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

by Karen Karbo

  “. . . I will be thinking of you all through the night and all through the days,” she wrote to him.

  “You will be with me in my country

  I will be with you here

  Be good to your self for me—

  It means so much for me—

  But I need not say—

  You know without my saying—”

  Shortly before Stieglitz’s death, the Museum of Modern Art, his old nemesis, opened a show of Georgia’s work, the first retrospective of a woman artist in its history. Alfred wrote: “Incredible Georgia—and how beautiful your pictures are at the Modern . . . Oh Georgia—we are a team.”

  The summer of 1946, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz suffered a stroke while sitting at her desk reading one of the letters she had left for him. O’Keeffe received the telegram while she was grocery shopping in Espanola, a small town about forty-five miles south of Ghost Ranch, and drove straight to the airport. She arrived at Doctors Hospital to find Dorothy Norman at his bedside. The two women took turns sitting vigil, but O’Keeffe was there when he died, the morning of July 13.

  I wish I could report that O’Keeffe, in her role as legal wife and Most Famous Woman Artist in America, took the high road and simply snubbed Norman, or looked right through her using the Native American blank-gaze-of-belittlement she’d picked up from Tony Luhan. Instead, she behaved badly. She was silent until the day after the funeral, then she called Norman and told her that by the fall, she needed to get her shit out of An American Place, and she didn’t care about the lease being in Norman’s name, or about the stupid rent fund Norman had been maintaining all these years, or about anything Norman had invested in the gallery or Stieglitz.

  Norman tried to explain that she was also grief-stricken and heartbroken; O’Keeffe’s response was to tell Norman she thought the affair she’d had with her husband was absolutely disgusting. She wanted Norman out. People who had been friends to both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe were stunned at her behavior, at her lack of grace and generosity in the face of death, but she didn’t care. She was, after all, a heartless wretch.

  O’Keeffe traveled alone to Lake George, to scatter Stieglitz’s ashes. With cupped hands she carefully scattered them among the roots of an old tree, but never revealed the exact location to anyone. Sixty years later, in 2006, a 1919 palladium print of those same hands, which Stieglitz had found to be so ethereal and hypnotic, sold at auction for $1.47 million.

  ‡ Pre-Viagra!

  § The art of the Depression was rife with images of those stricken jobless, breadlines, and misery. O’Keeffe’s always-personal subject matter seemed distinctly out of step with the times.

  ¶ So named because the spadix is overhung with a striped, lifelike structure that makes the flower resemble a minister (named Jack?) preaching from a pulpit.

  * Instead of stored in the basement behind the Christmas decorations and camping gear.

  † I’m told this paper will not dissolve if you vomit on it.

  ‡‡ Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose (1931), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

  §§ Summer Days (1936), Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of Calvin Klein.

  ¶¶ Historian and critic Lewis Mumford did allow that “O’Keeffe uses themes and juxtapositions no less unexpected than those of the Surréalistes, but she uses them in a fashion that makes them seem inevitable and natural, grave and beautiful.”

  ** !!!

  †† Alfred had written to a number of them on her behalf, trying to persuade them that Norman was a poet on par with O’Keeffe the painter.

  ‡‡‡ Well, for her; she was five-foot-five, and at her heaviest weighed 142 pounds.

  §§§ I realize I’ve violated the rule of outlines by having a “1” without a “2,” but alas, there is nothing else to say here.

  ¶¶¶ Ghost Ranch is located in the northeastern corner of the Piedra Lumbre, a high desert valley about seventy miles north of Santa Fe.

  *** I’m more of an ocean person.

  ††† For her side of the story, read Encounters: A Memoir.

  ‡‡‡‡ Inflation reality check: A good upper-middle-class salary at that time was about $4,000 a year.

  §§§§ Town and Country ran a piece on it called “Beauty Is Fun!”

  ¶¶¶¶ Interesting to see her in a pair of pants, but that’s not the alarming part.

  **** According to Jerrod, who once worked as a mobile slaughter guy in the Ojai Valley for about a year, the head could actually be mummified, but as it still has its lips, this is unlikely. Furthermore, he feels the vertebrae and the head probably belong to two different animals.

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  American (1887–1986)

  Above the Clouds I, 1962/1963

  Oil on canvas, 361⁄8 x 481⁄4 in.

  Gift of the Burnett Foundation and the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation

  Photograph by Malcolm Varon, 2001

  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM

  Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe/Art Resource, NY

  10

  PRIZE

  There is a bit of a bitch in every good cook.†

  In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atom bomb, and the People’s Republic of China was officially proclaimed by Mao Tse-tung. In Paris, Samuel Beckett was putting the finishing touches on Waiting for Godot. South Pacific opened on Broadway, and All the King’s Men was in movie theaters. Americans were buying one hundred thousand television sets a week, and the first Polaroid camera went on the market in New York, and sold for $89.85. Gene Simmons, lead singer of the rock band Kiss, was born. Georgia O’Keeffe, aged sixty-two, moved to New Mexico for good. That August, she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, over the protestations of “the men.”‡

  It had taken O’Keeffe three years to settle her husband’s estate. There was the predictable tussling over the will with Dorothy Norman, but in the end Georgia won out, and with ferocious care saw to it that each one of Stieglitz’s 850 pieces of art, thousands of photographs, and tens of thousands of letters, found the perfect home. We forget, or at least I do, that in addition to his seminal roles in photography and the modern art movement, he was also a prodigious collector. He owned Picassos, Matisses, and Rodins. He owned hundreds of Marins, Doves, and Hartleys, as well as some good pieces of African sculpture. Long before there was a voluntary simplicity movement, O’Keeffe was an adherent. She didn’t believe in owning a lot of stuff. She gave away everything, keeping only a few paintings from her old cronies—Hartley, Dove, and Marin—for her collection. Stieglitz’s letters, totaling 50,000 pages, all went to the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale.

  The majority of the art collection went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to which O’Keeffe also wanted to donate Stieglitz’s “key set.”§ The curator had an issue with the irregular shapes and sizes of the mats, which Stieglitz had cut in relation to the individual size of the print. To accept the gift, the mats all needed to be the same size for ease of storage. When O’Keeffe objected, the curator said that this was standard, and that even their Rembrandts had been altered this way. O’Keeffe said, “Well, Mrs. Rembrandt isn’t around, is she?” Neither side would give in, and in the end O’Keeffe gave the key set to the National Gallery of Art.

  Eventually, everything had been sorted and cataloged and photographed and placed, and O’Keeffe, as her parting farewell to the city she’d tolerated but never loved, did a painting of the Brooklyn Bridge. The focus of the painting is the bridge’s Gothic arches, placed side by side on the canvas. They look like a pair of tall, vacant eyes.

  O’Keeffe Goes Domestic

  One of the reasons O’Keeffe was so remarkable during the last four decades of her life is that her life stages had been reshuffled. Her twenties were spent in the same way many young adults today spend these early years of adulthood: taking random jobs, moving hither and yon, believing fervently that this guy
’s The One—no, this one . . . no, this one. When she moved to New York on impulse to be with Stieglitz (another classic young-adult maneuver), she skipped the young-married business that consumes most of us in our thirties and early forties—buying a house, making a home, getting a kitten or a puppy, having babies who grow into children who need school supplies, after-school snacks, bedtime rituals, cooking endless meals for a growing passel of ingrates, remodeling, redecorating, and eventually, caring for your elderly parents (husband)—and skipped straight to being an Empty Nester Treating Herself to an Intensive Art Retreat, living in other people’s flats, Elizabeth’s tiny studio, Lee’s brownstone, and then a hotel,¶ eating meals out, arranging her living space according to her creative requirements, taking off on a whim to Maine, Bermuda, New Mexico, wherever.

  After the death of Stieglitz, when O’Keeffe moved to Ghost Ranch, the demands of living in what was essentially the wilderness, forty-five miles on a dirt road from the nearest town (Espanola), and sixteen miles from the nearest telephone and general store (Abiquiu), pressed her into joyous domesticity.* O’Keeffe was sixty-two, and because she hadn’t already logged thirty years of wondering what smells at the back of the refrigerator, and how can the roof be leaking when the guy was just out to repair it, and how on earth can it be time to make dinner when we just ate lunch, and so on and so forth, she was delighted by homemaking. She was not only fresh for the task, but was also now a rich widow, and had the deep pockets required for living a life of elegant, rustic simplicity that people, then as now, covet.

  Food became important to her as never before. She was friends with health food “nut cake”†† Adelle Davis. In 1947 Davis published Let’s Cook It Right. Before Michael Pollan had his omnivore’s dilemma, Davis was a proponent of eating organic fruits and vegetables and avoiding processed food. O’Keeffe was on board. She was a confirmed locovore, before anyone knew what that was. She‡‡ grew two acres of organic fruits and vegetables. When an infestation of grasshoppers threatened to ruin her crop, she bought a gang of turkeys to solve the problem. She thought sugar could kill you. She believed in whole grains. She ground her own flour, purchased eggs from the neighbors. The most exotic item in her pantry was brought by her sister, Claudia, when she came to visit in the summer: alligator pears (avocados) that grew on a tree in her yard in Beverly Hills, California.

  Her average day in meals looked like this:

  Breakfast: Whole-grain bread, fruit, some kind of meat, teas

  Midmorning snack: Homemade yogurt or protein drink

  Lunch: Salad, made from whatever was ready to harvest in the garden

  Dinner: Fruit and cheese

  In addition to the Ghost Ranch home, O’Keeffe also owned a place twelve miles down the road in Abiquiu. When she had first glimpsed the Spanish-style house during one of her summer visits in the mid-1940s, it was being used as a pigsty by the local Catholic parish. The house was in such disrepair that the traditional adobe was crumbling back into the earth from which it was made. O’Keeffe purchased the building for a dollar, and spent four years overseeing its heroic restoration.

  The rigors and expense of this cannot be overstated. For the job, O’Keeffe hired a young woman named Maria Chabot, a free-spirited jill-of-all-trades who wanted to be a writer, but wound up doing just about everything else, as often happens, including acting as O’Keeffe’s general contractor. Open their massive (542 pages) collected letters§§ at random and you will come across phrases like, “I had eight men lined up for wall building today. . .” and “I will plant the apples, the plums, the apricot and the weeping willow—and we will see if they will grow” and “There is a large crack in the studio west wall.” You get a sense of the magnitude of the undertaking. Before O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico, Chabot stayed on, investigating, for example, how they might drill for water at the Ghost Ranch house, or how to install a butane gas system. Chabot, who was in love with O’Keeffe, would have worked for free, but O’Keeffe insisted she accept a stipend, advising her that for artists, it never mattered where the money came from, as long as it gave you time to work.

  O’Keeffe Style

  Once the houses were made livable, she decorated them with impeccable, mid-century style that looks as chic right this minute as it did back then. Also, in a move that belies the image that her husband had so carefully tended—that of a naive Woman-Child from the heartland who lived according to her feelings and intuition—O’Keeffe set aside an entire room in Abiquiu for her book collection, three thousand volumes, everything from a large assortment of cookbooks to first editions of French modernists.

  Sometime during the fifties writer Christopher Isherwood visited her and marveled at the “Zen simplicity” of her environment. As we now know, any decor worthy of the adjective Zen is aesthetically, morally, and spiritually superior to whatever hodgepodge of Pottery Barn, IKEA, neighbor’s-garage-sale thing you may currently have going on. Fortunately, emulating O’Keeffe style is not outside our reach.

  The less furniture the better.

  Time to get rid of that love seat you rescued from the neighbor’s garbage in 1997. If you have not sat on a chair, or put a glass down on a table for a week, get rid of it. Empty space always trumps something stuck there just because you can’t think of anything else to do with it. Once you’ve gotten rid of the dust bunnies, and your rooms are beautifully empty, purchase an Eames chair, or a Le Corbusier–style lounge chair.¶¶

  Paint the walls white.

  If it’s in your budget, hire a team of Hopi women to come in and apply mud plaster to the interior walls. They can pat your walls into a homely, earthy sheen like nobody’s business.

  Have as many fireplaces as possible.

  O’Keeffe had seventeen, combined.

  Bring the outside in.

  Collect some beautiful stones and stick them on window ledges. Wash them often: Nothing makes a rock look less like an objet d’art than three weeks’ worth of dust. Go wild and hang a cow skull on the wall, but only if you can bear being completely unoriginal. No one in her right mind, aside from O’Keeffe, can live with one of those things staring at her day in, day out. Splurge on one great piece of art.

  Get a Calder mobile and hang it in your bedroom, where only you and a select few can enjoy it. This is key: The point is not to display art, but to live with it. Your bedroom should be the most austere room in the house, your own private art museum. Use only white linen. Cover one wall with one of your own masterpieces, if possible.**

  Georgia O’Keeffe, American, Sees the World

  In the fifties, travel replaced painting as O’Keeffe’s primary occupation. Her final show at An American Place, which she’d kept open after Stieglitz’s death against the advice of people with a more finely honed business sense, Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings 1946–1950, opened in October 1950 to the unthinkable: No one paid attention. There were a few small notices, but nothing like the old days, when the Men would go on and on for many column inches.

  Many of the paintings, particularly those of the square patio door in her house in Abiquiu, were in keeping with Abstract Art, which was enjoying its heyday in New York; still, critics didn’t make the connection between her work and that of, say, Clyfford Still or Mark Rothko. O’Keeffe was just O’Keeffe, doing her weird O’Keeffe thing. It mattered not that she had been painting abstractions since the early teens. She knew the show was good, but few people came; her star had dimmed, it seemed.

  O’Keeffe’s reaction was unexpected: She got the travel bug and embarked on the kind of trips we all say we’re going to take, then never do. She drove through Mexico with Eliot and Aline Porter: Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Oaxaca. They met Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. With Rose Covarrubias, wife of illustrator Miguel Covarrubias, who years earlier had done a caricature of O’Keeffe for Vanity Fair, she hopped on a plane and flew to the Yucatan. They watched the sun rise at Chichén Itza.

  In 1953, when O’Keeffe was sixty-five, she finally got to Europe. One of the most f
amous painters in America could no longer say she’d never been to Paris. Like everyone the world over, she made her obligatory pilgrimage to the Louvre, only to leave with the same tired feet and slight headache. She liked the Fra Angelicos. She was happy to meet Alice B. Toklas, the longtime companion of the late Gertrude Stein, but she didn’t think it necessary to make the acquaintance of Picasso, claiming they didn’t speak the same language.††† In Spain she went to the Prado and to the bullfights. She loved the country; their brand of morbid Catholicism appealed to her. As did the bad vibes of Peru. She was there for two months in 1956. She was stunned by the grim, malevolent-seeming Indians, the jungle-choked mountains shrouded in dark mist.

  When she was seventy-one she flew around the world with a small tour group. I see that I’ve made it sound as if she set out on her own. As intrepid as she was, she always had a companion. One of her favorite traveling buddies was Betty Pilkington, the daughter of the man who owned the gas station in Abiquiu.

  Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saigon, Bangkok, Phnom Penh. She spent seven weeks in India. For some reason this gives me pause: Fastidious O’Keeffe, who only liked salads made from the red-leaf lettuce and watercress grown in her own garden, who cultivated clean, bright empty spaces, who was also seventy-one years old, and probably couldn’t just sleep on any old bed, or satisfactorily use any old toilet, loved India. “I like the dirty places of the world,” she once quipped.