Although forty-two works of art were donated to eight museums after O’Keeffe’s death, there remained a vast estate valued at seventy million dollars. Of the 343 pictures in O’Keeffe’s studio when she died, half date from the period between 1915 and 1939 and include some of her strongest early abstractions. O’Keeffe chose not to show most of these abstract pictures after her controversial 1923 exhibition. It is only since her death that these pictures have been made public.3
By 1999, the foundation had distributed ninety-four works by O’Keeffe and ninety-one photographs by Stieglitz to museums and institutions around the country. After 1996, the foundation began to donate only half the value of each work of art. Funds to purchase work from the foundation at half its value were used to raise an endowment to operate and maintain the O’Keeffe residence in Abiquiu.4
Thirty-three works were purchased at half their market value to form the core collection of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which opened in 1997 in Santa Fe. Anne Marion’s Burnett Foundation purchased numerous other works by the artist. George G. King, the museum’s director, and Lynes, the museum’s curator, solicited donations and encouraged purchases so that the permanent collection now contains 137 works by the artist.
In 2001, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center was established in an adjacent building, with fellowships available to further the study of O’Keeffe and modern American art. Lynes was named director of the research center as well as curator of the museum. Around the same time, Hamilton and his wife transferred ownership of O’Keeffe’s personal property—including clothes, art supplies, stone and bone collections—to the research center. The Ghost Ranch house was transferred to the Burnett Foundation, and it is a promised gift to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Research Center.
For several decades before her death, O’Keeffe had entered into various negotiations to establish a museum dedicated to showing her art and demonstrating her aesthetic. To a large extent, her vision has been fulfilled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I must thank Donald Richie, author and authority on all things Japanese, who started me on my path.
Writing may be a solitary occupation but it takes a village to complete a book about Georgia O’Keeffe. If that village had a mayor, it would be Barbara Buhler Lynes, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and author of many volumes on O’Keeffe, including the catalogue raisonné. Her scholarship has opened the door for anyone hoping to understand the complicated Miss O’Keeffe.
Others who were consistently helpful and courteous include the invaluable Agapita Judy Lopez, director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, and Sarah L. Burt, projects manager, Eumie Imm-Stroukoff, librarian, and Jennifer Jovais, exhibition coordinator at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation was manifested by the O’Keeffe Estate’s founding director, Elizabeth Glassman, and its board members—Ray Krueger, June Sebring, and Juan Hamilton—all of whom have been helpful in various ways over the time I have worked on this project. I also thank current board members Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Anne d’Harnoncourt, George D. Widener Director and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In addition, I would like to thank Mrs. William Pollitzer and Andrew Norman for their cooperation.
Much of the current awareness of O’Keeffe and her work would not have been possible without the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, born of its inspired founders, Anne Marion and her husband John Marion, and its dedicated director, George King.
There are many friends in Santa Fe who have helped me along the way but the longest suffering are Gail Factor and Keith Wilkinson, Nathaniel Owings, and Greg Powell and Malin Wilson-Powell, now curator of the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas.
This biography is the result of my own research, but I am indebted to the writings and exhibitions of Elizabeth Hutton Turner, curator, the Phillips Collection; Sarah Greenough, photography curator, the National Gallery of Art; Weston Naef, photography curator, the J. Paul Getty Museum; Maria Morris Hambourg, photography curator, the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Barbara Haskell, curator, the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Anthony Montoya, director, the Paul Strand Archive, Aperture.
Among the many authors and art historians who have contributed to my knowledge of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, I’d like to thank Sarah Whitaker Peters, Sue Davidson Lowe, Sharyn Rolfsen Udall, Barbara Rose, Charles Eldredge, Richard Whelan, Bram Dijkstra, Dickran Tashian, Nicholas Callaway, Meridel Rubenstein, Perry Miller Adato, Ellen Bradbury, Avis Berman, Suzan Campbell, Naomi Rosenblum, Calvin Tomkins, Steven Watson, Laurie Lisle, and Roxana Robinson. I also thank colleagues and friends Phyllis Tuchman, Lawrence Weschler, Christopher Knight, Dave Hickey, and Libby Lumpkin.
No O’Keeffe biography would be possible without many months spent at the Yale University’s Beinecke Library with the assistance of Patricia Willis, curator, American Literature Collection, Stephen Jones, and the late Donald C. Gallup. I also thank Amy Rule and the researchers at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, and David Stuart Rodes, director of the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. Thanks also to Ruth Mandel for her assistance in gathering the images reproduced in this volume.
There were numerous friends who provided lodging and listening while I did my research on the East Coast: Ron Steel, Michael and Lynne Levine, Stuart and Katherine Rome, and my uncle and aunt, Frank and Judith Muller; on the West Coast, where I live, I survived on the moral support and wisdom of my women friends: Joie Davidow, Eve Babitz, Jenny Armit, Sally Drennon, Carol Ester, Annie Kelly, Nancy Kitchell, and Ronnie Sassoon.
I am grateful to have steadfast and dedicated agents in Los Angeles, Eric and Maureen Lasher, and talented and patient editors in New York, Starling Lawrence and Morgen Van Vorst.
My mother, Carol Hield, and brother, Richard Gleason, have been proud, generous, and, of course, loving.
Most of all, I thank my wonderful husband, David Philp.
NOTES
Abbreviations for correspondence are as follows:
Georgia O’Keeffe—GOK
Alfred Stieglitz—AS
Anita Pollitzer—AP
Arthur W. Macmahon—AWM
Paul Strand—PS
Rebecca Salsbury Strand—RSS
Elizabeth Stieglitz Davidson—ESD
Sherwood Anderson—SA
Mabel Dodge Luhan—MDL
Henry McBride—HMB
Book One
Chapter I
1. When O’Keeffe was growing up, Sun Prairie’s better homes were demarcated by white picket fences. Her watercolors of picket fences, painted as they were with childlike simplicity, must certainly be visual recollections of her youth. They were so salient a feature of the landscape, they were nostalgically described lot by lot in the local newspaper: “In the early days, Sun Prairie enjoyed the privacy to be derived behind picket fences. On Main Street in the center of the village, Col. W. H. Angell’s lot was enclosed with a white picket fence. The Rood home, on the corner of West Main Street and the path later known as South Street, had a white picket fence. The Pease lot on Main Street also had a white picket fence.” The writer goes on to list another eight fences in the village. Unidentified author, “Some Things You’ll Never See Again in Sun Prairie,” Star Countryman, May 27, 1948.
2. Ibid.
3. Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 22.
4. Christine Taylor Patten and Alvaro Cardona-Hine, Miss O’Keeffe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), p. 101.
5. Robinson, A Life, p. 22.
6. Anita Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 58.
7. Calvin Tomkins, Notes from interview with Georgia O’Keeffe, Sept. 24, 1973, for his New Yorker profile, “The Rose in the
Eye Looked Pretty Fine,” Mar. 4, 1974. Tomkins kindly shared his invaluable notes with me after I interviewed him for this biography.
8. Robinson, A Life, p. 18.
9. Archer Winsten, “Georgia O’Keeffe Tries to Begin Again in Bermuda,” New York Post, Mar. 19, 1934.
10. Tomkins, Notes.
11. O’Keeffe cited by Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 70.
12. Helen Renk, “Georgia O’Keeffe—Sun Prairie Native,” Wisconsin Star Countryman, Sept. 2, 1948.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Viking Press, 1976), n.p.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Tomkins, Notes.
19. Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper, p. 58.
20. Renk, “Sun Prairie Native.”
21. Mary Braggiotti, “Her Worlds Are Many,” New York Post, May 16, 1946.
22. Larry Freeman, Louis Prang: Color Lithographer (Watkins Glen, N.Y.: Century House, 1971), pp. 108–23.
23. Bram Dijkstra, “America and Georgia O’Keeffe,” Georgia O’Keeffe: The New York Years, edited by Doris Bry and Nicholas Callaway (New York: Alfred A. Knopf in association with Callaway, 1991), pp. 107–8. Dijkstra writes, “William Sharp’s The Great Water Lily of America, printed by his own company in 1854, is a characteristic example of the genre, which often also included Heade-like close-ups of flowers. The chromolithographic process permitted the use of remarkably un-garish, painterly color shading in conjunction with relatively subtle gradations of line and texture—details of a sort which at this time could only be obtained through the lithographic printing process. These chromos were precursors of the poster-sized photographic color reproductions of paintings so popular in our own time. The rather glossy surface of these prints . . . could make the petals of flowers seem to have the slightly iridescent texture of human skin.”
24. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Chapter II
1. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
2. Tomkins, Notes.
3. Sacred Heart Academy brochure, n.d.
4. Ibid.
5. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
9. Author’s interview with Peter Klein, director, Sun Prairie Historical Society, May 20, 1988, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
10. “Facts About Williamsburg and Vicinity,” Business Men’s Association of the City of Williamsburg, 1900, p. 26; cited by Ann C. Madonia in catalogue essay for exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe in Williamsburg, Muscarelle Museum of Art, 2001, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.
11. Benita Eisler, O’Keeffe & Stieglitz: An American Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 17. Eisler wrote, “In January and again in December 1896, court proceedings were brought against an F. O’Keeffe by Peter Batz for unpaid debts in the amounts of $748.78 and $763.19, representing two loans plus eight percent interest. There is no record that these debts were ever paid.”
12. Claudia O’Keeffe to GOK, Feb. 7, 1919, Alfred Stieglitz Archive (hereinafter ASA), Yale Collection of American Literature (hereinafter YCAL).
13. George Humphrey Yetter, Williamsburg Before and After: The Rebirth of Virginia’s Colonial Capital (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).
14. Ibid.
15. When merchants complained that moving the courthouse had disrupted the old business district in Callands, the new town gave itself the droll moniker of Competition before renaming itself Chatham in 1852. “The Chatham Experience,” Chatham Retail Merchants Association, brochure.
16. Tomkins, Notes.
17. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
18. Tom Zito, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Washington Post, Nov. 9, 1977.
19. Christine McRae Cooke, “Georgia O’Keeffe As I Knew Her,” The Angelos, the publication of Kappa Delta sorority (to which both women belonged), Nov. 1934.
20. Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist (New York: Washington Square Press, 1980), p. 25.
21. Susan Young Wilson, quoted in Frances Hallam Hurt, “The Virginia Years of Georgia O’Keeffe,” Commonwealth, Oct. 1980.
22. Even as an older woman, O’Keeffe practiced deceiving people and encouraged it in others. Once, she had Juan Hamilton, her companion in later years, tell a visitor that she had gone walking, and he pointed to a distant bluff. After the visitor had walked the three-mile round-trip, O’Keeffe and Hamilton laughed at him for his efforts. Author’s interview with Joni Gordon, proprietor, Newspace Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif., July 20, 1987.
23. Cooke, “O’Keeffe As I Knew Her.”
24. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
25. Cooke, “O’Keeffe As I Knew Her.”
26. These 1904 drawings, purchased from the O’Keeffe estate, were exhibited for the first time at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., in Apr. 1999. Along with all other works described here, they are included in Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I (New Haven and London, Washington, D.C.: Yale University Press in association with the National Gallery of Art and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, Abiquiu, N.M., 2000).
27. Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper, p. 76.
28. Hurt, “The Virginia Years of Georgia O’Keeffe,” p. 26.
29. Ibid.
30. Harold Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 214.
31. Mayer and Wade, Chicago, p. 216.
32. Ibid.
33. Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years (New York: Abbeville, 1991), p. 43.
34. Bram Dijkstra, The New York Years, p. 95. In Georgia O’Keeffe and the Eros of Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Dijkstra also makes a case for Vanderpoel’s influence in developing in O’Keeffe a passion for the rendering of the human body that she would later express instead in paintings of the American landscape (pp. 60–64).
35. Robinson, A Life, p. 53.
36. GOK to AP, Oct. 30, 1916, cited in Lovingly, Georgia: The Complete Correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Anita Pollitzer, edited by Clive Giboire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 209.
37. Ruth S. Intress, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sept. 2, 1984.
38. Lisle, Portrait, p. 43.
Chapter III
1. Lloyd Goodrich, who was a student in 1913, in an interview with Dr. Harlan B. Phillips, Archives of American Art Journal 13., no.1 (1973). (Goodrich later became director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he co-organized O’Keeffe’s 1970 retrospective.)
2. Ibid. p. 4.
3. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Edwin Dickinson, interviewed by Dorothy Seckler on studying with William Merritt Chase in 1911, Archives of American Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1973).
7. Ibid.
8. Tomkins, Notes.
9. Mary Lynn Kotz, “A Day with Georgia O’Keeffe,” ARTnews, Dec. 1977.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Among the letters discovered in O’Keeffe’s estate was one from Eugene Speicher dated Jan. 6, 1914. “My dear Miss O’Keeffe—Will you call me up on the telephone Bryant 105? I want to paint your portrait and will give it to you after I exhibit it. Yours truly, Eugene Speicher.” Never printed before, this letter shows that Speicher and Georgia resumed contact with one another after her return to New York, though it is unknown whether she posed for him. In 1973, she told Calvin Tomkins, “I’ve been a person other people always wanted to paint or photograph. . . . I’ve always minded posing. . . . I never wanted to ask other people to do that.”
13. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
14. Speicher’s portrait of O’Keeffe and O’Keeffe’s still life of the rabbit and copper pot remain on view in the entrance gallery of the Art Students League, New Y
ork.
15. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.
16. Robinson, A Life, p. 73.
Chapter IV
1. Richard Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), p. 145.
2. Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Aperture, 1973), pp. 16–17.
3. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 145.
4. Ibid.
5. Penelope Niven, Steichen: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1997), p. 99. Niven maintains that F. Holland Day, who was Stieglitz’s archrival, became Steichen’s close friend during these two years in Paris and that he, not Stieglitz, was the first significant influence on Steichen’s development as a photographer. Steichen’s oil painting F. Holland Day was accepted into the Salon Nationale des Beaux Arts (informally referred to as the Salon des Champs de Mars) of 1901.
6. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 217.
7. Ibid., p. 226.
8. Norman, Seer, pp. 104–5. During Cézanne’s exhibition, Steichen painted a fake watercolor in the style of the great Impressionist and, as a joke, hung it with the originals, though resisting the temptation to sell it to an interested collector (Niven, Steichen, p. 351).
9. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 228.
10. Ibid., p. 230.
11. Sarah Greenough, “Rebellious Midwife to a Thousand Ideas,” Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, edited by Greenough et al. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000), p. 30.
12. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 231.
13. Ibid., p. 265.
14. Ibid., p. 266.
15. Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York, London, Paris: Abbeville, 1991), p. 71.
16. Whelan, Stieglitz, p. 284.
Chapter V
1. Vernon Geddy Sr., in Yetter, Williamsburg Before and After: The Rebirth of Virginia’s Colonial Capital, p. 11.
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