Full Bloom

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Gallup asked O’Keeffe if he could buy one of her pictures and pay for it over time. She suggested three potential paintings, and in November, Gallup met Bry at the storage facility in New York to see them. Remembering the strong impression of her relationship with Ghost Ranch, Gallup purchased The House I Live In, a small oil of the adobe that was painted when O’Keeffe was still leasing from Arthur Pack.

  Soon after Gallup’s visit, O’Keeffe agreed to publish Herbert Seligmann’s transcribed conversations with Stieglitz. Based on extensive notes Seligmann had taken over the years while listening to the ceaseless ruminations taking place at the galleries, they reveal a feisty, contradictory personality. O’Keeffe was fighting Norman’s efforts toward the beatification of Stieglitz and underwrote the costs of having the library print the book, which Gallup edited, and which was appropriately titled Alfred Stieglitz Talking. O’Keeffe thought such a record might discourage others (namely Norman) from writing about Stieglitz in their “dreamy” fashion.

  Nineteen sixty-six began with a trip to Houston to see Georgia O’Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist from 1915 to 1966 at the Museum of Fine Arts, where O’Keeffe’s old friend James Johnson Sweeney was director.

  The show was organized by Mitchell A. Wilder, director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, where it eventually traveled in March. O’Keeffe went to Texas to meet Sweeney in Fort Worth. Ostensibly, she wanted to oversee the installation, but in fact, she wanted to override many of Wilder’s decisions. Wilder had decided to use potted pine trees, rented locally, for added décor, but O’Keeffe and Sweeney decided that they preferred the cactus they had used in Houston. Secretly, they had them shipped overnight to Fort Worth. They met the trucks at eight in the morning at the museum and had the pine trees moved out and the cactus moved in before Wilder even arrived at work. He was furious to be confronted with this fait accompli.

  O’Keeffe’s next edict involved the Art Institute of Chicago, which lent her 1929 painting Black Cross, New Mexico with the restriction that it could not be removed from its frame. The lighting at the Amon Carter created a glare on the glass covering the painting so that it could not been seen properly. Wilder insisted nothing could be done about it. But O’Keeffe arrived early on the evening of the opening, before the first guests or Wilder had appeared, and surreptitiously had the painting taken down and the glass removed from the frame. Then she had it rehung so that it could be seen without a reflection.5

  Despite her willful demonstrations, the Amon Carter Museum purchased three of O’Keeffe’s watercolors of Light Coming on the Plains, painted when O’Keeffe was a Texas schoolteacher in 1917.

  The opening-night reception was attended by an unusual number of O’Keeffes: Anita, Claudia, and O’Keeffe’s niece June O’Keeffe Sebring, who observed that her aunts “were not close but they bonded in their own ways.” (A few months later, the O’Keeffe family bonded again over the fact that O’Keeffe received the Wisconsin Governor’s Award for Creativity in the Arts.)

  The timing of O’Keeffe’s retrospective was fortuitous. The catalogue surveyed familiar quotes from critics, artists, and curators such as Hartley, Rosenfeld, and McBride, with added observations from the 1950s and 1960s by younger curators like Lloyd Goodrich and Sam Hunter. As art critic and painter Peter Plagens wrote in Artforum, an art magazine primarily devoted to the cutting edge of contemporary art, “Georgia O’Keeffe . . . stands precisely on the boundary between our time, now, and history in our time.”6

  In a generous and lengthy review, Plagens praised her “aura of quiet, monumental sagacity which, in part at least, enjoins the historical; she has visited, fought and won battles of another period which are somewhat forgotten but still indispensable to painting today.”

  Plagens also connected O’Keeffe’s work to concurrent developments in formalist art by underscoring her consistency and concentration on issues of painting. Whether looking at large flowers, small hills, or the floating pelvic bones, he cited her use of “ambiguity as a formal tool as basic and utilitarian as line, tone, pattern or color.”7 Plagens was a younger critic writing after Greenberg and was able to read O’Keeffe’s pictures without imparting narrative, symbolic, or psychological hypothesis as to their meaning.

  The show concluded its tour at the University Art Museum in Albuquerque, O’Keeffe’s first major show in her adopted state.

  As a reward for her efforts on the retrospective, in the summer O’Keeffe visited England before meeting Richard Pritzlaff in Vienna, where they indulged their mutual passion for classical music.

  When she got back to work in her studio in the fall of 1966, O’Keeffe completed Sky with Moon, a minimalist painting based on a simple drawing of a circle placed above a horizontal line. The barely mauve sky yields a single apricot cloud, and most of the 4 × 7-foot canvas is white. Its unusually etiolated palette is like the white flag of surrender. O’Keeffe’s eyes were giving her trouble.

  Apart from an oil sketch of a bird of paradise, O’Keeffe didn’t paint another picture for four years, the longest stretch since her nervous breakdown in 1932.

  More than half a century had passed since O’Keeffe had struggled through her life drawing class at the Art Institute in Chicago. Unable to afford the tuition to attain a degree as a student, she felt doubly satisfied when the school awarded her an honorary doctorate in June 1967.

  Around the same time, Vogue magazine ran an adulatory profile, with photographs by Cecil Beaton glamorizing O’Keeffe’s distinctive sense of style. She was portrayed petting her chow on the Ghost Ranch patio and posed in a black kimono jacket and white ascot standing next to the elk antlers at the entrance to her house. She conceded, “I thought it was rather grand.”

  The reappraisal of her importance as an artist escalated with each exhibition and honorary degree. E. C. Goossen wrote in Vogue, “O’Keeffe’s painting is crucial to any competent understanding of the origins of recent styles, from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s to the Hard Edge, Pop, Op, and ‘minimal’ art of the ’fifties and ’sixties.”8

  O’Keeffe was pleased to be seen as having anticipated color field abstraction, especially in relation to Ellsworth Kelly, whose paintings of flat areas of pure color are based on simple, natural shapes. “Sometimes I’ve thought one of his things was mine,” she said. “I’ve actually looked at one of Kelly’s pictures and thought for a moment that I’d done it.”9

  Goosen noticed another trait that O’Keeffe had perfected by the age of eighty. “She is almost totally unsentimental and barely tolerates sentimentality in others.”10

  Since Stieglitz’s death, O’Keeffe had become increasingly self-centered, a seemingly ineluctable character trait of most great artists. Still, she could be helpful when a friend was in real need. Despite the tense beginning of their relationship, O’Keeffe was fond and supportive of Rebecca James and visited her regularly in Taos. O’Keeffe encouraged her artistic efforts and offered to give her a show at An American Place in 1950, an offer that she refused. New York City had come to seem too far away to Rebecca, but she did have the occasional show in museums and galleries in the West. She had also remained friends with her first husband, Paul Strand, and in 1964 told him that her relationship with O’Keeffe remained strong: “40 years have not diminished our friendship & liking for one another—because, I think, we have never ‘invaded’ one another—or become ‘intimate’—although we experienced a great many things together.”11

  On August 26, 1967, acting on instinct, O’Keeffe called Rebecca and asked if she could come to see her that day. She learned that Bill James, who was sick, had lapsed into unconsciousness just hours before. Rebecca needed O’Keeffe to come right away, but by the time she had driven to Taos, Bill had died of a heart attack. With Rebecca wheelchair bound with arthritis and barely able to travel, O’Keeffe agreed to go to Albuquerque to oversee arrangements for his funeral and cremation. Bill had been devoted to caring for Rebecca, and her life without him was bleak. She committed
suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills in July 1968.

  Although given to moments of generosity, O’Keeffe mostly placed her own interests over those of her friends and family. The most painful example concerned Anita Pollitzer, who had toiled for fifteen years on her biography of O’Keeffe. On October 19, 1967, Pollitzer submitted her lengthy tome to her best friend with the note, “I have tried to give you as I feel I know you.”12

  After reading the manuscript, O’Keeffe responded with a discouraging thirty-one pages of notes correcting tiny details such as the existence of flowers in the fields, the fact that she lived near, not across from, the Art Students League, that she slept on a bed, not a cot. She excised most of Stieglitz’s remarks, such as his description of her as “The Great Child pouring out some more of her Woman self on paper—purely—truly—unspoiled.” O’Keeffe corrected the portrayal of her relationship with her mother, explaining, “We had violent differences—we were very different kinds of people. It got so that I would not talk with her at all about many things. When I was near her I tried to do what she expected—when I was alone I did as I pleased and she would have often disapproved if she had known—I was not with her very much.” Her most noteworthy correction, however, had to do with Pollitzer’s perception that the artist was happy and content: “I do not like the idea of happyness—it is too momentary—I would say that I was always busy and interested in something—interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happyness,” she wrote.

  In the end, O’Keeffe did not want to break down the myth but to control its presentation. She still smarted under the image that Stieglitz had constructed. Painstakingly, she had rebuilt her reputation, presenting herself as reclusive, aloof, demanding, and sharp. She excelled in the management of her career as a business. Although Pollitzer’s account was positive, it was overly personal, intimate, and too revealing for O’Keeffe’s taste. She had worked too hard to polish her glittering surface to have it smeared by someone who characterized her as “happy.”

  Despite the fact that it was Pollitzer who had encouraged her earliest efforts at abstraction and brought her drawings to Stieglitz in 1916, O’Keeffe chose art over friendship. She delegated the nasty job of informing Pollitzer that the manuscript could not be published to Bry and made clear that she would sue if Pollitzer made any such attempt.

  O’Keeffe felt so threatened by the manuscript that a formal, businesslike letter was sent to her oldest friend: “I really believe that to call this my biography when it has so little to do with me is impossible—and I cannot have my name exploited to further it. I find it quite impossible to say yes to you for it, as my biography. I cannot approve it, directly or indirectly, in anyway.

  “You speak of our friendship—but it is not the act of a friend to insist on publishing what you call my biography, when I feel so deeply that it is unacceptable.”

  She offered to compensate Pollitzer for her time but made it clear that she was withdrawing her permission to use her correspondence with Stieglitz. The letter was signed “Sincerely, Georgia O’Keeffe” and copied to “Coburn Britton, Horizon Press,” the book’s potential publisher.13

  Pollitzer was devastated. The fifty-year friendship was at an end. The following year, she lapsed into senility and did not recover. She died in 1974. Adding to the insult, O’Keeffe wrote to William Pollitzer, Anita’s nephew and heir, demanding the return of the painting that she had given to her former friend. The very model of a southern gentleman, he complied. In 1988, after O’Keeffe’s death, he aided in the publication of his aunt’s manuscript as A Woman on Paper: Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Jerri Newsom, who worked as O’Keeffe’s cook and housekeeper on and off from 1966 through 1974, recalled that the artist auditioned her talents by asking her to make sponge cake. O’Keeffe then taught her to grind the wheat and add sunflower seeds to make bread. O’Keeffe bought goat’s milk, which she used in her coffee, at a nearby monastery. She called sugar “poison.” According to Newsom, O’Keeffe refused all prescription medication as well as aspirin. Newsom recalled that her parsimonious employer would wash out plastic bags and hang them on the line for reuse. She rarely carried cash. “Jerri, it hurts me to spend one penny,” she said, “but when it comes to thousands, I don’t seem to care.”14

  After the daughter of a friend borrowed O’Keeffe’s car and totaled it when she swerved off the road to avoid hitting a wild pig, O’Keeffe did not complain. She also had lent the girl her favorite coffee pot, which was in the car; the girl returned it, but the lid was missing. O’Keeffe’s handyman managed to find the lid, but O’Keeffe was dismayed to find that the coffee pot wouldn’t work. She had it repaired for $7.50 and sent the bill to the girl. When she received neither the money nor a reply, she was furious. It rankled her to such a degree that she told the story for years, always seeming much more upset about the bill for the broken coffee pot than about the wrecked car.15

  O’Keeffe’s lean years had left their mark, but she did not stint on her own physical well-being. Ida Rolf had introduced the artist to therapeutic massage, and O’Keeffe continued to see one of Rolf’s students. Once a month, she traveled to Santa Fe for a Rolfing session. When she came to Beverly Hills to see her sister and Kiskadden, she scheduled appointments with Rolf herself.16

  At her advanced age, O’Keeffe took pride in her personal appearance, brushing her teeth for several minutes a day and smoothing creams into her long hands. Her waist-length white hair was left undone when she was alone at home and put up in a scarf when visitors arrived. (Every week, Newsom chauffered her to Santa Fe to get her hair washed and dried at the La Fonda Hotel.)

  Early in the morning, Newsom would take a walk with O’Keeffe in the hills. When they travelled together, the artist introduced her as Mrs. Newsom without clarifying her position. When Newsom admitted to O’Keeffe that she worried about her hair turning gray, O’Keeffe raised her salary by twelve dollars a month to cover the costs of dying it. This generosity of spirit, and of funds, slightly compensated for O’Keeffe’s otherwise tyrannical behavior in her pursuit of perfection.

  As with so many of O’Keeffe’s relationships during the last decades of her life, there were arguments with Newsom. When Newsom grew tired of it, she left for two years; when she returned, she was welcomed. In a strange way, it seemed that O’Keeffe liked to argue. After more than twenty years of arguing with Stieglitz, she had grown so accustomed to the verbal battleground that she sought out similarly disputatious personalities. As she aged, O’Keeffe had even greater difficulty maintaining the boundary between her hired help and her friends.

  Apart from a May trip to New York, O’Keeffe stayed close to Abiquiu in 1968. When Daniel Rich visited in August with his family, O’Keeffe invited the spiritual philosopher Thomas Merton to dinner. Rich recalled, “It was early evening, the sky was aglow with the Pedernal in the distance. Father Merton looked around and said, ‘There is something sacred about this place.’ Well, the Indians thought so and she, too, has given it an overtone of mystery and extreme clarity.”17

  At the age of eighty-one, O’Keeffe’s mysterious existence in the desert often was of more interest to readers than her art. In March 1968, she was featured on the cover of Life magazine, her wizened face bent over the headline “Stark Visions of a Pioneer Painter.”

  The March issue was a noteworthy contrast to her first appearance in Life in 1938, when the Queen of Egypt, rather than O’Keeffe, made the cover. (O’Keeffe had been upset by the grating headline “Alfred Stieglitz Made Georgia O’Keeffe Famous.”)

  Thirty years later, O’Keeffe had made herself famous by continuing to underscore her own singular and unconventional choices. In the extensive article, with dramatic photographs by John Loengard, she described her monastic routine: “I think more about tomorrow than today or yesterday. . . . I like to get up when the dawn comes. The dogs start talking to me and I like to make a fire and maybe some tea and then sit in bed and watch the sun come up.”

  Tellingly, O�
�Keeffe admitted, “The morning is the best time, there are no people around. My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.”18

  After a brief visit to Mexico at the beginning of the year, O’Keeffe returned to Austria in the spring with Richard Pritzlaff. She loved Vienna for its architecture and classical music, but mostly she enjoyed seeing the famous Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School. The Lippizzaners reminded O’Keeffe of watching bullfights, and she reveled in the horses’ glorious movement and strength.

  Out of concern for O’Keeffe’s weakening eyesight, Pritzlaff had arranged front-row seats at the Lipizzaner performance. O’Keeffe was fretting about forgetting her opera glasses when the school’s director put his horse into a levade about five feet in front of her. O’Keeffe nearly tumbled out of her seat. Afterward, she completed several sketches of the noble horses with their ears pricked forward and their noses tucked into their chests.

  In the evenings, Pritzlaff took O’Keeffe to concerts and operas. During the days, they wandered the city. For lunch, O’Keeffe ordered Salzburger Nockerln omelets “improved” by a splash of Grand Marnier.19

  While she was enjoying the baroque pleasures of Austria, her sister Anita, seventy-seven, was concluding the construction of her Palm Beach Versailles. Montsorrel was built as a tribute to her late husband. Anita hired architect Jacques Regnault to fashion an oceanfront Regency-style residence with eight bedrooms and ten baths. For five years, she worked directly with the architect and designer Jansen of Paris in creating opulent interiors in the manner of an eighteenth-century palace, with marble floors and walls, crystal chandeliers, and a gold-leafed balustrade curving up the grand staircase. The perimeter of the house had glazed loggias that converted to open porches at the touch of a button. A hydraulic system allowed the glass walls to disappear into pockets underneath the floor, concealed under discreet marble caps.