"I have picked flowers where I found them – have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked . . . When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too.  I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it."  (Note -- all italicized text is drawn from words of Georgia O'Keeffe)

Georgia O’Keeffe . . . artist . . . teacher . . . mould-breaker . . . visionary . . . publicity-seeker . . . recluse . . . Quick to anger and slow to forgive, her intensity challenged her enemies and left an even stronger impact on her friends.  She clothed herself in black from head to toe, and yet nude photographs from her 30’s show a sensual woman, rejoicing in her own body’s grace. Photographer Ansell Adams once said  “when Georgia O’Keeffe smiled, the entire earth cracked open” . . . and yet on another occasion described her as “psychopathic.”

 

I am not much given to making idols out of even extraordinarily gifted human beings, but the complex genius, the feistiness, the challenge that was Georgia O’Keeffe, has got under my skin.  

             “Nobody sees a flower – really.  It is so small that it takes time, and we  haven’t time.  To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. I said   to myself -- I'll paint what I see -- what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it -- I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.”

 

“Sexual statements,” the critics insisted.  “Feminist eroticism,” some proclaimed in tones ranging from outrage to applause.   Not so, said O’Keeffe, for it was her life-long struggle to paint as the woman she was and yet to have her work bound by nothing, not even her gender.

 

“I made you take time to look at what I saw.  And when you took time to really notice, you hung all your own associations on my flower – and then you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.”

 

Georgia grew up in Wisconsin.  Her vision was grounded in the wide-open blue of the midwestern sky. 

 

"My first memory is of the brightness of light...light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground...very large white pillows..."

 

But the O’Keeffe aesthetic is not simple, and neither was her life.  She was the eldest of  seven children, allegedly her father’s favorite and indisputably for her mother an object of constant tension and strife.  As a child, she was a maverick – dressing in ways which surprised her conservative midwestern neighbors . . . teaching her classmates how to play poker . . . disrupting her classes with hilarious caricatures of their teachers.   This inscription shows up under her photo in one of her high school yearbooks:  “A girl who would be different in habit, style, and dress, A girl who doesn't give a cent for men—and boys still less.”

 

Surprise, surprise -- there are many who believe Frank O’Keeffe’s love for Georgia crossed the boundary of incest, and she may have been molested by her brother as well.  It is certain that her father’s alcoholism combined with his abysmal business sense threw the family on hard times.  By the time Georgia was 20, they’d dropped from middle class comfort in Wisconsin to just getting by in Williamsburg, Virginia, with her mother, Ida,  taking in lodgers to make ends meet. Georgia quit her art lessons and worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week as an illustrator for a Chicago advertising agency to contribute to the family coffers. 

 

This period of her youth is not pretty .  Her mother came down with tuberculosis.  Now you couldn’t be a boarding house operator with TB, so Mrs. O’Keeffe moved her children to Charlottesville where nobody knew about her illness -- and she took in boarders there.  Georgia contracted measles, moved back to live with her father in Williamsburg, and where for a year she did the housework and struggled with the sexual tensions of living in what was almost certainly an abusive home.  O’Keeffe’s adult life was dotted with the irrational rages and nervous illnesses that often plague people who’ve survived incest, and in her old age, she lifted the violation into the light.  For most of her life,  O’Keeffe maintained silence about her childhood:

 

 “You’d push the past out of the way . . . if only you could. . .  Where I have was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant .  It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest..”

 

While Georgia O'Keeffe was an art student one of her male colleagues asked her to pose for him. She looked annoyed and said something to the effect that she was an artist, not a model.  The man is said to have retorted:  "It doesn't matter what you do, I'm going to be a great painter and you will probably end up teaching painting in some girls' school."   I should note that the name of this colleague is now forgotten. 

 

            “I am going to give up everything for my art,” Georgia proclaimed, as she realized she would be making her own unique way.

 

            "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me...shapes and ideas  so near to me...so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them  down. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. And so I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.” 

 

Her break came in 1912.  When a backwater college in Texas hired her to teach art, O’Keeffe left her family and never looked back.    Seventy years later, her former students remembered her with pride, as a creative teacher who taught them to see in new and different ways, most of all to see the beauty that lived in the apparent desolation of the plains. 

 

There were no paved roads, and no fences – no trees—it was like the ocean but it was wide, wide land.  The evening star would be high in the sunset sky when it was still broad daylight.  That evening star fascinated me.  I needed nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with that star.  Ten watercolors were made from that star. 

 

During her time in Texas, she painted in abstract, and it was this work that caught the eye of Alfred Steiglitz.  Steiglitz -- gallery owner and photographer.  Georgia sent to a friend in New York some of her charcoal drawings, rounded, bud-like forms nestled in between a jagged silhouette and an undulating ripple.   The friend showed them to Steiglitz, who is perhaps best seen as the Henry Higgins of the 1920’s art world in America.  “At last,” he said as he hung O’Keeffe’s drawings in his famous gallery that was called “291”, “At last, a woman on paper.”

 

“I was startled and shocked.  For me the drawings were private and the idea of their being hung on the wall for the public to look at was just too much.  Steiglitz and I argued and, though I didn’t like it, I wound up leaving the drawings on the wall. . .  I probably wanted to see my things hang on a wall so as to be able to place them in my mind in relation to other things I have seen done.  And I presume, if I must be honest, that I was also interested in what anybody else has to say about them and also in what they don’t say because that means something to me too. “

 

            There’s controversy about whether or not O’Keeffe would have made it without Steiglitz.  The man controlled the art world in a way that’s hard for us to understand today.  What he promoted was what caught the critics’ eye.  What he ignored, withered.

 

            O’Keeffe and Steiglitz sparked off each other, and out of their passionate involvement came what are arguably the most erotic of his erotic photographs. . . and some of the finest paintings of her career.   They were lovers for many years, eventually they married.  Although artists can get away with a lot, Steiglitz was married, 23 years her senior, with a daughter close to Georgia’s age – and this evoked something of a scandal, even in the art world of New York. 

 

            The two took refuge in a corner suite (sans kitchen) atop the Shelton hotel, in the 1920’s, when living at the top of skyscrapers had never been conceived.  In an era when capitalism was an unquestioned blessing . . . when progress onward and upward had not yet been toppled as an ideal . . . O’Keefe captured the mood of the era in soaring images of skyscrapers . . . in optimistic images of the potential and promise of human ingenuity, quite literally concretized.  Hers was a new art for a new world, and she shaped her life to fit her vision rather than the other way ‘round. 

 

            “When I was looking for a place to live, I decided to try the Shelton.  I was shown two rooms on the 30^th floor. I had never lived up so high before and was so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York. For once I had a place where I could behold the city as a unit before my eyes. . . .  Of course, I was told that it was an impossible idea – even the men hadn’t done too well with it.”

 

            The 1920’s piled many restrictions on any woman, and an extraordinary woman like  O’Keeffe pushed against every norm.  During her lifetime, and often still today, she’s regarded as a woman first and a painter second, and much has been made about how her paintings mainly are images of Georgia’s sexuality writ large. On the occasion of her first major exhibition, she spoke about how being pigeonholed affected her art:

 

I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself -- I can’t live where I want to.  I can’t go where I want to.  I can’t do what I want to.  I can’t even say what I want to. School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself – that was nobody’s business but my own.

 

All her life, O’Keeffe was adamant that she was not a “woman painter,” not a “feminist,” and yet retrospectively, how many of us who are women say that one or another of her images touches us deeply, renders for us an almost electric covenant with the sources of our power.   I speak here not of biological predestination, but about a gendered sense of empowerment that is both deeper and more encompassing than anything anatomy can dictate.  I speak here of a gendered construction of reality that is an essential aspect of wholeness.  I speak of an image-based construction of reality that is the most essential form of being able deeply to see. 

 

I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me.  But they have passed into the world as abstractions – no one seeing what they are.  . . . I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me.  I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it. 

 

            While Steiglitz was growing old, O’Keeffe was only coming into her powers.  Neither one of them did monogamy well.  O’Keeffe longed to have a child, but her husband had too much personal baggage to agree.  He’d had a sister who had died in childbirth.  His daughter slid into mental illness after her child was born. Steiglitz himself so incredibly self centered that he would have made a lousy father – but you’ve got to give him credit for having the good sense to refuse.  

 

            O’Keeffe had other lovers, both male and female  – and one wonders why she never chose one of those men to father her child . . . It certainly wasn’t because she needed Steiglitz for child support, clever marketing made O’Keeffe’s paintings a money-making phenomenon from early on.

 

            Some say O’Keeffe never forgot her disappointment at not having a child.  Others point to Steiglitz’ blatant love affair with a younger woman.  Whatever reason, O’Keeffe suffered a depression so deep she couldn’t work and in fact was hospitalized for months.  For the rest of her life, adversity was likely to trigger depression – after an exhibition, or when faced with even mildly unfavorable reviews, O’Keeffe’s inspiration would go dry. 

 

            If it’s true that, in O’Keeffe’s words, she “simply painted what she saw,” may be the times of illness and depression were times of dimmer sight, times when, as many others have reported about depression, the lines and colors of the world become obscure.  Georgia had a lot of illness in her life . . . typhoid fever . . . recurrent headaches . . . cancer . . . measles that affected her eyesight. . . but depression was an ever-present possibility whose influence on her work has not been adequately explored.

 

I remember when I was waiting for surgery, I was on a stretcher in a large room, two nurses hovering over me, a very large bright skylight above me.  I had decided to be conscious as long as possible.  I heard the doctor washing his hands.  The skylight began to whirl and slowly became smaller and smaller in a black space.  I lifted my right arm overhead and dropped it.  As the skylight became a small white dot in a black room, I lifted my left arm over my head.  As it started to drop and the white dot became very small, I was gone.  A few weeks later all this became my painting, “Black Abstraction.”

 

            We don’t know for sure why she decided to do it, but the face of American art was forever changed when O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico . . . where she promptly fell in love . . .  with the land.   Back and forth she journeyed, most often by car, spending part of the year in New York with her aging husband and the most productive months in her beloved desert.

 

            When you think about whether or not you’re going to get something done in your life, maybe you’ll draw strength (as I do) from the reality that O’Keeffe was 41 when she first went to New Mexico . . . and 61 when she moved there full time.  All those paintings . . . the desert landscapes. . . the skulls . . . the bones . . . the churches . . . the penitential crosses . . . the doors from her adobe house in Abiquiu . . . all were made after she turned 40, and many when she was well past 60 – and she even found ways to paint in her 80’s, even when she could hardly see.

 

     She’d walk out into the desert in the early morning – walk for miles, soaking up the landscape, collecting bones, rocks, pieces of the land to bring into her ascetic home.  She was a menace on the road, a self-taught driver in her Model A.   She’d drive out into the desert until the landscape called her to stop, and then she’d paint, camping out in the cold desert night, rising early and painting again.   She fell in love with the shapes and absences of sun-bleached bones. 

 

“To me they are as beautiful as anything I know.  To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around.  The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable...and knows no kindness with all its beauty."

 

You still hear the argument that those great empty pelvic bones reflect her longing for a child.  I’m more persuaded by O’Keeffe’s words: 

I was the sort of child that ate around the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut, saving either the raisin or the hole for the last and best.  So probably – not having changed much – when I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones – what I saw through them – particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world.  . . . The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable – and knows no kindness with all its beauty. .

 

Somebody said that O’Keeffe expressed something profound about the American character in the twentieth century.  That may be – it’s too soon to tell.  We do know she abandoned the city, as so many have done.  She left the city in 1929, one of the darkest periods of American history, and except for a month or so each year, she left her husband, to make both home and history in the New Mexican desert.  She was, in several senses, a pioneer – a woman who communicated a unique artistic vision . . . a  wife who blazed a trail of full-bodied living . . .

 

I feel that a real living form is the natural result of the individual’s effort to  create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown   . . . Making your unknown known is the important thing. You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed.

 

Once she dug herself into her house outside of Santa Fe, her visitors’ list comprised just about everybody who was anybody in the American art world:  D. H. Lawrence, poet Witter Bynner, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, photographers Ansell Adams and Eliot Porter. . . The parade of “big city people,”  the ambiguity of her bisexual love life, the recklessness of her driving, her disdain for organized religion and her insistent blindness to racial differences . . .

 

            She continuously challenged her conservative New Mexican community, and earned a level of judgment that even her generous philanthropy could not wash away.  But at the same time,  the Trappist monk Thomas Merton met O’Keeffe in 1967, and described her as "a woman of extraordinary quality, life, full of resiliency, awareness, quietness who quietly does everything right."

 

Georgia O’Keeffe was a strong woman, and strong women always evoke vigorous response. People respected her sometimes, feared her a lot, made an icon out of her often.  Her companions in later years were as likely to be paid employees as friends, and the stories of her mistreatment of both are legendary.  She stayed connected with Steiglitz, supported him emotionally as she could and financially as required . . . but their relationship did not survive his aging and her independence.  

 

" I see Alfred as an old man that I am very fond of . . . [an old man] growing older.   For me he was much more wonderful in his work than as a human being... He has been very important to something that has made my world for me . .. and  I put up with . . . a good deal of contradictory nonsense because of what seemed clear and bright and wonderful." 

 

Everyone admits that “control” might have been Georgia O’Keeffe’s middle name.  No matter how far they had journeyed to meet her, no one was admitted to her home unless they’d been formally invited – and sometimes not even then.   No food was served on the O’Keeffe table unless she’d overseen its preparation.  In the recollection of one frequent visitor (Mary E. Adams), this conversation was typical: 

 

We’re having soufflé.  I made the cook practice all week, but she hasn’t got it quite right. . . . There, this one’s better, but it’s still not perfect. . . The cress comes from my own mountain stream and I made sure the herbs were hung to dry, not spread. . . Careful! You’re jiggling the wine bottle!!

 

Paintings she tired of, she destroyed, as she did most of the correspondence with her family.  No exhibit was hung without her micro-management, and more than one offer of a show was declined because galleries feared working with her.   As a curator at the Whitney Museum said during a 1960’s retrospective of her work, “Working with Georgia O’Keeffe is easy as long as you do everything her way.” 

 

You crossed O’Keeffe at your peril.  More than one writer had research notes mysteriously “disappear” from their files.  More than one interviewer received lawyers’ letters threatening suit – everyone who knew her agrees that Georgia O’Keeffe loved a good fight.   She once engaged a deaf housekeeper so, as she put it, “I won’t have to talk to anyone.”  A niece remembers being struck in the face simply for calling her “Aunt Georgia,” and O’Keeffe recounted with apparent pride the time some local children tried to steal fruit from her trees.

 

“When the little boys climbed over the wall to steal my apricots, I took my quirt and whipped one of them.  I was afraid his mother would be angry with me, but she was probably afraid.” 

 

More than one hostess reported that when Georgia arrived for a luncheon engagement, she entered their home without a word, walked straight to the kitchen, and subjected the cook to a rigorous interrogation. Only when she was satisfied, did Miss Georgia O’Keeffe consent to stay for the meal. 

 

Some say it was a blessing, many a curse, when in her late 80’s, a young artist named Juan Hamilton came into her life.  We know that O’Keeffe’s sight was failing.  We know that macular degeneration took all but her peripheral vision and in her last years even that was gone.  We know that depression and probably loneliness and habit and fear pushed her into increasing irascibility.    And who can blame her:

 

When you get so that you can’t see, you come to it gradually.  And if you didn’t come to it gradually, I guess you’d just kill yourself when you couldn’t see.

 

These are the words of a woman for whom seeing –her own unique manner of seeing—had been her life.  She was ripe for the companionship of someone who could be her eyes.  And then in 1973, thirteen years before her death, Juan Hamilton came along.   An increasingly mystical, physically vulnerable O’Keeffe chose to believe he had been sent by a higher power – and a bond was formed that was to carry beyond the grave. 

 

            (FRAIL, WISTFUL . . . A DIFFERENT, OLD GEORGIA)        "He came just the moment I needed him.  "

 

            Hamilton took care of her.  He flirted with her. He controlled her life – and wound up an extremely wealthy man when she died.  He frequently drank too much.  Had a volatile temper. Possibly did drugs.  Many people judged him as a charlatan and decided she was an old fool – but the fact is that Juan Hamilton revitalized Georgia O’Keeffe in the final years of her life.  She published an autobiography with his assistance.  She tried her hand at clay, even managed some painting.   Hamilton may have been seen as a scallywag by friends and foe alike, but O’Keeffe looked with the different vision she had employed all her life.

 

I may be old, I may even be unwell, but I am not dead!  My flesh has not begun to rot! Everyone is jealous – jealous—of my relationship with Juan, and well they might be, for they have all abandoned me.  What I have now for support and comfort – and all I need—is Juan.  He makes me feel good.  He gives me a reason to go on.

 

 Virtually blind, Georgia O’Keeffe became increasingly frail.  She died in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, at the age of 98.   As she had instructed, she was cremated the next day. Juan Hamilton walked to the top of the Pedernal Mountain and scattered her ashes to the wind...over her desert landscape. 

 

“When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore...unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I'm gone."

 

            In her final months, the vultures had gathered, as various people and institutions struggled over the O’Keeffe estate.  She had changed her will, reversing her long-time decision to give her significant assets to charity and place her paintings in the public trust.  Juan Hamilton was now her primary beneficiary and as the woman called “An American Legend” slipped further and further from reality, Hamilton’s behavior became increasingly wild.  His spending habits went from extravagant to ludicrous – all with what was still her money.  

 

            We can’t know what he thought of her, or whether he really was in it for the money . . . because Mr. Hamilton now has immense power and, like Georgia herself, is quick to threaten lawsuits against anyone with whom he disagrees.

 

            Does it matter?  In a way, yes.  For Georgia O’Keeffe is a national treasure, and it can be argued that –as she had intended for most of her life-- the public has a right to full access to the gifts of her estate.  It matters -- for if the stories of Hamilton’s manipulations are true, then  we must read into her story an element of tragedy.  It would mean that not only was O’Keeffe  victimized by her father, not only did her husband objectify her body and use it to market her art . . . but her last years were shaped once more by a victim relationship that determined the details of her life. 

 

            Does it matter?  In a way, no.  For Georgia O’Keeffe was a great artist, who took many risks, breached many norms, loved everyone she wanted to and refused to suffer fools whether gladly or in any other way.  “Making your unknown known,” was the goal she set for herself in her youth, and this she did through her art as well or better than any other American to this day.  If sometimes she judged people neither wisely nor well . . . if she allowed her emotions to rule her otherwise excellent mind . . . let us remember that this complex woman was a genius, and her legacy is only beginning to have its say. 

 

            Let us remember that it is better to risk at life and lose than to try to win it all by playing safe.  Let us seek always a deeper way to see.  I give Miss O’Keeffe the final say:

 

            Kick your heels in the air!

I’m going. I’m chasing it. 

I’m hunting for life at a great rate!


Quotations from Miss O’Keeffe taken from Georgia O’Keeffe, Viking Press, 1976; O’Keeffe, the Life of an American Legend by Jeffrey Hogrefe, Bantam, 1992; and From the Faraway Nearby:  Georgia O’Keeffe as an Icon ed. By C. Merrill and E. Bradbury, University of New Mexico Press, 1992.  In addition, I have drawn on the myriad sources of criticism of and observation about O’Keeffe on the internet.