Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  In coming to terms with Stieglitz’s bequest, O’Keeffe sought the advice of Daniel Catton Rich, Carl Van Vechten, and William Howard Schubart, who managed her financial affairs. Stieglitz’s personal collection included Rodin drawings, a Kandinsky painting, African sculpture, and Toulouse-Lautrec prints. There were sculptures and drawings by Brancusi and Matisse, as well as paintings, drawings, and etchings by Picasso. In lieu of deducting commissions, Stieglitz had accepted gifts from his artists in addition to purchasing hundreds of pieces. He wound up with 337 works by Marin and dozens by Dove and Hartley.

  The bulk of Stieglitz’s estate, about six hundred paintings, works on paper, and photographs went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The influence of Van Vechten accounted for the 101 works that were left to the African American Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Remaining photographs and other works of art were divided among the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.

  On Sweeney’s advice, every work of art from Stieglitz’s estate was photographed. Always meticulous, O’Keeffe met with the head of the print department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss the possibility of donating a group of Stieglitz’s photographs. Each mat had been sized by Stieglitz to fit a particular print, but the head of the print department wanted to cut all the mats down to the same size so they would fit into his solander boxes. When O’Keeffe objected, the supercilious curator explained, “This is the way we do our Rembrandt prints.” To which O’Keeffe snapped, “Well, Mrs. Rembrandt isn’t around.”3

  O’Keeffe kept a few works by Hartley, Marin, and Dove for her own collection. She outlined her preferences: “All Hartleys are of interest when you first look at them—for me after the second or third day I take them off the wall. . . . Dove I can leave on the wall day after day—month after month—Marin I can keep on the wall longer than Hartley—but not as long as Dove—Dove stays.”4

  Before distributing the works of art, O’Keeffe let Sweeney, who recently had retired as head of MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture, organize a double exhibition of Stieglitz’s photographs and his collection at the museum in 1947. Despite Stieglitz’s allegiance to the Newhalls, O’Keeffe sided with Steichen and, in 1954, donated ten photographs to MoMA’s photography department. A letter accompanying photographs by Stieglitz dictates that they may never be mixed with photographs donated by anyone else; they must remain in their original mattes and original boxes. (In 1957, after Dana Steichen died, O’Keeffe wrote her friend a note of condolence: “I feel that you are the sort that should not be alone.”5 Apparently, he felt the same way, because a few years later, at the age of eighty, he married copywriter Joanna Taub, then in her mid-twenties. They remained married until his death fourteen years later.)

  O’Keeffe refused to wallow in the rituals of loss. When Webb met her at The Place, a month after Stieglitz’s death, she was furiously throwing out all of his medicines and many of his clothes. Fiercely, she warned Webb that three shirts, one pair of shoes, one necktie, and two suits are all that any man should own.

  She even allowed Norman to help in putting Stieglitz’s papers in order. When Norman contacted Chabot in the spring of 1947 and asked for copies of letters Stieglitz had sent to her, O’Keeffe told Chabot to send them, saying that she had no feeling about a lot of old papers. “She likes doing it so why not do it—I’ve just never thought she was creative. . . .”

  For the next three years, O’Keeffe spent much of her time in New York, sorting through Stieglitz’s affairs with the assistance of a twenty-six-year-old Wellesley graduate, Doris Bry. After seeing the Stieglitz photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and reading about him in the publication Twice a Year, Bry had sought out a position working for Dorothy Norman. After six weeks, she found Norman to be “uncritical” and “slushy”; she preferred O’Keeffe’s no-nonsense demeanor.6 Another incentive lay in her salary. Norman paid only thirty-five dollars a week, while O’Keeffe offered sixty-five dollars, on which Bry could support herself, albeit modestly.

  Bry’s father was a woolens manufacturer, her mother a classical violinist. Raised as a Jew in an assimilated family living on West Seventy-ninth Street, she was exposed from childhood to chamber music and museum trips, though not permitted to attend movies. She was sent to private schools and, having a precocious intellect, entered Wellesley at the age of sixteen. “I have a good hard head,” she said. “You can apply it to anything—science, photography, reproducing paintings, editing, writing, the ability to make critical judgments and stand by them. It was important that I had that faculty, one reason O’Keeffe could trust me.”

  From 1946 to 1949, Bry helped O’Keeffe with the time-consuming distribution of the paintings and photographs in the Stieglitz estate. She recalled, “When we were trying to sort out the master set of Stieglitz photographs, she’d hold up two photographs that looked exactly alike to me, and ask which I thought was better. Then she’d show me the difference. Working with this extraordinary material every day was my education. To some extent, she prepared me for taking care of her estate.”

  Bry handled all correspondence. “When she hired me, she wanted to teach me everything so she could be free to paint. After a while, I did most of the work while she was in New Mexico. I’m always a little irritated to read how she spent years settling the Stieglitz estate. She did the thinking, but if a letter went to a museum, chances are that I drafted and wrote it. There is a certain amount of drudgery in taking care of eight hundred paintings.”7

  In early 1949, at a party given by Carl Van Vechten and his wife Fania Marinoff, O’Keeffe was introduced to Donald Gallup, curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. O’Keeffe so trusted Van Vechten’s opinions that she was willing to listen to Gallup make his case for leaving the Stieglitz correspondence and archives to Yale, even though, as she put it, Yale had meant nothing to Stieglitz. She had been inclined to leave the Stieglitz papers to an institution in New York, but after this first conversation with Gallup—which took place at the party, in the elevator, in a taxi, and finally in her apartment—she agreed to come to New Haven. In April, she toured the library and was impressed by the Gertrude Stein papers and the archives of correspondence among her Paris-centered friends, including Picasso and Matisse. It was an obvious counterpart to the New York circle of artists and writers around Stieglitz. After her return to New York, she wrote to Gallup of her “very pleasant day” and said that she had been “impressed by and interested in the order and intimacy of your department.” She ultimately left Yale some fifty thousand pages of Stieglitz’s correspondence, as well as paintings and photographs. (The convincing personality of Gallup did much to convince most of Stieglitz’s correspondents, in turn, to donate their letters to the collection.) O’Keeffe also donated what she called her Waste Basket Collection, small prints that Stieglitz had thrown away and that she had rescued from the trash.

  O’Keeffe told Gallup to approach various members of the Stieglitz family for the donation of more papers, photographs, and especially funds for the organization of the archive. When she saw that few financial contributions were forthcoming, she donated the money to pay for the cataloguing of the papers and to solicit letters from his many correspondents.8

  Stieglitz wrote as many as twelve letters a day—some to O’Keeffe run to fifty pages. Not wanting to read letters that Stieglitz had written to Katharine Rhoades and other women, O’Keeffe gave Bry the task of organizing his vast correspondence. When she discovered that Bry had read them, she was furious. “I felt like slapping her face,” the artist complained.9 The incident led O’Keeffe to restrict access to Stieglitz’s correspondence with Rhoades, Emmy, Kitty, and herself through 1976, further embargoing her own correspondence with him until 2006.

  At Lake George, there was no O’Keeffe to clean out the closets. Stieglitz’s artifacts made his absence
more evident. The summer after his demise, housekeeper Margaret Prosser observed, “The hill is very silent and really in mourning. The Doctor comes down every morning and goes through his brother’s room. Everything is left just the same as when he lived.”10

  With Bry sorting out the estate project, O’Keeffe was able to leave for New Mexico by April 1948. First, she went to see Daniel Catton Rich of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Sorting through Stieglitz’s affairs in New York the previous year, she had had little time for her art and had completed only two canvases. White Primrose enlarges two of the tiny blossoms, one lying on its back, another facing the viewer, its yellow center glowing against pale petals.

  Once settled at Rancho de los Burros, she completed Pelvis Series, a single 40 × 48-inch canvas, which centers the oval of blue so that the white bone surrounding it runs off the four edges of the picture. In this painting and ones that would follow, O’Keeffe creates a confusion of space that renders the sky hard and round, while the bone seems a soft cushion of support. O’Keeffe gave space the quality of objecthood. Art historian Charles Moffatt observed, “The distance is given the same weight of importance as the pelvis—It becomes a thing.”11

  In the summer of 1948, however, O’Keeffe painted her largest canvas to date. The influence of the monumental scale used by up-and-coming Abstract Expressionists underscored her yearning to work larger. The 4 × 7-foot canvas, Spring, supports glowing alabaster flowers, antelope horns, and a backbone hovering over the Pedernal. O’Keeffe liked the painting enough to keep it in her studio instead of sending it back to New York to be sold. Although her Abiquiu house would not be completed until the end of 1949, she was able to stay there for part of the time that fall.

  After the challenge of so large a canvas, she felt up to taking on the wall with the patio door. Each of four canvases is dominated by an adobe wall represented as a horizontal band of tan. A thinner band of blue at the top denotes sky, a narrow band of dusty pink at the base is the earth. Roughly in the center of each painting is the darkened square of the closed door. One version of the painting, In the Patio IV, includes a second, shadowy door to the right. In the Patio V is diagonally divided into areas of light and shadow and the closed door is turquoise.

  The Patio Door series, which continued for a decade, actually began with the watercolor of a blood-red door in an expanse of adobe based on an early glimpse of the ruined hacienda. “I bought the place because it had that door in the patio. . . . I had no peace until I bought the house,” she said. “I’m always trying to paint that door—I never quite get it. It’s a curse—the way I feel about the door.12 That curse was also a blessing as she completed some twenty variations on the simple theme. Her 1946 drawings of the patio door reduce the architecture of her home to simple geometry. In these drawings, the door is open; in the later pictures, it is closed. Several may be based on a photograph of the patio door that she had made into postcards and sent to friends like Van Vechten.

  These pictures recall her earliest Dow-inspired watercolor, Tent Door at Night (1916), a burgundy and navy triangle. For O’Keeffe, the door was a symbol of transition, the focus of her paintings of the Fifty-ninth Street studio, Stieglitz’s Lake George darkroom, the Dodge Luhan house in Taos, and, now, her own house. Yet the door was never as completely explored as in the Patio Door series, in which she repeatedly painted the same door in the same wall to arrive at her own intuitive authenticity. “I have a single-track mind,” she explained. “I work on an idea for a long time. It’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.”13

  Due to the demands of Stieglitz’s estate, finding time to paint was not easy for O’Keeffe in the late forties. She spent more time drawing and completed more than two dozen sketches of trees, some quite detailed, some consisting of just a few lines, as well as of landscape and cactus.

  In the autumn, the sketches led her to paint Grey Tree, Fall, the colorless apparition of a dead cottonwood surrounded by the yolky foliage of the changing seasons. Pleased with the result, she wrote of this painting to Russell Vernon Hunter, “A dead tree surrounded by the autumn is very gentle and pleasant and high in key but it holds its place on the wall alone more than forty feet away.”14

  In July, Bry had come to work for O’Keeffe, and Chabot had talked O’Keeffe into participating in the making of Land of Enchantment, a short black-and-white film about New Mexico for the State Department written, directed, and narrated by Henwar Rodakiewicz.

  Panning the desert landscape at its most desolate, Rodakiewicz compared it to a lost land of the past. To the dissonance of a film noirish sound track, Indians dance, women form clay pots, and men make adobe bricks. Amid this cultural mishmash is brief footage of O’Keeffe wearing a housedress and black headscarf, her black cowboy hat hanging off the back of her neck, dragging a bleached strip of vertebrae back to her Ghost Ranch studio. At the general store, she grins into the camera as a man loads her supplies into the back seat of her black convertible. She is seen standing by a bonfire at the White Place. Considering the years that Rodakiewicz had known O’Keeffe, it seems a haphazard portrayal of the artist, who is the only Anglo in the film.

  Ultimately, O’Keeffe was furious about the whole enterprise. Chabot recalled, “Rodakiewicz showed up in the Rolls roadster that Garland gave him and he was with a woman. O’Keeffe yelled at him, ‘Nobody comes to work with a woman!’ and refused to come out of the house.” She wished not to take part in the film, but Chabot insisted because of promises she had made to some officials at the State Department.15

  O’Keeffe and, at times, Chabot lived in Rancho de los Burros, during the renovation of the Abiquiu hacienda. A new roof was added, the walls were plastered, and hot and cold water were installed so that O’Keeffe could live there year round. The garden was leveled and planted with fruit trees, vegetables, and flowers. As an official welcome in the fall, the “sweet but poor” villagers of Abiquiu, led by ribbon-bedecked young girls, danced in a procession to her new house.

  Although O’Keeffe is widely thought to be the initiator of what has come to be known as Santa Fe style, the house that she designed in Abiquiu was modern. The walls may have been adobe, but the interior spaces were spartan. She installed plate glass windows to bring the glorious light of the region in. She had said that the only furniture she could endure was kitchen furniture, and her dining room had a plank of white finished plywood on top of a pair of sawhorses—exactly as her father had installed in their Williamsburg summer house some fifty years earlier. The living room, however, was furnished with chairs and tables by the architects and designers Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier.16

  O’Keeffe had developed a uniquely penetrating eye that rigorously accepted or rejected each element of her domestic life. Although she had collected, drawn, and painted seashells for years, when they were arranged under a glass-topped table, she found that they looked wrong. One by one, she gave the shells away. In many ways a minimalist, she noted, “I like empty space. . . . If you have an empty wall, you can think on it better.17

  Bancos built into the walls provided seating. A square was dug out of one of the bancos and covered with plexiglass so one could gaze in on an enclosed rattlesnake skeleton. Pillows were covered with Japanese and Turkish flags, and an African mask from a 291 show was hung low on the wall near the fireplace. Conical fireplaces in the corner of each room were stacked vertically with split logs in the Native American manner. Alexander Calder’s black mobile hung at the end of the room and Arthur Dove’s small abstract oil, Golden Sunlight, graced another wall.

  O’Keeffe’s bedroom was the smallest room in the house, with a window facing the Chama River valley, a narrow bed, and a small bathroom tiled in white. The studio, converted from the stable and the largest room in the house, was carpeted in white and fitted with flat files and long tables holding various projects, sketches, and books. A long horizontal window took in the view of the valley below. />
  The courtyard was termed the “roofless room.” “It is very cool and sweet,” O’Keeffe said. Chabot laid willow branches over the supporting rafters to provide shade.

  O’Keeffe’s house reflected her early studies with Dow and his insistence that art be evidenced in every aspect of daily life. “Art is the most useful thing in the world, and the most valued thing,” Dow wrote. “The most useful is always that which is made as finely as possible and completely adapted to its purpose; the most valued because it is the expression of the highest form of human energy, the creative power which is nearest the divine.”18

  As O’Keeffe prepared to move into the Abiquiu house, Chabot again became possessive and overstepped the boundaries of their relationship. After another jealous tantrum, this time directed at Doris Bry, O’Keeffe told her to leave and not to return without an invitation. O’Keeffe later said, “I don’t want to know about the private lives of the people who work for me.”19

  O’Keeffe never had had much finesse when dealing with the staff. Without Stieglitz to intervene, she developed the awkward habit of personalizing relationships with her employees, only to chafe later. Predictably, many of these relationships ended badly, as people who thought they were friends wound up being fired. Chabot was the first of many casualties.

  Chabot continued to work at Los Luceros and, after Mary Wheelwright’s death in 1958, inherited part of the ranch and its valuable contents, including antique silver, Spanish furniture, jewelry, and two of O’Keeffe’s paintings. Unable to pay the inheritance taxes on the extensive property, Chabot sold it to Charles Collier in 1961. “I wanted to be shed of it,” she said. That year, she married radio astronomer Dana K. Bailey. The marriage did not last. She said that she “couldn’t stand the round of continual VIP-ing that was expected of the wife of an important scientist. You had to leave home, and you had to find out what you wanted to do”.20