Full Bloom

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by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp


  2. Tomkins, Notes.

  3. Robinson, A Life, p. 74.

  4. Helen Xavier’s 1894 letter to her mother is quoted in the Frank Vincent Dumond Papers, Art Institute of Chicago.

  5. Lisle, Portrait, p. 54.

  6. Helen Appleton Read, “Georgia O’Keeffe—Woman Artist Whose Art Is Sincerely Feminine,” Brooklyn Eagle, Mar. 2, 1924.

  7. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  8. Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper, p. 100.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Summer School News, Thursday, July 8, 1915.

  11. Hurt, “The Virginia Years of Georgia O’Keeffe,” p. 36.

  12. Nancy E. Green and Jessie Poesch, Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts (New York: American Federation of Arts in association with H. N. Abrams, 2000), p. 61.

  13. Frederick C. Moffatt, Arthur Wesley Dow (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), pp. 40–50.

  14. Dow, Composition, p. 83. Dow’s Composition was reissued in a thirteenth edition, with an introduction by Joseph Masheck, by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001.

  15. Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 190.

  16. Kotz, “A Day with Georgia O’Keeffe.”

  17. Pollitzer, “That’s Georgia,” Saturday Review, Nov. 4, 1950.

  18. Lisle, Portrait, p. 64.

  19. Pollitzer, “That’s Georgia.”

  20. Author’s interview with Margaret Benton, Oct. 3, 1989, Charlottesville, Va.

  21. GOK to AP, Aug. 25, 1915, cited in Pollitzer, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 16.

  22. Pollitzer, “That’s Georgia.”

  23. Ibid.

  Chapter VI

  1. Watson, Strange Bedfellows, p. 169.

  2. Picabia quoted by Henry Tyrrell, cited in Watson, Strange Bedfellows, p. 370.

  3. O’Keeffe said, “I discovered Dove and picked him out before I was discovered. Where did I see him? A reproduction in a book, the Eddy book [Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (New York: McClung, 1914)].” Dove’s pictures inspired her charcoal drawings of South Carolina and continued to influence her Texas oils, according to art historian William Inness Homer. Author’s telephone interview, Sept. 22, 1992.

  4. Watson, Strange Bedfellows, p. 178.

  5. Milton O. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Abbeville, 1988), p. 45.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Charles Brock, “The Armory Show, 1913: A Diabolical Test,” Modern Art and Alfred Stieglitz, pp. 131–35.

  9. Ibid., p. 129.

  10. Ibid., p. 132.

  11. Ibid., p. 135.

  12. Martin Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant (New York: Scribners, 1988), p. 174.

  13. Stieglitz considered Statuary in Wood by African Savages—The Root of Modern Art to have been one of his most important exhibitions, with African sculpture posed before an installation of red, yellow, and black paper devised by Steichen. He retained two masks and some wooden spoons for his own collection, later photographing O’Keeffe’s sister Claudia reclining and holding the masks over her breasts. Helen Shannon, “African Art,” Modern Art and America, pp. 169–70.

  14. Edward Steichen, “What is 291?” Camera Work 47 (January 1915). He wrote, “As far as 291 was concerned I was then ready to put an art movement such as futurism with anarchy and socialism into the same bag as Church and State to be labeled ‘dogma’ and relegated to the scrap heap—History.”

  15. The Modern Gallery sold works by Picasso, Brancusi, and Van Gogh. Stieglitz bought Gino Severini’s 1915 Dancer-Airplane-Propeller-Sea, a painting whose chromatic shading influenced O’Keeffe’s paint handling, which is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  16. Stieglitz quoted by Pepe Karmel, “Picasso and Braque, 1914–1915, Skeletons of Thought,” Modern Art and America, pp. 52–53.

  17. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), p. 41.

  18. GOK to AP, Oct. 3, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 58.

  19. Tomkins, Notes.

  20. Pollitzer, “That’s Georgia.”

  21. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  22. Lisle, Portrait, p. 74.

  23. Niven, Steichen, pp. 392, 470.

  24. “Charles Lang Freer and His Gallery,” brochure from Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1970, p. 19.

  25. Whelan analyzes this relationship in depth in Stieglitz. It is thought that they did not marry due to Freer’s family history of congenital syphilis. In fact, Rhoades never married but adopted a devoutly religious life style. In the spring of 1917, Eugene and Agnes Meyer moved to Washington, D.C., and later named their daughter after Rhoades. Her married name is Katharine Graham, who became editor-in-chief of the Washington Post.

  26. Lisle, Portrait, p. 72.

  27. GOK to AP, Feb. 16, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 148.

  28. Lisle, Portrait, p. 72.

  29. GOK to AP, June 10, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 6.

  30. Robinson, A Life, p. 112.

  31. GOK to AP, Aug. 25, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 14.

  32. Ibid., p. 15.

  Chapter VII

  1. Ralph Looney, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” Atlantic Monthly, Apr. 1965.

  2. GOK to AWM, Aug. 1915?, quoted in Robinson, A Life, p. 114.

  3. GOK to AP, Aug. 25, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 17.

  4. GOK to AP, Sept. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 24.

  5. GOK to AP, Sept. 18, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 33.

  6. Ibid.

  7. AP to GOK, Sept. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 33.

  8. Ibid.

  9. GOK to AP, mid-Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 42.

  10. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 46.

  11. GOK to AP, Oct. 4, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 48.

  12. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915 Lovingly, Georgia, p. 48.

  13. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 47.

  14. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 46.

  15. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, pp. 52–53.

  16. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 59.

  17. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Dress of Women,” cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 121.

  18. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 68.

  19. GOK to AP, Oct. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 40.

  20. GOK to AP, Nov. 15, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 71.

  21. AP to GOK, Nov. 15, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 84.

  22. GOK to AP, Nov. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 87.

  23. GOK to AWM, before Oct. 12(?), 1915, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 119.

  24. Lynes, O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, p. 57. In Oct. 1915, O’Keeffe wrote to Pollitzer that the pastels represented their feet dabbling in water. “He got me to put my feet in because he said the motion of the water had such a fine rhythm—I still had on my stockings!” Lovingly, Georgia, p. 48.

  25. GOK to AP, early Dec. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 92.

  26. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  27. Georgia O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings, edited by Doris Bry (Albuquerque: An Atlantic Editions Book, published by University of New Mexico Press, 1988), n.p.

  28. Avis Berman, “Arthur Wesley Dow,” Architectural Digest, Mar. 2000.

  29. Sarah Whitaker Peters, Becoming O’Keeffe (New York: Abbeville, 1991), p. 43.

  30. O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings.

  31. GOK to AP, Dec. 4, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 94.

  32. GOK to AP, Dec. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 96.

  33. GOK to AWM, Dec. 25, 1915, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 127.

  34. GOK to AP, Dec. 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 103.

  35. AP to GOK, Dec. 17, 1915, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 104.

  36. AP to GOK, Jan. 1, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 115.

  37. Ibid., p. 116.

  3
8. Ibid.

  39. GOK to AP, Jan. 4, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 117.

  40. Ibid.

  41. GOK to AS, cited in Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper, p. 123.

  42. AS to GOK, Jan. 1916, cited in Pollitzer, A Woman on Paper, p. 124.

  43. GOK to AP, Jan. 28, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 128.

  44. AP to GOK, Feb. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 138.

  45. GOK to AP, Feb. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 141.

  46. Ibid.

  47. GOK to AP, Jan. 4, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 118.

  48. GOK to AWM, 1916, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 134.

  49. GOK to AP, Jan. 14, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 123.

  50. GOK to AP, Jan. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 124.

  51. Ibid., p. 123.

  52. GOK to AP, Feb. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 145.

  Chapter VIII

  1. Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art with Harry S. Abrams, 1997), n.p.

  2. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  3. Camera Work 48 (Oct. 1916), reprinted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916–1929 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), pp. 166–67.

  4. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  5. Critic Henry Tyrrell called her “Georgia O’Keeffe of Virginia” in his review of her 1916 show. Charles Duncan called her “Miss Virginia O’Keeffe” when writing about her work in Camera Work.

  6. Norman, American Seer, p. 130.

  7. Georgia O’Keeffe, documentary film produced and directed by Perry Miller Adato for WNET 13, the Public Broadcasting Service, 1977.

  8. Henry Tyrell, “New York Art Exhibitions and Gallery News: Animadversions on the Tendencies of the Times in Art-School for Sculpture on New Lines,” Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 1916.

  9. Alfred Stieglitz, “Georgia O’Keeffe—C. Duncan–Réné Lafferty,” Camera Work 48 (Oct. 1916).

  10. Sarah Greenough, “Paul Strand, 1916: Applied Intelligence,” Modern Art and America, pp. 248–49.

  11. O’Keeffe described it as the figure of a nun bowing her head. Its phallic appearance, however, was understood by Stieglitz and reinforced when he exhibited it. In 1919, he photographed it placed suggestively before the opening of her painting Music—Pink and Blue, underscoring the vaginal reading of that work.

  12. GOK TO AWM, May 3, 1916, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 154.

  13. GOK to AWM, June 19, 1916, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 154.

  14. GOK to AWM, June 20, 1916, cited in Robinson, A Life, p. 155.

  15. Lynes, Critics, p. 265.

  16. GOK to AP, June 21, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 155.

  17. Emmeline Stieglitz to AS, Sept. 15, 1916, ASA, YCAL.

  18. AS to GOK, June 1916, A Woman on Paper, p. 139.

  19. GOK to AP July 1916 and Aug. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, pp. 164, 174.

  20. AS to GOK, July 10, 1916, A Woman on Paper, p. 140.

  21. O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings. For example, Tiffany Studios mass-produced vases in the shapes of ferns in the late nineteenth century.

  Chapter IX

  1. GOK to AP, Aug. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 173.

  2. GOK to AP, Sept. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 179.

  3. O’Keeffe, Some Memories of Drawings.

  4. AP to GOK, Dec. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 230.

  5. “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Plains on Paper,” KACV-TV Production, 1995.

  6. GOK to AP, Sept. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 187.

  7. GOK to AP, Sept. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 183.

  8. GOK to AP, Sept. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 201.

  9. AP to GOK, Nov. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 211.

  10. GOK to AP, Sept. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 179.

  11. GOK to AP, Oct. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 207.

  12. GOK to AP, Sept. 4, 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 180.

  13. Lula Byrd McCabe, interviewed by Fred Stoker, Apr. 12, 1990, at her home near Umbarger, Tex. Courtesy of Panhandle Plains Historical Society. Stoker was the retired dean of education at West Texas A&M University.

  14. Ruby Cole Archer, interviewed by Fred Stoker, Mar. 10, 1992, in Amarillo, Tex. Courtesy of Panhandle Plains Historical Society.

  15. Archer said. “She had marked on them and showed you how you should have done it and how you missed it. . . . She . . . talked to each student [about] how you should have made the body and all that. Anyway to try to make you look better and help us.”

  16. GOK to AP, Sept. 1916, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 188.

  17. “Georgia O’Keeffe: The Plains on Paper,” KACV-TV Production, 1995.

  18. O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe.

  19. Lisle, Portrait, p. 104.

  20. GOK to AP, Jan. 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 240.

  21. AP to GOK, Feb. 14, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 247.

  22. GOK to AP, Feb. 19, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 249.

  23. AP to GOK, Feb. 10, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 243.

  24. GOK to AP, Jan. 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 249.

  25. Willard Huntington Wright, Creative Will, as quoted by Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, in Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo, p. 114.

  26. GOK to AP, Feb. 19, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 248.

  27. Herbert Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 69.

  28. Henry Tyrrell, “New York Art Exhibition and Gallery Notes: Esoteric Art at ’291,’” Christian Science Monitor, May 4, 1917.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Peters also explores this connection in Becoming O’Keeffe, p. 193. Lynes establishes the relationship between O’Keeffe’s charcoal and Stieglitz’s photograph in Critics, p. 266.

  31. William Murrell Fisher, Camera Work 49–50 (June 1917).

  32. Arthur Wesley Dow to GOK, Apr. 24, 1917, YCAL. William Merritt Chase, Arthur Wesley Dow, and Alon Bement had all encouraged their women students to become artists, and all had been O’Keeffe’s teachers.

  33. GOK to AP, June 20, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 255.

  34. Djuna Barnes, “Alfred Stieglitz on Life and Pictures: One Must Bleed His Own Blood,” Interviews (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985), pp. 211–22.

  Chapter X

  1. Severini and Wright used close harmonies of color to achieve a sense of luminous volume in paint, a technique O’Keeffe also employed. O’Keeffe never met Severini. Of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the brother of Creative Will author and art critic Willard Huntington Wright, she wrote Pollitzer, “He needed an airing in the country.” GOK to AP June 20, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 255.

  2. Sarah Greenough, “An American Vision,” Paul Strand (Washington, D.C.: Aperture Foundation in association with the National Gallery of Art, 1990), p. 31.

  3. Ibid., pp. 35, 36.

  4. Within the decade, however, they would all pull back from a commitment to pure abstraction and began to regard it as something European and insufficiently connected to the human spirit. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., p. 37.

  6. GOK to AP, June 20, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 256.

  7. Ibid.

  8. GOK to PS, June 12, 1917, Paul Strand Collection (hereinafter PSC), Center for Creative Photography (hereinafter CCP), University of Arizona, Tucson.

  9. Ibid.

  10. GOK to PS, n.d., in envelope marked June 12, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  11. Ibid.

  12. I developed this analysis for presentation at the Georgia O’Keeffe Symposium held July 23, 1997, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M.

  13. GOK to PS, n.d., in envelope marked June 12, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  14. GOK to PS, June 21, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  15. Ibid.

  16. GOK to PS, June 25, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  17. GOK to PS, n.d., in envelope dated June 25, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid.

  20. GOK to PS, n.d., in envelope dated June 25, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  21. GO
K to PS, June 30, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  22. GOK to AP, June 20, 1917, Lovingly, Georgia, p. 256.

  23. GOK to PS, July 11, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  24. Ibid.

  25. PS to AS, Aug. 15, 1917, ASA, YCAL.

  26. AS to PS, Aug. 19, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  27. Ibid.

  28. GOK to PS, Aug. 16, 1917, PSC, CCP. On Aug. 17, 1917, she told Strand that she would marry Reid in a year “if we don’t change our minds. . . . I know I’ll change mine.”

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Sheila Tryk, “O’Keeffe,” New Mexico, Jan.–Feb. 1973.

  32. GOK to PS, n.d., 1917, PSC, CCP.

  33. Niven, Steichen, p. 420. At the end of the war, in 1919, among Steichen’s many decorations were the Croix de Guerre, the Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur, and a Distinguished Service citation awarded by General Pershing, pp. 469, 475, and 458.

  34. GOK to PS, June 12, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  35. GOK to PS, Oct. 30, 1917, PSC, CCP. After the O’Keeffes moved to Charlottesville, Georgia befriended Anna Barringer, daughter of a medical school professor. Their correspondence, in the University of Virginia’s Manuscript Department, includes letters from 1917 to 1941. In late 1917, she wrote to Barringer, “The war makes me feel as if I’m dangling in the air. Can’t get my feet on the ground . . . don’t know. Don’t seem to care. “I haven’t worked for three months now. The longest time in several years—four—I guess. Everything seems so uncertain that it seems almost impossible to feel anything definite or think anything definite.”

  36. GOK to ESD, 1917, ASA, YCAL.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Tomkins, Notes.

  39. Author’s interview with heirs to Oaks Ranch, San Antonio, Tex., Feb. 21, 1998.

  Chapter XI

  1. AS to GOK, June 16, 1916, A Woman on Paper, p. 139.

  2. GOK to PS, June 25, 1917, PSC, CCP.

  3. PS to AS, May 13, 1918, ASA, YCAL; Claudia O’Keeffe found a teaching position in Spur, Tex.

  4. Ibid.

  5. PS to AS, May 15, 1918, ASA, YCAL.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. PS to AS, May 17, 1918, ASA, YCAL (letter X).

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. AS to PS, May 17, 1918, PSC, CCP.

  14. PS to AS, May 22, 1918, ASA, YCAL.

  15. The comparison between O’Keeffe’s watercolor of a dark silhouetted tree and red picket fence with the Strand photograph of a picket fence and barn was made by Sarah Greenough in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, edited by Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough (Boston: Little, Brown and National Gallery of Art in association with New York Graphic Society Books, 1987), pp. 276–77.

 

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