A month later, shortly after her seventy-fifth birthday, the man who had promised the New Frontier and transformed Washington, D.C., into a short-lived Camelot, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. Without a television, O’Keeffe hadn’t been privy to the charisma of America’s media-savvy president, but she applauded his role in a restless nation divided over the civil rights movement, the cold war, and radically shifting values.
O’Keeffe was sensitive to the quickly passing decades and the fact that she was finding a new audience among a younger generation of viewers and critics. Her painting had changed as a result of the color field painters. Although Clement Greenberg had not been a fan of her painting (or that of any other woman artist, apart from Helen Frankenthaler, his one-time paramour), his emphasis on the formal properties of abstraction had a positive effect on the critical writing about her work.
Although O’Keeffe’s latest canvases may have been based on her view of reality, critics liked to read them as abstract. She was increasingly honored for the formally consistent quality of her work. Following the death of the poet E. E. Cummings, O’Keeffe went to New York to take part in the ceremony electing her to his seat in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of the most prestigious honors conferred on a creative artist.
Asked whether her success required self-discipline, she answered, “It’s simply that you decide on the kind of person you want to be, and then you get at it. It’s like a habit of neatness.”21
In March and April of 1963, O’Keeffe resumed her postponed journey to Egypt and visited Greece and the Near East. “I loved Greece,” she recalled. “Crete, though, was like a photograph of a painting. The restoration was too obvious.”22
When she returned to New York in April, she was given the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award. In the fall, her paintings were included in an insightful exhibition, American Modernism: The First Wave, at the university’s Rose Art Museum. The critic Sam Hunter describes the work of O’Keeffe and Dove as “biomorphic abstraction” in the show’s catalogue, and positioned them as precursors to the later abstractions of Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland. “Her art seems characteristically American in standing aloof from final solutions,” Hunter wrote. “What must have once seemed a curious lack of commitment to formal exposition, or at best a weak and muffled echo of it, has today become a prevailing way of art in which we see reflected the ambiguity and indeterminacy of our own experience of reality. Despite their essential modesty of scale and ambition, and without being an actual influence, the paintings of O’Keeffe and Dove prefigure attitudes and an imagery that belong to contemporary abstraction.”23
O’Keeffe wasn’t painting many pictures compared to the past, but what she lacked in number, she made up for in square yardage. She aimed to recreate atmosphere itself, the feeling of a horizon extending into infinity. A couple of abstract drawings led to another painting of solid white and topped with layered rays of sun and sky in Clouds 5/Yellow Horizon and Clouds.
Abstract drawings of the shadowy areas between clouds led her to depart from her earlier conceptions to complete Above the Clouds I, a painting of heavy white ovals regularly arranged on a flat blue background and receding in size until they scudded up against the pink horizon. Webb thought they looked like “hotcakes on a griddle.”24
Pleased with the outcome of Above the Clouds, she expanded the format of the canvas to four by seven feet for Sky Above Clouds II and Sky Above Clouds III. In this second work, the clouds multiplied and dotted the celestial sphere with crowds of creamy lozenges.
“What I have been doing really amuses me,” she wrote to Kiskadden. “The only trouble—or the principal one is that the paintings are too large—My last three paintings are clear skys with clouds below as I have seen them from the air—they will probably make you laugh.”25
After the cloud paintings, O’Keeffe returned to earth with a drawing of the purple hill near Ghost Ranch, followed by the oil sketch Small Purple Hill. Both works looked like afterthoughts, and she knew it.
That summer, she had a visit from her sister Catherine. In September, she traveled with her friends to Colorado.
But in August, O’Keeffe had to endure a less pleasant undertaking: long-simmering resentments led her to sever her thirteen-year relationship with Halpert, who returned to her one hundred and fifty works. A measure of their animosity can be felt in an exchange with journalist Ralph Looney, who wrote an article about the artist for the Atlantic Monthly.
The Downtown Gallery had told Looney that O’Keeffe paintings could be had for between thirty-five hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. When Looney included this information in a draft of his article that he showed O’Keeffe, she was incensed and insisted the prices be edited out of his story. “If anyone’s interested, they can ask, and anyway, I’ve gotten much, much more than the top figure the Downtown Gallery gave you!” Her lip curled and she added, “Much more!”
In unusually candid terms, she told Looney, “I’m conceited enough to know what pictures I paint will sell. If a picture doesn’t sell now, it will sell in two or three years. I did a painting three or four years ago that no one was interested in. In recent months three people have expressed interest in that picture. Each time, the price goes up, and I don’t know what price I’ll finally ask—and get—for it.”
She added, “The success I’ve had has come from a strange combination of luck and my rather odd ability to paint pictures people would buy. I think my lack of ambition actually contributed to my success simply because I never worried about being unable to make my living at it.”26
After a two-year period of transition, O’Keeffe appointed Bry as her agent.
Since completing work on Stieglitz’s estate, Bry had continued to help O’Keeffe on a part-time basis and often visited her in Abiquiu during the summers. From 1954 to 1958, she had worked full time for the Saturday Review, both as an editor and as a production manager, followed by four years as an administrative assistant at the Ford Foundation, and another four years at Time as a researcher and writer. With the key to the Manhattan Storage Company at Third Avenue and Eightieth Street, where O’Keeffe stored her work, Bry now sold pictures in an arrangement with the respected art dealer Terry Dintenfass. But conflicts arose over the division of the commission and, in 1968, Bry became O’Keeffe’s sole agent.
Bry said, “I didn’t like the dealer world. It puts money ahead of everything so it has no value except as money. I’d read Stieglitz’s correspondence. I was influenced by his feeling that art was one of the great things, of how making good of an artist’s work was more important than a dollar sum. He was very shrewd. By taking that attitude, he did well for O’Keeffe. I had principles and ideals and I stuck to them. I was able to turn down huge sales if I thought they were wrong for her paintings. One man looked at some paintings . . . and said, ‘Why should I buy a painting for $50,000 when I can buy ITT stock and get an income?’ I told him to buy the stock. Why should I sell a painting to someone like that?”
Bry, who tried to force collectors to agree to donate their purchases to a museum, soon developed a reputation for being as difficult as Stieglitz had been. By withholding important pictures from the market, she created an artificial scarcity. “I was oddly good at it,” she added. “I was planning for the long term. I suggested that she make a list of paintings by name and put it in the will to keep them off the market, protected. I didn’t put all the top paintings in there. I didn’t want a major collector or museum to feel they couldn’t get a top painting.”27
As O’Keeffe’s earlier works came up at auction in the sixties, Bry bought them back, maintaining their value and further increasing the overall scarcity. By dint of her lengthy relationship with O’Keeffe, she became the de facto expert and the only source of contact as O’Keeffe experienced a resurgence of popularity in the late sixties. As with most of O’Keeffe’s previous employees, Bry grew overly protective and began to confuse employment with friendship.
In the winter of 1963, O’Keeffe used her Leica to determine the composition of a painting. “From my eastern window the road out into the world seems to wind away far up and down,” she wrote. “Nearby it seems to swoop under the house—then curves to the left instead and goes past me. The road winds along the foot of the hills at the edge of the mountains. A long dark mesa to the east—a ragged pink one to the west—a valley into the mountains to the south, then hills and a mountain to the north. . . . One day, playing with a camera, I tried to photograph the road and to get it all in I had to turn the camera at a very odd angle. My drawing—or painting—call it what you will—comes from that photograph.”28
O’Keeffe’s evocative description betrays the simplicity with which she turned the highway into a calligraphic arabesque of burnt umber against a snowy background, The Winter Road.
“I have always been very free in my approach,” she said. “I paint because I like to paint. I paint what I want to paint. I painted many abstractions before I was known at all. I still paint both ways.” More than ever, O’Keeffe rejected the notion that an artist had to choose between abstraction and realism. “What’s the difference whether it’s one or the other? It’s the same principles that make one or the other satisfactory to you.”29
VI
O’Keeffe, seventy-eight, still fought the mounting years. She was always busy. The outset of 1964 saw her travel to New York to discuss business with Bry. On her return, she stopped in Houston and Fort Worth to discuss plans for a forthcoming retrospective at the Houston Museum of Art, then visited the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. She had to be back in Albuquerque by February to receive an honorary degree presented by the University of New Mexico.
Although she had been honored by major museum shows around the country, the museums of New Mexico were slow to catch on. When O’Keeffe began coming to the region in the thirties, her offer to paint a mural for the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe was spurned by the director, Dr. Edgar Hewitt. Hewitt, an archaeologist, had been befriended by Robert Henri, the influential member of The Eight in New York and a teacher at the Art Students League when O’Keeffe had been a student. Henri had come to Santa Fe in 1916, 1917, and 1922 and advised Hewett to establish a liberal exhibition policy at the museum. Hewitt later said that the museum practiced an open door policy. “Its alcoves have been open to the most eminent painter or sculptor, to the unknown beginner.”1 Rebecca Strand was given a show there in 1934. But that “open door” was closed to O’Keeffe, and she had long resented the exclusion.
Hewitt’s oversight had become an embarrassment by 1962, when O’Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 1964, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque took the first step in healing the relationship with the state’s most famous artist by awarding O’Keeffe an honorary doctorate. Wearing her mortarboard and gown, O’Keeffe was truly pleased by the honor, if only as vindication. Instead of talking about her adopted state, however, she euphorically recalled New York, describing the place as “so vast and so sparkling . . . you go up in the world, you go high.”2 She later told a local reporter that her life had been divided into three separate stages: before, during, and after Stieglitz.
Since she traveled less that year, O’Keeffe could have spent more time in her studio, but she only managed to complete three paintings. On the River is a return to the drainpipe shape rendered in the blues and greens of a peacock’s tail. In addition to the paintings, she made about nine rough line drawings of the topography around Abiquiu. One of the more complete renderings, Mesa and River, is the basis for two paintings of the highway. The view is from the spot where O’Keeffe would stop on her way back from Ghost Ranch to take in the river valley rolling away to the Abiquiu mesa.
Road to the Ranch depicts a ribbon of periwinkle winding through mesas and mountains painted in copper, violet, and blue. Road Past the View shares the shape and color of the periwinkle highway, but the landscape is bleached white, and only the tops of hills are captured in color. Both pictures draw on the misty, Japanese-influenced style of a few years before, but applied to a fresh site. Ideas were percolating, and O’Keeffe must have felt that she was on the verge of another great breakthrough.
The art world itself was on the verge of a breakthrough. For twenty years, Greenbergian critics had considered any form of representational painting to be hopelessly backward. But there was rebellion in the ranks of young artists and critics. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were incorporating found objects like old beds or cast body parts in their painting, while Andy Warhol silkscreened one hundred cans of Campbell’s soup as a singular work and Roy Lichtenstein painted giant comic book frames.
Greenberg’s heroes were thoroughly established, so he pledged his allegiance to a younger group of color field artists, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis among them, who stained unprimed canvas with thin veils of paint. Their efforts were more decorative than the emotive canvases of Newman or Rothko, but they earned Greenberg’s approval. The painterly mode of the Abstract Expressionists gave way to abstractions of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, who were labeled hard edge painters for their use of geometric shape, line, and monotone color or noncolor. Stella came to the fore with his all-black paintings. All were shown together in a 1963 exhibition, Toward a New Abstraction, at the Jewish Museum in New York.
The greatest seismic shift in aesthetics since World War II was taking place, one that would propel O’Keeffe and her art to a new audience.
Around the time that astronaut Edward White became the first American to walk in space during the Gemini IV flight, O’Keeffe released the sky from its earthly tether and concentrated on the effect of infinite space in her art. She painted cotton ball clouds on blue receding toward a horizon line of faintest peach. At a whopping eight by twenty-four feet, Sky Above Clouds IV was vastly more ambitious than any previous painting. The seventy-nine-year-old artist stretched the enormous canvas with the assistance of her summer assistant, Sandy Seth, daughter of her friends Jean and Oliver Seth. Since her studio could not accommodate the scale of the picture, it was set up in the Ghost Ranch garage. She had to prop the canvas on a precarious arrangement of tables and stand on a chair to reach the top.
O’Keeffe, who usually finished a picture in a matter of days, spent the entire summer on this project. As soon as she finished, she invited the Webbs to come take a look. She asked Todd what he thought she could charge for it. “Well, it’s more than twenty feet long. I think you could ask two hundred thousand dollars,” mused the humble photographer. “Are you crazy?” she laughed. “I’m going to ask a million!”3
The price tag was only $75,000 when it was shown at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles in 1966. Arguably one of the most important paintings of her career, it did not sell. It was later acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was installed with considerable difficulty.
Collector Joseph Hirshhorn, who founded the eponymous museum in Washington, D.C., was a frequent visitor to Los Angeles galleries at that time. He didn’t buy Sky Above Clouds IV but approached Nelson about buying a selection of other O’Keeffe paintings. After securing the privilege of visiting the Abiquiu studio, Nelson gave Hirshhorn a firm lecture on his conduct in front of the artist. Hirshhorn was to let Nelson do the talking.
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p; The two men arrived to find that O’Keeffe, ever the professional, had carefully arranged more than a dozen canvases around the inner courtyard of her home. Hirshhorn completely ignored Nelson’s advice, demanding, “I want this and this and this and this. How much?” O’Keeffe calmly named her price for each canvas. Hirshhorn had a reputation for haggling over prices with art dealers, and he tried the same treatment on O’Keeffe. The artist, however, had learned from Stieglitz and wouldn’t budge on price. “O’Keeffe’s prices were fair,” Nelson recalled. “She reacted coldly to his bargaining. He acted like he was on Delancey Street.”
“Not a single painting was sold,” Nelson added ruefully. “I was embarrassed and told Hirshhorn I wouldn’t deal with him again.”4
Earlier that spring, O’Keeffe, Tish Frank, and others had made a pilgrimage to Lake Powell and the Colorado River. She walked or rafted between the cliffs of sheer stone, noting the way they contained and described the shapes she called sky holes. When she returned to her studio, she made two large charcoal drawings of rock formations dividing the space into a wedge of sky, similar to her White Place paintings more than two decades earlier. Two paintings came out of these drawings. Canyon Country, White and Brown Cliffs features a creamy tower of rock on the left and a slab of striated chocolate on the right, both framing an ivory sky. Canyon No. II features a triangle and a hemisphere of red rock demarcating a tangerine sky with white streaks of cloud. On the River I features rounded and angular shapes of mahogany and henna buttressing an area of fleshy pink with waves of lemon and mandarin. Canyon Country depicts the mountains as truncated pyramids in coffee and brick; a thin band of green delineates the river from its ocher banks.
Over Labor Day weekend 1965, Beinecke Library curator Donald Gallup made his first visit to Abiquiu. (O’Keeffe and Gallup had met frequently on the East Coast since 1949, when she had donated the Stieglitz correspondence to the library.) During Gallup’s visit, O’Keeffe hosted dinner parties for him with her friends in the area: Judge Oliver Seth, who had graduated from Yale Law School, and his wife, Jean, who owned an art gallery, the Porters, Charles Collier, and Tish and Paul Frank. O’Keeffe also drove Gallup up to her Ghost Ranch house, where he was impressed by its immaculate order despite its being constructed entirely of hardened mud.
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