Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings have long fascinated me. In DC, I studied them at the Phillips Collection; in Santa Fe, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Here in Florida, the Women Modernists in New York exhibit at the Norton Museum, which Carolyn and I saw four years ago, led me to appreciate O’Keeffe as a pioneering feminist. Perhaps the fundamental reason I am attracted to O’Keeffe is that she and I share a love for the sweeping plains of the Texas Panhandle, where I grew up. In her twenties she lived in Amarillo and Canyon, Texas. She loved the landscape so much that she spent most summers thereafter in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, 280 miles west, where a similarly dry landscape includes colorful mountains. For the last 40 years of her life she lived in New Mexico full-time. Visiting my friends Courtney and Adam in Santa Fe has allowed me to appreciate the wonders of that locale. Living Modern, a recent exhibit at the Norton Museum that I saw with Marjo and several others, has brought all these aspects of O’Keeffe’s life together and helped me to understand the aesthetic choices she made. Here is the introduction to the exhibit:

Living Modern addresses how Georgia O’Keeffe proclaimed her progressive, independent lifestyle through a self-crafted public persona, using her art, her clothing, and the way she posed for the camera. Early on, she fashioned a signature style of dress that dispensed with ornamentation, which evolved in her years in New York—when a black-and-white palette dominated much of her art and dress—and then her time in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the colors of the Southwestern landscape. There, a younger generation of photographers visited her and solidified her status as a pioneer of modernism and a contemporary style icon. In addition to O’Keeffe’s paintings and clothes, the show includes photographs of the painter by noted artists Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, and others.

Born in Wisconsin in 1887, O’Keeffe graduated from Chatham Episcopal School in Chatham, Virginia in 1905. After studying art at the University of Virginia and in Chicago and New York, she got a job in Amarillo Texas Public Schools in 1912. By 1916 she was head of the art department at a new teachers college a few miles south in Canyon, Texas.

Canyon, Texas is special to me:

• My mother, Patti Raiza Kirkpatrick, earned her BA in Education from West Texas State Teachers College in Canyon in 1954, an inspiring example of lifelong learning.
• West Texas State, ninety miles south of my hometown, Phillips, was the site for solo instrumental musical competitions. From eighth grade on, I earned money accompanying soloists on piano. In March 1957, a few days after turning 13, I was stranded there in a historic blizzard that introduced me to college dormitory life. My fellow musicians and I lived for two days on vending machine snacks until the National Guard was able to break through the snow drifts and bring us sandwiches.
• In the 1950s I attended Girl Scout and Presbyterian summer camps in nearby Ceta Canyon.
• In 1982 my family and I saw the outdoor musical, Texas! at Palo Duro Canyon State Park.
• In 2007, Joel, Marjo and I visited the Panhandle Plains Museum.
• In 2012, Marjo and I enjoyed the Cowboy Morning Breakfast, that relatives of Steve’s cousins used to host in Palo Duro.

The way O’Keeffe dressed, usually in black or white, with thick stockings and flat shoes, was radically different from traditional feminine attire, generating curiosity and gossip in the small town of Canyon. These dresses and a painting she did in 1926–reflect her signature style.

During her teaching years, O’Keeffe was influenced by the writings of Arthur Wesley Dow, a painter and printmaker who dismissed the notion that art was an imitative medium and advocated for modern abstraction. O’Keeffe began to focus on the beauty of pattern and design, not only in art, but in every aspect of her life. She summarized Dow’s philosophy as “filling space in a beautiful way.” O’Keeffe believed that everything a person makes or chooses to live with–art, clothing, home decor–should reflect a unified, pleasing, modern aesthetic. Everything she did–art, style of dress, public persona–must be done beautifully.

New York (copied from an exhibition text)

In 1918, O’Keeffe left teaching in Texas to become a professional artist in New York. Alfred Stieglitz, a fine art photographer and modern art advocate, had made an irresistible offer:  he would find her a place to live and support her, if she would come to New York and paint full time. O’Keeffe, 30 and single, was developing her radically new abstract art. Stieglitz, 53 and unhappily married, recognized her exceptional talent and exhibited her early abstractions. She knew he had considerable experience launching male artists’ careers in his New York gallery, 291, and through his magazine, Camera Work.

Not long after O’Keeffe arrived in New York, they were in love and Stieglitz moved into her modest studio apartment. He had already begun what he called a “continuous portrait” of her. For 20 years he made formal photographic portraits of his partner, a unique project that eventually numbered some 330 images. Beginning in 1923, he organized exhibitions and showcased her work on a nearly annual basis, building her artistic career while giving her facial recognition by exhibiting and publishing his photographs of her. His portraits and her abstract paintings launched O’Keeffe’s public persona as an audacious modern woman.

An accomplished seamstress, O’Keeffe made many of her garments by hand during these early years. She had a fine eye for quality silks, cottons, and wools and remained true to her two-tone dress palette of white and black. Characteristically, her clothing veered to strong silhouettes, plainness, and simplicity. She took pride in her handiwork and preserved some of her early garments for well over 60 years.

My friend Marjo and I were especially attracted to garments O’Keeffe had made. Marjo’s mother, Lilburn, had a masters in costume design and made most of her own clothes with meticulous attention to detail. She sometimes assigned Marjo and me sewing projects, holding us to high standards. Lilburn, we thought, would have admired this exquisite blouse that O’Keeffe created and wore. The stitched pleats are but a fraction of a millimeter and extremely even. Together they make a subtle chevron design that gently emphasizes female curves. One can readily spot the correspondence between this garment and a painting done about the same time.

In the first years of their partnership, Stieglitz and O’Keeffe would retreat to his family’s compound on Lake George in upstate New York to relax and create new art. O’Keeffe painted the lake and its trees.

Influenced by the culture of cowhands and ranchers, O’Keeffe revved up her palette and relaxed her wardrobe. In her art, she drew upon the new motifs and bold colors of her adopted landscape–bright blue skies, white animal bones, brown adobe, and pink and red stony cliffs. In her daily dress she adopted chambray shirts, denim pants, bandanas and wide-brimmed hats.

O’Keeffe adopted new headgear to go with her denim. From the Stetson Company she chose a soft, black felt vaquero or gaucho hat. The hat’s geometries–a solid cylinder mounted on a round, flat plane–appealed to her. For some photographers, she tied her head in a bandana.

After taking this picture Ansel Adams wrote Alfred Stieglitz:  “O’Keeffe is supremely happy and painting, as usual, supremely swell things. When she goes out riding in a blue shirt and black hat, she scampers around against the thunder clouds–I tell, you, it’s something.” Adams was the first photographer to chronicle O’Keeffe in the Southwest. His images, unlike Stieglitz’s, rendered her a down-to-earth, approachable woman at home in a rugged Western setting. In this photo she playfully smiles at the cowboy guide who led camping trips from Ghost Ranch, a remote dude ranch where she rented a small house. In 1940, she purchased that Ghost Ranch cottage.

Pedernal is a flat-topped mountain that commands the Ghost Ranch landscape and is visible for miles in every direction. O’Keeffe, inspired by its unusual topography and regal presence, explored it again and again in different compositions. She said she felt such a spiritual kinship with the mountain that she hoped if she painted it enough, God would give it to her. Upon her death, her ashes were scattered at the top.

ASIA: O’Keeffe’s favorite teacher, Arthur Wesley Dow, introduced her to the arts and cultures of Japan and China, and she became a lifelong student of Eastern traditions. She visited American museums with major Asian collections and built an impressive private library of books on Asian art, calligraphy, gardens, tea and poetry. After Stieglitz died, she traveled to Japan, China and India. She visited gardens, temples, and museums, finding reinforcement for the central idea by which she lived:  everything in one’s environment should be beautiful and unified in a harmonious style of simplicity and understatement. From her early years on, O’Keeffe had a soft spot for Japanese kimonos and wore them around her house.

Alexander Calder, known for his mobiles and stabiles, made a pin for O’Keeffe in gold. When her hair turned gray, she had it recast in silver and wore it to fasten her kimonos.

Andy Warhol sought out O’Keeffe in the late 1970s and early 80s, meeting her first at Ghost Ranch and then New York. On one visit, he made photographs of her, noting in his diary that “Georgia was wearing a black thing around her head.” These photos became the basis for a series of silkscreened and painted portraits. He finished the images with diamond dust to make his subject sparkle. Warhol’s pursuit of O’Keeffe is evidence of her superstar status at the end of her life.