Full Bloom Read online

  Full Bloom

  THE ART AND LIFE OF

  Georgia O’Keeffe

  Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York London

  To David

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Book One BEGINNING 1848–1917

  Book Two BECOMING 1918–1946

  Book Three BEING 1947–1986

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  O’Keeffe’s parents: Ida Ten Eyck Totto and Francis Calixtus O’Keeffe.

  (Courtesy of Catherine Krueger)

  The family farmhouse built by Frank O’Keeffe in Sun Prairie,Wisconsin (undated).

  (© The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation)

  Georgia O’Keeffe, age twenty-nine, as a student at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where she learned the theories of Arthur Wesley Dow. (© Holsinger Studio Collection, Special Collections Department, Manuscripts Division, University of Virginia Library print)

  O’Keeffe had her first serious relationship with the political science professor Arthur Macmahon. She demonstrated her passionate feelings for him in a series of abstract charcoal drawings and watercolors called Specials. (Columbia University Archives–Columbiana Library)

  Anita Pollitzer brought O’Keeffe’s drawings to Alfred Stieglitz in 1916. She said that he exclaimed, “At last, a woman on paper!”

  (Courtesy Mrs.William Pollitzer)

  O’Keeffe poses on the windowsill of the house that she rented while teaching school in Canyon, Texas, in 1916.

  (© The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation)

  O’Keeffe had a special relationship with her student Ted Reid while teaching college in Canyon, Texas, between 1916 and 1917.

  (Courtesy of Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas)

  Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz, whom Alfred married in 1893, and their daughter Katherine (Kitty), at about age eight.

  (The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  O’Keeffe’s brief relationship with Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer helped her overcome the effects of her nervous breakdown and return to painting. (Bettman/Corbis)

  Maria Chabot, O’Keeffe’s assistant and ally, helped build her house in Abiquiu, New Mexico. (Maria Chabot, 1944, photographer unknown, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, Maria Chabot Archive, Santa Fe, N.M., © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

  A rare glimpse of the artist at work: O’Keeffe draws “sky holes,” the negative space created by two rocky cliffs, while leaning against a stone wall in Glen Canyon, Arizona. (© Todd Webb, Courtesy of Evans Gallery and Todd Webb Trust, Portland, Maine)

  O’Keeffe furnished her Abiquiu adobe house with modern furniture (such as the black Bertoia chair) and painted the interior rooms white. In this context, her Navajo rug and collection of stones take on aspects of abstract design. (© Balthazar Korab, Balthazar Korab Photography Ltd.)

  Juan Hamilton, in his Barranca studio, holds his first son, Albert, while flanked by two important women in his life: his wife, Anna Marie, and Georgia O’Keeffe. (© Todd Webb, Courtesy of Evans Gallery and Todd Webb Trust, Portland, Maine)

  INTRODUCTION

  Georgia O’Keeffe may be the best known and least understood artist of the twentieth century. She was a woman who lived the newspaper editor’s adage that, if the myth is more stirring than the truth, print the myth. Nonetheless, I have attempted an honest portrayal of the woman behind the myth, exploring her remarkable strengths and talents as well as the demons and dark past that occasionally drove her to behave cruelly.

  When I began this book a decade ago, I had not yet interviewed the dozens of people who knew O’Keeffe, nor read the thousands of letters from her and about her. In the course of my research, a woman emerged who was confident and troubled. I reevaluated the suppositions of previous biographers to discover a woman who, contrary to general opinion, was not born with naturally fierce independence and indomitable creativity. In fact, O’Keeffe’s story turned out to be characterized by great suffering, by professional and emotional setbacks, and by good fortune and the wisdom to take advantage of it. O’Keeffe, like many great artists, was not thrilled with the truth of her own story and took pains to disguise her past.

  In her idealized autobiography, titled simply Georgia O’Keeffe, she described her early childhood on a Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, farm as idyllic. The truth is that her parents were not happily married and bad decisions made by her father proved to be disastrous to the welfare of the family. Her father lost the substantial fortune built up by his parents and his in-laws. As a result, shortly after the turn of the century, when families were less migratory than today, O’Keeffe was forced to move three times during high school; these moves were followed by study at two colleges in different states. The combination of geographical upheaval and her family’s loss of income left O’Keeffe in Chicago, at the age of twenty, with little hope of becoming an artist. Instead, she worked long hours as a freelance illustrator for minuscule pay.

  Scattered dreams, piecemeal education, and poverty: this is not the picture painted in O’Keeffe’s own autobiography.

  A debilitating case of the measles forced the adult O’Keeffe to move back to Charlottesville, Virginia, to live with her sisters and mother. After her recovery, while taking classes at the University of Virginia, O’Keeffe learned the theories of artist and teacher Arthur Wesley Dow. His philosophy of design, that art should consist of filling space in a beautiful way, had a two-fold effect. It introduced her to a method of abstraction within decoration that became the basis of her most successful paintings and reanimated her desire to pursue teaching as a vocation.

  Over the next five years, O’Keeffe developed her first abstractions—loopy, ornamental forms in charcoal and watercolor on paper—while teaching in far-flung towns like Amarillo and, later, Canyon, Texas, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Columbia, South Carolina. Periodically, she traveled to New York City to complete the courses at Teachers College, Columbia University, required for her teaching certificate.

  Her early drawings and paintings were shown at Alfred Stieglitz’s modern art gallery, 291, where the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, and Auguste Rodin was first presented in the United States. Her relationship with Stieglitz during these years was professional. Stieglitz was married and O’Keeffe was simultaneously entertaining the interests of three boyfriends.

  The most influential of these was Paul Strand, the young photographer who was Stieglitz’s most promising protégé. Strand captured her creative and emotional heart. His cropped and close-up style of photography was crucial to the development of O’Keeffe’s painting, from her abstract watercolors to her giant flowers.

  Photography, combined with Dow’s theories, enabled O’Keeffe to develop a style of painting that was rooted in realism yet abstracted by virtue of the foreshortening and cropping borrowed from the lens and the darkroom. In the early twentieth century, painting largely remained the preserve of men; photography was a relatively fresh field of endeavor in which women were allotted recognition, even sales. O’Keeffe insinuated the graphic power of photography into her painting, thereby finding acceptance in the closed world of fine art—acceptance unprecedented for a woman artist.

  Strand traveled to Texas and brought O’Keeffe, suffering from influenza, back to New York. When faced with the financial responsibility of caring for her, however, he surrendered the field to the well-to-do Stieglitz.

  The impresario and photographer, old enough to be O’Keeffe’s father, was smitten by the attractive young painter. O’Keeffe had enjoyed a lively correspondence with him.
/>
  Unfulfilled by his marriage of nearly twenty-five years, Stieglitz saw an impressionable young woman who needed his help. Within weeks of her arrival in New York, O’Keeffe became Stieglitz’s mistress.

  Although initially ashamed of her role as the other woman, O’Keeffe blossomed under Stieglitz’s attention. Over the course of the next decade, she became the most famous and highly paid woman artist in America. However, O’Keeffe also became less accepting of all that Stieglitz said and did. In 1927, three years after Stieglitz had divorced his wife and married O’Keeffe, she was at the peak of her creative power, making the large-scale flower and cityscape paintings that now stand as masterpieces of American modern art. At the point when O’Keeffe was enjoying her independence and generating most of their income, Stieglitz lost interest in his creation. He needed another ingénue to impress and began an affair with Dorothy Norman, a wealthy married woman of twenty-one, seven years younger than Stieglitz’s only daughter, Kitty.

  O’Keeffe, heartbroken, endured their open love affair until 1933, when she suffered a nervous breakdown that left her hospitalized for two months. Afterward, she sought solace in her art and in time alone in New Mexico. The wound would not heal, since Norman continued to work closely with Stieglitz at An American Place, his third and final New York gallery, until his death in 1946.

  I had the good fortune to interview Dorothy Norman. Having read the correspondence between Stieglitz and Norman, it is clear to me that, contrary to previous accounts, he considered his relationship with Norman to be crucial. Certainly, he refused to deny it, even as it destroyed his relationship with O’Keeffe. It was Stieglitz’s emotional and sexual infidelity that drove O’Keeffe to redefine herself, not as he saw her but as she saw herself, in New Mexico.

  After making her permanent move to Abiquiu, New Mexico, in 1948, O’Keeffe was the subject of numerous feature stories in such popular magazines as Vogue and Life. Photographers Cecil Beaton, Philippe Halsman, Horst, Ansel Adams, Arnold Newman, Todd Webb, Eliot Porter, and Bruce Weber are just a few of those who took her portrait, a proliferation that helped her erase the pictures of herself created by Stieglitz. Today, few conjure a mental image of the slender young woman photographed by her elderly lover. Instead, we see O’Keeffe as she saw herself and as she presented herself to others: noble, aloof, wrinkled from sun and hard work, long hair covered in a black turban, posed with her bleached skulls outside an adobe house.

  In the end, O’Keeffe controlled her own destiny. With a substantial fortune in her bank account, O’Keeffe enjoyed her simple yet luxurious life of travel and painting. She reconnected to an earlier interest in the art and philosophy of China and Japan while she deepened her spiritual ties to nature and the landscape. Eventually, despite her oft-voiced need for solitude, she grew lonely, especially after her eyesight began to fail when she was in her eighties.

  The difficulties of her personal life, the disappointments and the battles, also left thick scar tissue. During the last third of her life, O’Keeffe acted in ways that can only be called callous, hurting many of her closest friends.

  O’Keeffe’s last meaningful relationship was with a young sculptor, Juan Hamilton, an employee she considered a friend. He enabled her to experience a burst of attention late in her life by overseeing the publication of her autobiography and the production of a documentary film and several exhibitions. When O’Keeffe died in 1986, at age ninety-eight, he inherited a large portion of her estate.

  In 1987, the highest price paid for a large O’Keeffe oil painting was $1.87 million. In the spring of 2001, Christie’s New York sold Calla Lilies with Red Anemone for $6.2 million, a record price for the work of any woman artist sold at auction. But that is just money. The rising public interest in O’Keeffe can be assessed by attendance figures for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which opened in Santa Fe in 1997 and boasted more than fifteen thousand visitors during the first weekend. O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiu is open to the public, but there is a one-year waiting list for reservations.

  Interest in Georgia O’Keeffe is escalating, and as more information about the reclusive artist becomes available each year, we are better able to understand her as a person and as an artist. I hope that this biography, which contains quotations from letters and interviews never before published, will add to the understanding of the woman rather than further the myth.

  Book One

  BEGINNING 1848–1917

  We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU, June 11, 1852

  I

  The sun was fierce on July 18, 1997, proclaimed Georgia O’Keeffe Day by the governor of New Mexico. Yet by nine in the morning, a line of more than two thousand people snaked through the dusty streets of Santa Fe awaiting the opening of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. These devotees waited for three hours, carrying water bottles and fanning themselves with their programs in the ninety-degree heat.

  At noon, dignitaries on a flower-decked dais lauded the accomplishments of O’Keeffe, who died in 1986, but no one was more eloquent than the local priest who, according to the custom of the largely Hispanic state, had come to bless the streamlined adobe building. He thanked the Lord for artists and especially for Georgia O’Keeffe and “her ability to see beauty in the simplest of things.”

  For decades, O’Keeffe had tried in vain to find a home for her art in her adoptive state. Despite the fact that she spent only the last two years of her life in Santa Fe, that town had come to be synonymous with her personal style and her art. Tourists were routinely disappointed to find that they could see more O’Keeffe paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York than at any museum in Santa Fe.

  Texan heiress Anne Marion and her husband, John Marion, had decided to help establish an O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe after buying a home there. Marion’s mother, Anne Burnett Tandy, of the Radio Shack fortune, had owned two of the paintings and met O’Keeffe on more than one occasion. After Marion had conceived of the museum, her Burnett Foundation bought more than eighty O’Keeffe paintings and works on paper to establish a core collection.

  It was Anne Marion, smartly dressed in a dark brown suit and sunglasses, who hoisted a pair of scissors and cut the ribbon to the gallery’s portal. Men and women, the elderly and the adolescent, professionals and students, streamed into the cool, ivory galleries, designed by architect Richard Gluckman. If the experience was rewarding for the crowd, it was stunning to curators and critics who thought they knew O’Keeffe’s work.

  Unlike her six retrospectives, the O’Keeffe Museum collection offered an intimate view, one with which the artist may not have been entirely comfortable. O’Keeffe was secretive and always a little nervous about exhibiting her work. Many of these pieces, hidden away in drawers and portfolios around her studio, had come to light only after her death. Today the visitors to the O’Keeffe Museum were being shown a heretofore hidden aspect of the artist and her work.

  Critics gasped and looked twice at the dates for lyrical, candy-colored abstract oils from 1917, only a few years after the first abstract paintings made by Wassily Kandinsky. There were many of the map-sized flower paintings that became her trademark, but traffic was stopped by a sizzlingly erotic, electric blue pansy pastel. Along with the luminous nocturnal Manhattan cityscapes, such as Ritz Tower, there were strangely evocative paintings of her Abiquiu patio door, one with a brilliant emerald leaf suspended as it fell through space.

  Still, it was the land that prevailed, especially scenes of New Mexico.

  Galleries held views of the rosy Abiquiu cliffs, the dark hills known as the Black Place and the slate-blue mountain called Cerro Pedernal. In a narrow gallery, dozens of New Mexico landscapes were precisely and gently rendered in pencil on paper.

  O’Keeffe resisted enclosure. In New Mexico, she walked, rode, and drove around the landscape for half a
century. Previously, for thirty years, she had pursued a similar passion around the East Coast. From her earliest days, she had found solace in changeable landscapes, in flowers and trees, boulders and stones, mountains, lakes, and sea. Landscape was her heritage and the source of her gift. A gift, as the priest pointed out, “to see beauty in the simplest of things.” Put another way, through painting, she made things simple in order to see their beauty.

  Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, where Georgia O’Keeffe’s story began, was a village linked by railroad to the city of Madison, twelve miles to the north. The little town was on the cusp of a transition in American history, flanked as it was by the newly cultivated farms and old, worn hunting trails of the Winnebago Indians.

  She was born on a dairy farm three and a half miles southeast of Sun Prairie on November 15, 1887. Her parents owned hundreds of acres of fertile farmland. In spring and summer, red-winged blackbirds flashed like rubies amid the green-gold fields. After a radiant autumn, however, the plains were blanketed in deep snow and temperatures regularly dropped below zero. That land was the contract that brought her parents together.

  Francis Calixtus O’Keeffe and Ida Ten Eyck Totto were brought together by an informally arranged marriage. Through the union, their mothers doubled the amount of workable acreage on their families’ farms, strengthening their collective resources and opportunities. In the freshly settled areas of the Middle West, the survival of the many depended upon the sacrifices of the few.

  The O’Keeffes’ story was common enough among nineteenth-century immigrants. In 1848, Georgia’s paternal grandparents, Pierce O’Keeffe and Catherine Mary Shortall, left County Cork, Ireland, when taxes eroded profits from their small business. They sailed from Liverpool to America, continuing by boat along the Great Lakes to Milwaukee, then by oxcart to Sun Prairie. They arrived that summer with the family silver, some bone china, and enough money to pay a dollar an acre for nearly one-half square mile of what the U.S. government called “first rate” land along the Koshkonong Creek.