How Georgia Became O'Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living

by Karen Karbo

  That year, O’Keeffe bumped up her departure to April. She stayed in Alcalde, forty miles southwest of Taos, at H & M Ranch, owned by Marie Garland. Like Mabel, Marie was flamboyant, but less annoying. Every day for weeks on end O’Keeffe got up at dawn, hopped in her Model A, and drove until she found something she wanted to paint. It was the year she discovered Abiquiu, the village where she would one day own a house. She collected more bones: long thigh bones, horse skulls, entire vertebrae.

  Meanwhile, Stieglitz had adjusted to his bachelor summers quite nicely, thank you very much. He who had spent decades proud of his refusal to travel anywhere, except Lake George, visited Dorothy and her husband at their summer home in Cape Cod. He shamelessly trumpeted his adoration of Norman. Even Margaret Prosser, the housekeeper at Lake George, got an earful about “the full-hipped Child-Woman with soul-brimming eyes . . .” Naturally, O’Keeffe was kept in the dark.

  Stieglitz had had lovers before, most of whom wound up naked before his lens, but he’d never embarked on a big photographic portrait like the one he’d made of Georgia when they had first become lovers. Now, he began one of Dorothy Norman. That fall, not long after Georgia turned forty-four, history repeated itself. One day O’Keeffe, who had been at Lake George, returned to New York earlier than expected to find Stieglitz in their apartment at the Shelton, photographing Norman in the nude. Georgia was not Emmy; she was not going to offer an ultimatum. Her natural defense mechanism wasn’t hysteria but stone-cold silence. Even though she was supporting Stieglitz by now and could have easily thrown him out on his ear, she refused. I yearn to believe her behavior was mystifying, but I suspect I’ve fallen prey to Hollywood movie logic, where the only acceptable response to such betrayal is to stuff his clothes in a suitcase, always inexplicably at hand,* and throw it out the window. Instead, O’Keeffe did what she always did: She left.

  In February 1932, Stieglitz opened a forty-year retrospective of his work. Prominently displayed were pictures of the new Woman-Child in town, next to some new ones of O’Keeffe. Georgia was handsome and interesting-looking, but Dorothy was young. Also, when Stieglitz photographed Dorothy, he instructed her to whisper his name over and over, to capture the proper expression of adoration.† The result was as you might imagine: The Woman-Child looked dewy and innocent, and O’Keeffe looked like the “before” picture in an ad for banishing fine lines.

  Georgia fought back in the only way Georgia could: She created a new aesthetic, completely disavowing Stieglitz’s influence. The one thing that had always united them was their art, their ability and willingness to influence one another’s work. By the mid-1930s, O’Keeffe’s art was completely her own. She might not have been divorced from Stieglitz, but her work was. In midlife, she reinvented herself, just as the current crop of women’s magazines advises.

  O’Keeffe’s fascination with clean, elegant bones was not a passing phase. “To me they are as beautiful as anything I know . . . The bones seem to cut to the center of something that is keenly alive,” she said in one of her increasingly frequent interviews. She painted a horse skull with a powder-pink rose resting jauntily in one eye socket‡‡ and a cow skull floating over low red hills, red and yellow flowers suspended in the clouds behind it.§§ As with her erotic-wait-they-are-erotic-right? abstractions of twenty years earlier, the critics weren’t sure what was going on. Dead animal bones? Seriously? And in the same way that back then the theories of Freud were on everyone’s mind, so O’Keeffe paintings must be Freudian, now surrealism was all the rage, which meant her work must be related somehow to Salvador Dali’s melting clocks or René Magritte’s large, lone hats. This isn’t to say O’Keeffe wasn’t influenced by the times, but even as she came into her own, and was gradually being acknowledged as the weird and singular genius that she was, it was still difficult for the critics to believe she came up with this stuff all on her own.¶¶

  A marriage is a civilization, the couple at the center of it, king and queen. When it falls apart, the entire population suffers. In 1932 Stieglitz opened a show featuring the work of his old friends, Paul and Beck Strand—his photographs and her paintings. Dorothy Norman disapproved of them both. She felt that Beck was a bad influence on Georgia (who, by running off to Taos, had caused Stieglitz to suffer), and Paul was a schlemiel to put up with her. She didn’t like their art, either. And so their exhibit, which was not even given a catalog, flopped. Strand turned in his key to An American Place, which he’d helped found, and the twenty-five-year-long friendship between him and his mentor was over.

  The degree to which O’Keeffe was saddened by this, on top of everything else, is unknown. She believed in forward motion. She believed in living life in the moment, long before the Beatles went to India and returned to the West with a bad case of Eastern thinking. Years passed. Things got worse. No one said a word. Sex is merely sex. Love, too, is mere. Stieglitz, not satisfied with Norman’s role in his life as patron, office manager, and lover, gave her a camera. To fully replace O’Keeffe, she needed to be an artist, too.

  Stieglitz had hated museums since he was a young man working to convince the establishment that photography was art. His loathing intensified in November 1929, when the new Museum of Modern Art opened on the twelfth floor of a new building on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The founding members were three women who had married money: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.) and two of her art-loving friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Stieglitz was hurt and enraged that these . . . these . . . ladies would dare to open a museum of modern art without including him.

  He’d been slightly appeased when the museum’s second show, Nineteen Living Americans, included pictures by his artists—Demuth, Marin, and O’Keeffe—but then, in the spring of 1932, O’Keeffe was invited, along with sixty-four other artists, to submit a proposal for a mural show. Without breaking a sweat, and without consulting him, his wife whipped out a cubist-inspired red, white, and blue skyscraper-scape, with a few trademark O’Keeffian flowers tossed in for good measure. The show bombed, but O’Keeffe’s contribution was praised, and she was offered another commission: A brand-new performance venue called Radio City Music Hall asked her to paint a wall in the ladies’ lounge. She would be paid $1,500, the same amount as every other contributor.

  Stieglitz was so furious it’s amazing the stroke that would kill him years later didn’t drop him in his tracks there and then. Where to start? He despised murals—he called them “that Mexican disease”—and all that Diego Rivera peasant, man-of-the-people stuff that went with them. He was angry that Georgia had allowed herself to appear next to a bunch of hacks in the MOMA show, and then, even worse, that she would go behind his back and accept a commission to paint the bathroom wall** in a place of commerce, and then accept the paltry sum of $1,500, when he, the great Stieglitz, had spent decades carefully managing the outflow of her artwork, and making sure he placed each work with the most appropriate, appreciative collector, massaging the prices ever upward as her fame grew. Even worse, she did all this on her own.

  When O’Keeffe informed him of the project—can’t you just see her folded hands and smooth forehead, his eyes bulging out of his head like a cartoon character, with the accompanying sound effect spelled, I believe, aoooooooga?—he marched over to wherever he marched over to—the designer’s office? the project headquarters?—and demanded that the agreement be nullified, saying that his wife was a child—not even a Woman-Child—and had no idea what she was doing.

  The Radio City Music Hall people were unmoved. O’Keeffe had signed a contract. The next day, Stieglitz revised his request: His wife would paint the ladies’ lounge for free, but she would require $6,500 in expenses. But the sway Stieglitz had held in the world of New York culture was no more. All those images he and his circle of artists had made, depicting the dehumanizing effect of unparalleled urban growth and the rise of technology, really did reflect the reality of the modern world. The contract stood.

  In September 1932, O�
��Keeffe was set to begin work painting the mural, but construction was behind schedule. The room still wasn’t ready by November 15, her forty-fifth birthday, even though the hall was scheduled to open for the Christmas season. O’Keeffe was given the go-ahead to begin sketching her mural, but as she began, the canvas started peeling off the wall. Or, she was standing in the room having a conversation with the designer, and the canvas started peeling off the wall. However it went down, the canvas came away from the wall.

  Then, she either marched out, as was her custom, or burst into hysterical tears, which, then and now, makes men nervous. O’Keeffe did suffer an eventual breakdown, but not then. She was well enough to travel to Lake George the next day to prepare for her December show, and also to return on her own to Manhattan. But Stieglitz, thrilled to have an excuse to break the contract, called the Radio City Music Hall people the very next morning and said his wife had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Although this was untrue, the Radio City Music Hall people—smelling too much crazy somewhere in the mix—released O’Keeffe from her obligation.

  A few months passed. Georgia complained of skull-splitting headaches. She couldn’t sleep or eat. She couldn’t stop crying. In February 1933, she was admitted to a swanky facility called Doctors Hospital under the care of Alfred’s doctor brother, Lee. The initial diagnosis was early menopause, but Lee must have known that was bogus, because his first order of business was to forbid his brother to see her. After a month, Alfred was allowed to visit Georgia for ten minutes a week. Meanwhile, An American Place, which was apparently now also in the business of legitimizing Dorothy Norman as an artist, published a book of Norman’s poetry, after no publisher†† would touch it.

  At the end of March, O’Keeffe was declared recovered. She couldn’t bear the thought of going home, so she went to Bermuda for a few months. There, she swam, walked on the fine sand beach, and bicycled to the point of exhaustion. She didn’t go to New Mexico that summer, but instead holed up at Lake George. Stieglitz came and went. The housekeeper fed her and she ate and ate. She slept late and got fat.‡‡‡ She didn’t draw or paint. Her “recovery,” it seemed, was a lateral move into clinical depression.

  In the midst of all this mishigas, Stieglitz faithfully opened an O’Keeffe exhibit every year. One can’t help but think this was his guilt at work, even though he maintained to the end that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, that he loved Dorothy because she was Woman, and to him Woman was God, and by worshipping her he was only . . . I can’t go on. You get the idea.

  Anyway. In January 1933 he showed a few dozen oils, but there was no new work. During his weekly visit to O’Keeffe, he brought pictures of the exhibit, the packed gallery, the admiring crowd. The next year, 1934, there was still nothing new. The show was announced as a retrospective, focusing primarily on the early abstractions that Stieglitz loved. The New Yorker reviewed the show and declared that Georgia O’Keeffe’s work was universal. The hallowed Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased its first O’Keeffe: Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur. O’Keeffe was too bored and tired of her own self to really care.

  How to Repair a Marriage that’s Beyond Repair

  Stay together and hope things improve before you kill each other.§§§

  Arnold Newman, a photographer who made a name for himself by making arresting and revealing pictures of iconic artists and politicians, made a picture of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe in 1944 that’s about the saddest picture of a pair of famous people I’ve ever seen. She’s sitting in a chair facing sideways, her chin slightly lowered, eyes cast down, looking defeated. He stands facing the camera, wearing his black cape and holding a book, his hair thin and white and flyaway. He glares at the camera as if to say, “It’s not my fault,” or, possibly, “How on earth did this happen?” The same year O’Keeffe completed a modest pastel of two gray rocks on a pinkish-coral background. O’Keeffe almost never gave her work titles that contributed anything to their interpretation. A Calla Lily was a calla lily, the D. H. Lawrence Pine Tree, just that. She called this little pastel, My Heart.

  Life wasn’t notably bad for Stieglitz and O’Keeffe that particular year, but the picture seemed to be an expression of all the difficult years that had come before; they simply looked wrung-out. Indeed, by the time this picture was taken she had mostly recovered, in no small part because she now had a new love: Ghost Ranch.

  I have the same misgivings about introducing Ghost Ranch as I had about introducing Stieglitz in an earlier chapter: Once you start talking about O’Keeffe’s mad love for this part of New Mexico,¶¶¶ those hundreds of paintings of red and yellow sandstone cliffs, the flat-topped Pedernal Mountain, the purple hills, the blue hills, the gray hills, and the rest of the breathtaking stuff out there*** take over the narrative. The semi-mystical terminology starts creeping in: the White Place, the Black Place, the Faraway Nearby.

  The semi-crackpot anecdotes assert themselves. “What are those people doing in my house?” O’Keeffe demanded of the ranch’s owner, Arthur Pack, in 1936, when she arrived unannounced and a family was renting the cottage she’d rented the year before. “It’s my private mountain,” she said of the Pedernal, which she could see from the windows of the house she eventually purchased from Pack in 1940. “God told me if I painted it often enough I could have it.” In marched the esteemed photographers—Cecil Beaton, Philippe Halsman, Todd Webb, Horst—to codify her solitude, her regal, aging face. The black dress. The black hat. The cow skull hung on the wall. In rushed the gaggle of lifestyle magazines to rave about the chicness of O’Keeffe’s houses and decor. Once you start talking about Ghost Ranch, it’s hard to see the woman inside O’Keeffe the Icon.

  After she found and fell in love with Ghost Ranch, poor old Stieglitz—and by now, he was old—and creepy Dorothy Norman,††† and everything else that went on in New York no longer concerned O’Keeffe. She spent the winters in New York with Alfred out of a sense of duty, or because she felt obligated since he had done so much to launch her career, or because of a shared history. She fussed over his clothes, sewing buttons on old shirts and seeing that his suits were faithfully copied, as they always had been. Now that she’d made a life all her own, a strange thing happened: She enjoyed his company once more.

  In 1936, the Elizabeth Arden Beauty Salon commissioned O’Keeffe to do a painting for the exercise room. Although this was no more elevated than the ladies’ lounge at Radio City Music Hall, O’Keeffe asked Stieglitz to take care of the business end. He negotiated a staggering $10,000 for her fee, about twice what her paintings were going for at the time.‡‡‡‡ She painted a big, sexy, spirited jimsonweed and everyone was happy.§§§§

  Despite all their insane letter-writing, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were visual artists; she was his artist, he her manager and promoter, and it was in this realm that they made their apologies. They moved from the Shelton Hotel that year as well, to a penthouse on East 54th Street. Georgia had tired of living in a hotel, and also felt she needed more space to work. The lease was in her name. Stieglitz grumbled: He felt it was too fancy. It had a terrace and a view of the East River. Georgia was unmoved by his protestations. She was going, and he was welcome to come along.

  The same year, Henry R. Luce founded a new kind of magazine, focused not on words but on pictures. The arrival of a lightweight, compact 35mm camera had led to the advent of something called photojournalism, and Life magazine was created to celebrate photojournalists and their images. Did Stieglitz ever imagine photography, which had at one time been written off as a passing fad, would catch on this way? Was he gratified, appalled, or jealous because the art he had legitimized had, like his wife, ultimately escaped his control?

  In 1938, Life did a four-page spread on O’Keeffe, with pictures by her friend Ansel Adams, declaring her “the most original painter working in America today,” and borne out by a large, alarming picture of O’Keeffe wearing jeans and a cardigan,¶¶¶¶ holding a full cow’s vertebrae wi
th ribs attached (I counted nine) in one hand, and a cow’s head in the other. This is not a clean, sun-bleached skull, but the head of a cow dead no more than two weeks.**** Even in the grainy black-and-white photo you can see the matted curls on its cheeks, the eyes staring vacantly. The caption reads IN NEW MEXICO O’KEEFFE GETS MATERIAL FOR A STILL LIFE BY LUGGING HOME A COW’S SKELETON.

  Perhaps this is an appropriate, if grisly, metaphor for what can happen in a marriage when there’s no premium placed on communication or honesty. At first, it’s a sweet, big-eyed calf swishing its tail, so cute, then it ages and gets less cute, and eventually it dies and the buzzards swoop down and feast on the rotting corpse. Time passes, the bones are picked clean, and it becomes once again a thing of beauty, albeit seriously pared down. If you can stand the buzzards, you might wind up with the sort of fond friendship O’Keeffe and Stieglitz shared in his later years. On the other hand, maybe she’s holding his dead and rotting metaphorical head.

  In 1938, at the age of seventy-four, Alfred suffered a heart attack, followed by a case of double pneumonia. O’Keeffe nursed him most of the summer, until he was well enough to be looked after by Margaret Prosser, who had worked for the Stieglitz family at Oaklawn, when she was still in her teens. Stieglitz begged O’Keeffe not to go, but it was too late for that. New Mexico had claimed her heart, and even though she said she felt like a heartless wretch for doing so, she left.

  During the last years of Stieglitz’s life, their letters to one another were especially affectionate. They’d developed the habit of writing many letters in advance of her yearly departure for Ghost Ranch. She would hide hers around the apartment for him to stumble upon, and he would mail his in advance, so they would be there when she arrived. “I greet you on your coming once more to your own country,” he wrote, “I hope it will be very good to you . . . I’m with you wherever you are. And you ever with me.” During Georgia’s long absences Stieglitz kept regular hours at An American Place, even though the gallery had few visitors. Stieglitz had become a relic. He often napped on a cot in the back office, and on his desk he kept a single red flower stuck in a water glass, to remind him of Georgia.