Georgia O’Keeffe, who is eighty-six, spends almost no time thinking about the past. “You’d push the past out of your way entirely if you only could,” she said to me one morning last fall, sitting in the open patio of her house near the Ghost Ranch, in the New Mexican high desert, seventy miles northwest of Santa Fe. What interested her at the moment were the wild purple asters that grow so abundantly at this time of the year, when there has been enough rain. It was largely because of the purple asters that after lunch she asked Juan Hamilton, her young friend and assistant, to take us to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, a seventeen-mile trip over barely navigable dirt roads. Although the asters at the monastery were less plentiful than she had remembered them, she spent a pleasant hour chatting with the Benedictine monks and admiring the chapel, built in 1965 by George Nakashima and furnished as austerely as her own house, with split-log benches, wood carvings by a local artist, and a gory wooden crucifix in the Spanish manner. Miss O’Keeffe had visited the monastery several times, most recently for the dawn service last Easter, and the monks were pleased to see her. On the drive back, bouncing imperturbably in the rear seat of her Volkswagen bus, she said that it would be a very simple thing for her to convert someone to Catholicism. “It has great appeal,” she said. “Not for me, of course—but I can see the appeal.”
Her voice is quiet and yet clearly audible. She was dressed entirely in white—a white jacket of some durable material, a full skirt of the same stuff, white shoes. Terrie Newsom, the woman who takes care of her and, in Miss O’Keeffe’s words, “keeps me alive,” told me that when people ask whether Miss O’Keeffe has only one dress, she explains that “Miss O’Keeffe has a hundred dresses, but they’re all alike, except that some are black instead of white.” The dress suits her, in any case. A slight, immaculate woman with white hair tied back in a smooth knot, she is as handsome today as she was at twenty-nine, when Alfred Stieglitz began his famous multiple portrait of her, now in the National Gallery, in Washington—a portrait that eventually included some five hundred photographs.
During the drive back from the monastery, she told me how she had discovered the Ghost Ranch. “I’d been staying down around Alcalde, east of here, for several summers in the nineteen-thirties. One day, the boy who was trying to teach me to drive said he knew of a place he thought I’d like better than any I’d seen, and he brought me up here. It was operating as a dude ranch then. Before that, it had been a working ranch. I think the story is that a family was murdered there, and that from time to time a woman carrying a child appears in the original house—that’s the ghost. Well, I came back a few days later, alone, and asked if I could stay. The owners said that I could stay the night but that unless some other guest failed to show up I’d have to leave in the morning. That night, a family moved out—the son had developed appendicitis—and I moved in. That was in 1934, and I’ve been coming up here on the plateau every summer since then. I knew the minute I got up here that this was where I would live.” She bought her own house, which is about two miles from the ranch, in 1940. Some years ago, the Ghost Ranch was acquired by the Presbyterian Church, which now uses it as a conference center. Miss O’Keeffe has given the Presbyterians a sufficiently wide berth. “You know about the Indian eye that passes over you without lingering, as though you didn’t exist?” she said. “That was the way I used to look at the Presbyterians at the ranch, so they wouldn’t become too friendly.”
Although she owns a larger and more comfortable house in the village of Abiquiu, sixteen miles south of the ranch, Miss O’Keeffe has always felt more at home up on the plateau. The solitude, the stillness, and the harsh, dry, splendid landscape are more her world. Animal skulls and bleached antlers hang on the walls of her patio, and rocks picked up on her walks and camping trips spill in profusion over low tables and shelves. A few years ago, when Miss O’Keeffe and several others were going down the Colorado River—a week in a pontoon boat, sleeping under the stars every night—her friend Eliot Porter, the photographer, found a particularly beautiful stone, which Miss O’Keeffe very much wanted for her collection. Porter said he was keeping it for his wife. Matters were a trifle touchy for a time, but then, a few weeks later, the Porters came to Miss O’Keeffe’s house for dinner and presented her with the stone. “When she wants something, she makes people give it to her,” Stieglitz once remarked. “They feel she is fine and has something other people have not.” Not that she wants many possessions. “I like to have things as sparse as possible,” she told me. “If you have an empty wall, you can think on it better. I like a space to think in—if you can call what I do thinking.”
Miss O’Keeffe sometimes feels that she ought to sell the Abiquiu house and live permanently at the ranch. “Last year, Jerrie and I were here in December,” she said. “Being up here is one of the best things I know. There is nothing in this house that I can get along without.”
There is little to indicate why O’Keeffe should have felt at home in such a landscape. She was born and brought up in the gentler, wheat-farming country of southern Wisconsin, the second of seven children in a moderately well-to-do family. “My mother’s and my father’s families had farms that adjoined and eventually my father bought mother’s property,” she told me. “They raised all kinds of things there, even tobacco. I can still see the enormous loads of hay coming into the barns in the evening—I’ve never seen loads of hay like that anywhere else.” On rainy days, their mother used to read aloud to her older brother, who had weak eyes. O’Keeffe always listened, even after she had learned how to read herself. Her favorites were stories about the Old West. “My memories of childhood are quite pleasant,” she said to me, “although I hated school.” Until she was twelve, she went to a small rural school near her home. For a while, she and two of her sisters also went into the town of Sun Prairie once a week for private lessons in drawing and painting Today, she says she can’t remember a time when she couldn’t read music (although she doesn’t remember taking music lessons), and it sometimes seems to her that she might have become a musician. The family was not a terribly close one, and she rarely played with her brothers or sisters. One day when she was ten, she told her friend Lena, the daughter of the woman who did the family’s washing, that she was going to be an artist. “I have no idea where that came from,” she said. “I just remember saying it.”
Because the harsh Wisconsin winters seemed to be undermining Mr. O’Keeffe’s health, the family moved in 1902 to Williamsburg, Virginia. Georgia was sent away to boarding school at the Chatham Episcopal Institute—Chatham Hall today—where she was far from a model student. “I’d go for long walks in the woods, which wasn’t allowed. I wouldn’t read my French lesson aloud to myself three times, as we were told to do, and in class when the teacher asked whether I had done it I would say no—that I didn’t have the time for that. I always had enough demerits to be expelled if I got one more. And I never did learn to spell. My friend Doris Bry says now that I’ve ruined her spelling because I misspell with such confidence.”
She was going to be an artist. After graduating from Chatham, she entered the Art Institute of Chicago, but a serious bout with typhoid the following spring caused her to withdraw, and she spent a long convalescence at home. In 1907, she enrolled in the Art Students League, in New York, where she won a prize for a still-life painting and a scholarship to the League’s summer school at Lake George. O’Keeffe remembers that at the League she was everybody’s pet. Her hair, which had only just started to grow in after her illness, was short and curly—a rare phenomenon at the time. Any number of fellow-students wanted to paint O’Keeffe, whose strong, clean features and intensely expressive hands and eyes would so fascinate Stieglitz a few years later. She disliked posing, and has occasionally said that her unwillingness to put others through such an ordeal ruled out any interest she might have taken in painting the human face or body. There was never any question about her talent. But the slick, academic imitations of European styles then being taught at the League by William M. Chase, Kenyon Cox, and others soon lost all interest for her. “I began to realize that a lot of people had done this same kind of painting before I came along,” she told the art historian Katharine Kuh in 1962. “It had been done, and I didn’t think I could do it any better.” O’Keeffe decided to give up painting, and for the next four years she did not paint. Instead, she went to Chicago and became a commercial designer, drawing lace and embroidery for advertisements. In the summer of 1912, however, home on a visit to her family, who had moved from Williamsburg to Charlottesville, she was persuaded by one of her sisters to register for Alon Bement’s summer art class at the University of Virginia. Bement was a disciple of Arthur Wesley Dow, the head of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Columbia University’s Teachers College. A brilliant art educator, Dow had known and worked with Gauguin in France; he was also a friend of Ernest F. Fenollosa, the great Orientalist, through whom he had developed a profound appreciation of Chinese and Japanese painting. As O’Keeffe said after studying with Dow himself, “This man had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way.” Bement taught according to Dow’s principles of design, which for O’Keeffe proved eventually to be a way out of the dead end of academic realism. Bement invited her to come back the following summer—and for the three summers after that—to teach with him at the University of Virginia, and at Bement’s urging she went to New York in 1914 to study with Dow. Until then, she had been earning her living as an art supervisor in the public schools of north Texas.
“It came about because of a girl I had known at Chatham Institute,” O’Keeffe told me. “The girls there all thought I was pretty strange, and I thought they were pretty strange, mainly because we spoke so differently. There was one girl named Alice Beretta, from Laredo, Texas, who hated me—or so I was told. Well, when I heard that, I bet some of the others that I could get her to like me, and I went to work on Alice. After we left Chatham, we corresponded. She began teaching school in Amarillo, and when the art teacher there left, she suggested that they hire me, and they did. I was hugely excited about going to Texas, because of all those stories that Mother had read to us. Texas was the great place in the world as far as I was concerned.
“I got very interested in teaching,” O’Keeffe went on. “Later, I became head of the art department of the normal school in Canyon, about twenty miles away. What I enjoyed was teaching people who had no interest in becoming artists. Dow’s teaching had been based on the idea that the same principles applied no matter what sort of work you were doing—pottery, making wallets, anything. He thought everybody had to use these principles in everything he did. Dow gave us exercises in the arrangement of color and shape, dark and light, smooth and rough, and so forth. One of his exercises was to take a maple leaf and fit it into a seven-inch square in various ways. Of course, when I got to north Texas there was nothing like a leaf to use. The only tree around was the locust, and its leaves were too small to do anything with. There was just nothing for the children to use, and they were too poor to go out and buy an orange. I’d get them to draw a square and put a door in it somewhere—anything to start them thinking about how to divide a space. Pretty soon, I got so interested in teaching I wondered why I should be paid for it.
“And then, of course, I liked everything about Texas. I didn’t even mind the dust, although sometimes when I came back from a walk I’d be the color of the road. Oh, the sun was hot and the wind was hard and you got cold in the winter—I was just crazy about all of it. I remember one morning I got up very early to catch a bus from Amarillo back to Canyon—I sat up in front with the driver, because the smell of whiskey and cigars in back was too awful—and we saw the most extraordinary sunrise. When we got to Canyon, I thought maybe that was something I could paint. It was really what started me painting again. I worked in watercolor, because I never had the time for oils.”
Although much of the new work looked wholly abstract, it was always based on something she had seen in the landscape. The “Light Coming on the Plains” series had its origin in what she often saw in the very early morning, before the sun rose. “The light would begin to appear, and then it would disappear and there would be a kind of halo effect, and then it would appear again. The light would come and go for quite a while before it finally came. It was the same with the trains. You could see the morning train coming a long way off, and then it would disappear, and then you’d see it again, closer. The country was so flat, but there were slight depressions in it, and things would drop out of sight. Anyway, my teaching schedule was usually arranged so that I had two hours a day to myself, and that’s when I used to paint. It was a good time for me. I was getting very interested in what was mine.”
They met for the first time in 1916. O’Keeffe, of course, had often visited the Stieglitz gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, had seen her first Matisses and Picassos there, and had certainly overheard Stieglitz talking to other visitors in his volcanic style, preaching the cause of modernism and upholding the artist’s integrity against the multiple corruptions of the age. But they did not actually meet until the spring of 1916, when O’Keeffe, learning that Stieglitz had hung a group of her recent drawings in his gallery without her knowledge or permission, came to make him take them down. Stieglitz was not even there the first time she appeared—he was on jury duty. She returned a day or so later and confronted him indignantly. O’Keeffe, who has grown exceedingly tired of this story over the years, will say only that he managed to talk her out of removing the drawings. “He was a good talker” is the way she puts it.
The drawings, which came before the first Texas watercolors, were the earliest fruits of her decision, in 1915, that everything she had painted up until then was influenced by one or another of her teachers, and that from then on she would paint only what was in her head. “I hadn’t thought before about doing what was in my head,” she told me. “I hadn’t even known anything was there. But when I began to think about it, it seemed very simple.” The series of charcoal drawings that she did soon after this decision were for the most part abstractions based on forms in nature. O’Keeffe sent a group of the drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer, in New York, but asked her to show them to no one else. O’Keeffe had met Miss Pollitzer in Arthur Dow’s course at Columbia. She was currently the secretary of the New York branch of the National Woman’s Party—“a very lively little person,” in O’Keeffe’s description, “who used to carry everything under one arm—books, sketch pad, notes, brush and comb—and who usually had some paint on her face or in her very long hair.” Miss Pollitzer took the drawings straight to Stieglitz, who looked at them and made his famous remark “Finally, a woman on paper.” He kept them for several months, and then exhibited them the following spring, along with work by Charles Duncan and René Lafferty.
A year after that first meeting, Stieglitz gave her a one-man show—her first—at 291. O’Keeffe was in Texas at the time, teaching, but when she heard that her show would be the last ever held at 291—the building was to be torn down—she took all her money out of the bank and came East to see it. The show had been dismantled before she arrived, but Stieglitz rehung it for her. Before she went back to Texas, he also photographed her for the first time. The following spring, Stieglitz offered to pay her living expenses for one year, so that she could devote herself entirely to painting, and that summer O’Keeffe resigned from teaching and came to New York to live. She became a member of Stieglitz’s inner circle, which included the painters John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and, later on, Charles Demuth and the photographer Paul Strand. “I met a great many people,” O’Keeffe said, recalling those days. “There was Stieglitz’s circle, and there was also the circle around the Stettheimer sisters—Florine, the painter, and Ettie, the writer, and Carrie, who built the doll house that they and their friends decorated. Whenever Florine finished a painting, she would invite everybody in for tea. Nothing in their house looked as though it had ever been used. Once, I made this comment about a red cushion, and Florine said very indignantly, ‘I sit on it every day! ’ Another time, I remember, I was sitting there just behind the new painting, and Marcel Duchamp was in a chair facing me. I finished my tea, and Duchamp got up from his chair and took my teacup from me with the most extraordinary grace—with a gesture so elegant that I’ve never forgotten it.
“Demuth was very elegant, too. He was also more amusing than any of the other artists I knew. He had diabetes, and he would come to New York from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he lived in a house that had been in his family since the seventeen-hundreds, and would eat and drink everything he wasn’t allowed to eat and drink, and got quite sick. In my memory, he is the only artist who was any fun to be with. We were always going to do a large picture together—a flower painting—but we never did. He had a clubfoot, and the effort of walking must have been terrible for him—his collar wilted even on the coldest days. The first time we met him, he was ill and very thin, and his ears stuck out from his head like horns. He always had lunch or dinner with Stieglitz and me when he came to town, and we always enjoyed it.”
When Stieglitz and O’Keeffe began their life together, in 1918, she was thirty and he was fifty-five. He had been married; she had not. In addition to being the greatest living photographer—the man who had managed almost singlehanded to revolutionize the medium and to force its recognition as a legitimate means of producing art—he was the center of the modern-art movement in America. He often described his exhibition galleries—first 291 and later the Intimate Gallery and An American Place—as laboratories for experiment rather than places where pictures were sold, and not infrequently he refused to sell to people whose motives he mistrusted. “Stieglitz liked the idea of a group,” O’Keeffe said. “He wanted something to come out of America—something really important—and he felt that you couldn’t do that alone.” O’Keeffe, for her part, did not like groups and was never comfortable in them. For almost thirty years, she lived without complaint the kind of life that Stieglitz’s public role demanded. (They were married in 1924.) “I never knew how many there would be for dinner,” she said. “It seemed as though anyone who was around the gallery in the late afternoon would come back afterward.” During those years, living on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel and later in an apartment near the East River on Fifty-fourth Street, she managed, in spite of interruptions, to get a considerable amount of painting done. In the summer, they went to Lake George, where the large and somewhat contentious Stieglitz clan came together in a house filled with Victorian furniture and knickknacks. “There would be from fifteen to twenty people at the table, and four times as much food as anyone could eat,” O’Keeffe recalls. “It was hard for me to work there, because I can never bear to have people around me when I’m working, or to let anybody see what I’m doing or say anything about it until it’s finished. Stieglitz never could understand that. Stieglitz did almost all his own photographic work in the summer. In the winter, people were his work.”
Dozens of the people Stieglitz knew and influenced have tried to write their impressions of him, but O’Keeffe feels that no one has come close to describing him accurately. “Stieglitz was a very contradictory person,” she said last fall. “For example, he would start out in the morning saying one thing, and by noon he would be saying the exact opposite, and then in the evening he would have changed his mind again. He thought aloud, you see. He could become very enthusiastic about someone’s work and then forget about it. But he said everything with such conviction that people always believed him. He had such power with words. Stieglitz used words in a unique, almost violent way, which nobody has ever been able to reproduce. It was appalling to me the way he could tear somebody to pieces—and that person would accept it because it was Stieglitz talking.
“His mind was quicker than mine, of course, but when I really knew I was right I could often wear him down. I seldom argued with him, though. He was the sort of person who could be destroyed completely if you disagreed with him. Actually, for someone who moved in the world as widely as he did, Stieglitz was something of a child. You had to humor him a good deal. When I was first with him, his breakfast every morning would be exactly six pieces of zwieback and a cup of cocoa made with water—and that would be all he had until six in the evening. There had always been too much food at his family’s; I think he reacted against that by never eating enough.
“The relationship that Stieglitz and I had was really very good, because it was built on something more than just emotional needs. Each of us was really interested in what the other was doing. I think what he did in photography was one of the great documents of the period. Of course, you do your best to destroy each other without knowing it—some people do it knowingly and some do it unknowingly. But if you have a real basis, as we did, you can get along pretty well despite the differences.”
In a letter to the Sun’s art critic, Henry McBride, during the nineteen-twenties, O’Keeffe described her own “particular kind of vanity.” She did not in the least mind being ignored, she wrote, “but I don’t like to be second or third or fourth,” and added, “I like being first, if I’m noticed at all. That’s why I get on with Stieglitz. With him, I feel first. And when he is around, and there are others, he is the center and I don’t count at all.” And some years later, again to McBride: “I see Alfred as an old man that I am very fond of—growing older—so that it sometimes shocks and startles me when he looks particularly pale and tired. . . . Aside from my fondness for him personally, I feel that he has been very important to something that has made my world for me. I like it that I can make him feel that I have hold of his hand to steady him as he goes on.”
Although O’Keeffe’s work has been extravagantly praised from the very outset of her career, she has not been overly impressed by what critics have found to say about it. Attempts to uncover the sources of her imagery fill her with amazement. “Sometimes I know where an image comes from, sometimes not,” she told me. “I think Arthur Dove was that way, too. Often, a picture just gets into my head without my having the least idea how it got there. But I’m much more down-to-earth than people give me credit for. At times, I’m ridiculously realistic.”
After a pause, O’Keeffe continued, “I’ll tell you what went on in my so-called mind when I did my paintings of animal skulls. There was a lot of talk in New York then—during the late twenties and early thirties—about the Great American Painting. It was like the Great American Novel. People wanted to ‘do’ the American scene. I had gone back and forth across the country several times by then, and some of the current ideas about the American scene struck me as pretty ridiculous. To them, the American scene was a dilapidated house with a broken-down buckboard out front and a horse that looked like a skeleton. I knew America was very rich, very lush. Well, I started painting my skulls about this time. First, I put a horse’s skull against a blue-cloth background, and then I used a cow’s skull. I had lived in the cattle country—Amarillo was the crossroads of cattle shipping, and you could see the cattle coming in across the range for days at a time. For goodness’ sake, I thought, the people who talk about the American scene don’t know anything about it. So, in a way, that cow’s skull was my joke on the American scene, and it gave me pleasure to make it in red, white, and blue.”
To the critics, of course, O’Keeffe’s skulls signified death, with overtones of crucifixion. O’Keeffe did not think of them that way at all. “The bones,” she wrote in the catalogue for one of her New York exhibitions, “seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty.” When she painted desert flowers with a skull (“Summer Days,” 1936), she says, there was no symbolism intended. Nor was there in “Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose” (1931). O’Keeffe explained to me that she had a collection of artificial flowers, which the Spanish people in her part of the country used for funeral decorations. “I was looking through them one day when someone came to the kitchen door,” she said. “As I went to answer the door, I stuck a pink rose in the eye socket of a horse’s skull. And when I came back the rose in the eye looked pretty fine, so I thought I would just go on with that.”
Throughout her career, in a kind of counterpoint to the precise, stripped-down realism of her more familiar work, O’Keeffe has continued to paint abstract or semi-abstract pictures. Abstraction, of course, was very much in the wind when she first began going to exhibitions at 291. Arthur Dove was painting in a style of pure abstraction by 1910—whether Dove, in America, or Wassily Kandinsky, in Munich, got to pure abstraction first is a matter of critical dispute. O’Keeffe doesn’t really know how she came to her own form of three-dimensional abstraction, characterized by strongly modelled forms and intense, luminous color. “What happens is that you pick up ideas here and there,” she told me. “If you mention any particular source, it gives that too much emphasis.” Her work, in any case, was nothing like the flat, lyrical abstractions of Kandinsky or other Europeans. Brancusi, on seeing O’Keeffe’s painting, said, “There is no imitation of Europe here; it is a force—a liberating free force.”
In recent years, several critics have come to see O’Keeffe as an important precursor of much contemporary American art. Eugene Goossen suggested in a 1967 article that O’Keeffe’s work is in the true line of a native American aesthetic tradition, which was rudely interrupted by European influences as a result of the Armory Show, in 1913, but which reëmerged during the late nineteen-forties in the explosion of Abstract Expressionism. O’Keeffe is also seen as having anticipated the more recent color-field abstraction of Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, and others. She herself is particularly interested in Kelly, whose paintings, composed for the most part of flat, unmodulated areas of pure color, are nevertheless based, like O’Keeffe’s, on natural shapes. “Sometimes I’ve thought one of his things was mine,” she said last fall. “I’ve actually looked at one of Kelly’s pictures and thought for a moment that I’d done it.”
Georgia O’Keeffe and Rebecca Strand, an artist who was married to the photographer Paul Strand, spent the summer of 1929 in Taos. They stayed in one of the houses there that belonged to Mabel Dodge Luhan, the rich woman who had married an Indian from the Taos pueblo, and who liked to be surrounded by artists and writers. It was the same house that D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, had lived in for a summer. O’Keeffe had fallen in love with New Mexico in 1917, when she passed through Santa Fe with her younger sister Claudia on a vacation trip to Colorado. “From then on, I was always trying to get back there,” she has said, “and in 1929 I finally made it.”
Stieglitz continued to spend his summers, as usual, at Lake George, but from 1929 on he did so without O’Keeffe. The separations were painful for both of them. O’Keeffe was torn between her obligation to Stieglitz and her obligation to her work. In the high, wild desert country of New Mexico, she felt very close to something that she had been trying to reach in painting. “Lake George is not really painting country,” she remarked last fall. “Out here, half your work is done for you.” Once, O’Keeffe suggested in a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan that she sometimes found it necessary to help Stieglitz by not getting in his way, and that this was why she came West in the summer. But the problem was obviously more complex. “The difficulty in getting out here was enormous, but I came,” she told me quietly.
That summer of 1929, she painted the country around Taos, working directly from nature. “In the evening, with the sun at your back, that high, sage-covered plain looks like an ocean,” she said. “The color up there—the blue-green of the sage, and the mountains, and the wild flowers—is a different kind of color from anything I’d ever seen. There’s nothing like it in Texas, or even in Colorado.” Much to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s annoyance, O’Keeffe spent only one summer in Taos. She had discovered the country to the west—the Rio Grande Valley, near the little village of Alcalde. “It was the shapes of the hills there that fascinated me,” she said. “The reddish sand hills with the dark mesas behind them. It seemed as though no matter how far you walked you could never get into those dark hills, although I walked great distances. I’ve always liked to walk. I think I’ve taken a bath in every brook from Abiquiu to Espanola. Irrigation ditches are fine for bathing, too. They’re just wide enough to lie down in. I found I could work in a place for two days before anyone bothered me. After two days, people would turn up and be curious, and then I’d move on somewhere else. If I hadn’t finished, I would come back in a week and spend two more days. I was painting what I saw, as best I could. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes not.”
It may be assumed that O’Keeffe also wanted to keep a certain distance between herself and the Taos art colony. She rather liked Mabel Dodge Luhan—was amused by her, even when Mabel was at her bullying worst. Mabel and Dorothy Brett, the painter, and Frieda Lawrence, who had settled near Taos after D. H. Lawrence died, in 1930, carried on a running three-cornered feud. They had all idolized Lawrence, and each considered herself in some way his true muse—a situation that reached lunatic heights during their protracted squabble over Lawrence’s ashes. To prevent Mabel from stealing and scattering the ashes (as she claimed Lawrence had wished), Frieda finally had them mixed with a ton of concrete and formed into a block.
“Frieda was very special,” O’Keeffe recalls. “I can remember very clearly the first time I ever saw her, standing in a doorway, with her hair all frizzed out, wearing a cheap red calico dress that looked as though she’d just wiped out the frying pan with it. She was not thin, and not young, but there was something radiant and wonderful about her. They were a funny crew over in Taos. They’d have terrible fights, and not speak to one another for days. But there weren’t that many interesting people around, so sooner or later they would make up. Mabel could be pretty mean, of course. She had the ability to paralyze a whole room. She would invite a lot of people to her big house and seat them around in a circle, and they would be so intimidated by her that nobody would say a word. And then the next day Mabel would go on about how everyone in Taos was so stupid. Mabel and Tony Luhan really met their match in each other, I always thought. Tony stayed top of the heap and he did it through silence. Sometimes he’d get mad at Mabel and fling his blanket around him and say he was going to go to the pueblo. Mabel always worried that he’d decide not to come back. But the time Mabel went East to have an operation, Tony lay like a log across her bed for days, missing her. They needed each other—no doubt about it.
“One summer, Mabel was going away on a trip, and she invited me to come and use her studio. I thought that might be nice for a few days, so I went, but I stayed only one night. The next day, I went over to the Sage Brush Inn, near Taos. Well, Mabel came back early from her trip, and demanded that I return and stay with her. I explained that I couldn’t work all day and then be with people in the evening—it just wasn’t possible—but I said that if I had a day when I wasn’t working I would call her up and come over. I did call her one day, and Mabel said, ‘Oh, no, you can’t come. Tony’s invited the peyote singers here, and we have too many people already.’ Later that afternoon, Tony came to the inn to pick me up. I told him what Mabel had said, and Tony came into my room and sat down in a rocking chair in the corner. ‘I go to lot of trouble, get peyote singers,’ he said. ‘She no invite my friend, I not go.’ And he didn’t. He sat there all evening, rocking in that chair. Mabel was furious.”
O’Keeffe and Tony Luhan were great friends. Tony used to take Rebecca Strand and her on camping trips to Mesa Verde, Inscription Rock, the Canyon de Chelly, and other places. (Mabel had periods of minding and periods of not minding, according to O’Keeffe.) On occasion, Tony even confided to her his deep feelings about his wife. Mabel, for her part, was a great but rather frustrated admirer of Stieglitz. “She had known Stieglitz long before I did, and she always wanted to get him out there,” O’Keeffe told me. “He never came, which was just as well. He was such a worrying person—he had the sort of mind that wouldn’t have let me drive five miles to market without worrying.” (His anxieties might have been understandable. Around Taos, O’Keeffe’s difficulties in learning to drive a car were legendary.)
Every fall, O’Keeffe returned to New York and to Stieglitz, who remained very much the center of her life. After his death, in 1946, she spent three more winters in New York, settling his estate and dividing his extensive art collection among six different institutions, including the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Metropolitan Museum. Stieglitz had wanted his collection to be kept together in New York, but she had always told him that she thought it had to be divided, and he left the decision up to her. In 1949, she moved to New Mexico for good.
The Abiquiu house was in ruins when O’Keeffe bought it in 1945. She had had her eye on the place for years—ever since she drove by in a car one day and saw, through a break in the adobe wall, an enclosed garden and a tumbledown house. The man who owned it said he planned to put up a motel there but would sell for six thousand dollars. Too much. A few years later, the man died and left the property to the Catholic Church; O’Keeffe was told that she could have it for less, but by this time she was in the process of buying the house at Ghost Ranch. Then the war came, and gas rationing, and only one trip to town a week to buy fresh vegetables, and she began to think again about the walled-in garden at Abiquiu. It took three years to rebuild the house and make it livable. The place was roofless and crumbling to dust. All available building supplies in the area were still going to the atomic facility at Los Alamos, and it was almost impossible, she says, to buy a nail. By 1949, though, when she moved west for good, the Abiquiu house was ready.
“I’ve never wanted to make it look Spanish, or Indian, or anything like that,” she told me. “I wanted it to be my house.” There is more furniture than at the Ghost Ranch, but not much. O’Keeffe lives mainly in the studio, a long white room that used to be the stable, with wide windows overlooking the Rio Chama Valley. The best of her hi-fi systems is in the studio, and so is a large proportion of her record collection, which runs to instrumental music from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. (Monteverdi is a favorite.) Two of her own paintings hang here—a 1950 abstraction in blue, black, and white, and the 1971 “Black Rock.” The only other work of art in the room is a print by Hiroshige—a snow scene in three panels—which she keeps covered with a cloth against fading. Large worktables take up one end of the room, with matters of current interest in neat piles all over them—magazines and books, reproductions, correspondence, a photograph clipped from a newspaper of a Viking ship with a prow that rises to an extraordinary curling peak. The floor is carpeted in white.
In Abiquiu, O’Keeffe becomes managerial. She confers at length with the cook and with her sister Claudia, who presides over the well-irrigated garden that provides all the fruit, vegetables, and corn for both houses; she answers the telephone and attends to correspondence. Since her big 1970 retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum, there has been an increase in correspondence with museums and galleries that want her to lend paintings, which she does rarely and only under the strictest conditions. In the art world, her reputation now is as high as it has ever been, or higher, and her prices have always been impressive. (In 1927, Stieglitz sold an O’Keeffe flower painting for three thousand dollars and another painting for six thousand.) Recently, and through no efforts of her own, she has become something of an idol to the new generation of feminists, whose tactics sometimes cause her to wonder how they can hope to accomplish much, “jumping around that way.” But then O’Keeffe herself has never had much trouble accomplishing what she wanted to accomplish. “Dealing with Georgia is very easy, provided you do exactly what she wants,” a museum director said last fall.
She has contributed generously to her adopted village. For some years, she has helped needy children get through school. She has built a gymnasium for the village, and has given funds to improve the water system. Except for O’Keeffe, the storekeeper, and the Catholic priest, the population of Abiquiu is Spanish-American and Indian. “When I first moved here, the children had nowhere to go when it got dark,” she told me. “They’d play out in the street in front of the cantina until sundown and then sometimes they would come in here to see me. After a time, I took to sending them in my car when they had games with other schools. Once a week, I sent them to the movies in Espanola. The boys used to talk a lot about having a gymnasium, and eventually I had a gymnasium built. Now those same boys are grown up and have children of their own.” A man who knows and likes O’Keeffe and who lives in another Spanish-American village some distance away, insisted years ago on giving her two large and aggressive blue chows for protection. She came to adore the dogs but has never felt any need for their protective qualities. “I find the Spanish-American people very gentle and immensely polite,” she says.
The sitting room at Abiquiu is fairly luxurious by O’Keeffe’s standards. There are three comfortable chairs, a built-in adobe bench with cushions, and a glass-topped table, which she likes because, as she says, “it looks as though it almost didn’t exist.” The end window faces the garden, and its wide sill holds some of the choicest rocks from her collection. On a low table against the wall are art books and a small oil by Arthur Dove—an abstraction called “Golden Sunlight.” Her own “Sky Above Clouds,” one of the series that grew out of her travels by jet plane, fills the wall at the far end. A delicate black Calder mobile hangs near the fireplace. It is a cool night—cool enough for a fire in the rounded, hive-like little fireplace, where the piñon logs stand up on end and are ignited by piñon shavings.
“I think Dove came to abstraction quite naturally,” O’Keeffe says, reflectively. “It was his way of thinking. Kandinsky was very showy about it, but Dove had an earthy, simple quality that led directly to abstraction. His things are very special. I always wish I’d bought more of them. And all the people Dove influenced, who are better known now than he is! The Museum of Modern Art never gave him a really important show—I don’t know why. Dove used to paint a lot of small pictures, little landscapes, that didn’t look particularly distinguished at first, but in them he would get the feel of a particular place so completely that you’d know you’d been there.”
O’Keeffe has often said that she does not much like pictures. When she travels, as she has done extensively since Stieglitz’s death, she spends little time in museums or galleries. The heights of Machu Picchu, the Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School, in Vienna, the ruins of Angkor Wat—these are the sort of thing she goes to see, and she is never disappointed. “But I mentally destroy the pictures I look at,” she said, with an amused smile. “I’m very critical. I don’t seem to have the kind of pleasure I know a lot of other people have in pictures. That’s why I was so surprised when I went to the Prado in 1953—because everything there was so exciting to me. Maybe the fact that the pictures had not been cleaned had something to do with it.
“It’s funny to me that I enjoy Goya so much,” she went on, after a moment. “One of the first things I ever bought was a reproduction of a Goya in the Metropolitan—I hope it’s still considered a Goya. It’s a portrait of a man in knee breeches. Goya seems so foreign to me, and yet I enjoy him as much as any other Occidental artist. His prints—a lot of them, anyway—show some pretty terrible things, things that usually make me squeamish. But not the way Goya does them. Of course, my favorite is Chinese painting. I’d still say it’s the best that’s been done.”
She got up to put some more wood on the fire. When she was in her thirties, she said, she was troubled with arthritis, but it had disappeared years ago; she thought the secret was in keeping warm enough. “Now I haven’t a creak. I suppose that’s remarkable.”
The conversation turned to the number of letters she gets these days from young artists and would-be artists who want to see her and show her their work. O’Keeffe does not believe in giving advice. “ ‘Go home and work.’ That’s all I can tell anyone,” she said. “You can’t help people that way. I think one of my best times was when nobody was interested in me. That may have come from my not being the favorite child in the family, and not minding that I wasn’t—it left me very free. My older brother was a favorite, and I can remember comparing myself to him and feeling I could do better. In my case, I never cared anything at all what other people thought. I always knew I could earn a living doing something else besides painting, so I wasn’t worried. I could just do what I wanted to do, and I didn’t have to care what people thought. Oh, if I’d followed people’s advice it would have been hopeless. That man Bement gave me some very good advice. He told me things to see and do, and he was very helpful. But if I’d really done in painting what he wanted me to do, nobody would ever have thought anything about me.
“The truth is I’ve been very lucky. Stieglitz was the most interesting center of energy in the art world just when I was trying to find my way. To have him get interested in me was a very good thing. My going to Texas was lucky, and, of course, my finding this place. And then, somehow, what I painted happened to fit into the emotional life of my time—does that sound right to you? Often I’ve had the feeling that I could have been a much better painter and had far less recognition. It’s just that what I do seems to move people today, in a way that I don’t understand at all. Now and then when I get an idea for a picture, I think, How ordinary. Why paint that old rock? Why not go for a walk instead? But then I realize that to someone else it may not seem ordinary.”
O’Keeffe was silent for a time, gazing at the bare adobe wall beyond the fireplace. “I just think that some people are very lucky,” she said. ♦
