than two hours, the navy lost eight battleships, three cruisers, and twenty-four hundred men. Ten hours later, a similar attack surprised General Douglas MacArthur and destroyed half the U.S. Air Force in the Philippines. America was jolted out of its isolationist resistance. In Manhattan, the war that most people had been trying to avoid now dominated every conversation and concern.