Forget the morning glories and orificial irises, with their attendant readings of flamboyant female sexuality. If there is a painting that encapsulates the mysteries of Georgia O’Keeffe, the subject of a major forthcoming retrospective at Tate Modern , it’s of something far more humble, far less glamorous. A wall with a door in it, an expanse of smooth brown adobe cored by a rough black square of absolute negative space.
O’Keeffe liked to paint the same thing again and again, until she had penetrated to its essence, unravelling the secret of her attraction. The flowers, the blowsy petunias and jimson weed, were superseded by New York cityscapes and then by cow skulls and miscellaneous animal bones, surreally aloft over the clean blue skies and dry striated hills of New Mexico.
This was the landscape that unlatched her heart, and it was during her time there in the 1930s that she began to obsess over the wall with a door in it, located in the courtyard of a tumbledown farmstead in Abiquiú. First she bought the house, a process that took a full decade, and then she set about documenting its enigmatic presence on canvas, creating almost 20 versions. “I’m always trying to paint that door – I never quite get it,” she announced. “It’s a curse the way I feel – I must continually go on with that door.”
The attraction was a mystery, and yet walls and doors figure large in the story of O’Keeffe’s singular life. How do you make the most of what’s inside you, your talents and desires, when they slam you up against a wall of prejudice, of limiting beliefs about what a woman must be and an artist can do? She didn’t kick the wall down – hardly her style – but instead set her considerable canniness and will at prising a new way through.
In terms of the radical things she did with paint, never mind the innovations she brought to bear on her private life, she forged a passage to a world of openness and freedom, as frightening as it was exhilarating. “I’ve always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,” she said, “and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
She was a farm girl first, raised in the wide-open prairies of Wisconsin. Her mother had hoped to be a doctor and several aunts never married, instead pursuing independent careers. The family style was cool and austere, setting great store by self-reliance. Born on 15 November 1887, O’Keeffe was the eldest daughter, ministering to a brood of sisters. Her first memory was “of the brightness of the light – brightness all around”, and she resolved to be an artist at the age 11.
Dogged commitment to this ambition got her to the Art Institute of Chicago at 17, but all the same her apprenticeship was long. A spell in New York at the Art Students League introduced her to the pleasures of an urban social life, and the concomitant realisation that art would require relinquishment as well as ambition. “I first learned to say no when I stopped dancing,” she said. “I liked to dance very much. But if I danced all night, I couldn’t paint for three days.”
A downturn in the family fortunes made college an unaffordable luxury. Instead, in common with her contemporary Edward Hopper, O’Keeffe attempted commercial art, though like him she loathed the silliness of the commissions. As it often would in her life, illness forced a shift in course. She caught measles, and as she was convalescing at home in Virginia her mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then invariably fatal. Worn down and despairing, she resolved to abandon painting altogether.
It was teaching it that saved her, offering a model of a financially independent life. Between 1911 and 1918, teaching was O’Keeffe’s mainstay and anchorage. She took jobs all over the south, living in deep seclusion in South Carolina and out on the Texas Panhandle. The harsh landscape suited her. “I was there before they ploughed the plains. 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 ... The beauty of that wild world.”
She cut an extraordinary figure back then: a rural modernist among the cows, in severe black suits and Oxfords, a man’s felt hat jammed on her black hair. As a teacher in Amarillo she plumped for a hotel frequented by cowboys; in another boarding house she caused consternation by asking to paint the woodwork black. Conscientious with her students, she spent much of her private time alone, hiking and camping in the canyons, getting high on the electric drama of the prairie sky.
Between jobs, she repeatedly returned to education, studying at the University of Virginia and Teachers College in New York. The city might have been short on cattle drives but it did offer enrichments of its own. In Manhattan she saw the work of Picasso and Braque and read Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
Even more influential was her introduction to the revolutionary notions of Arthur Wesley Dow: a mild-mannered professor who generated an innovative approach to art. Inspired by Japanese painting, Dow prioritised composition over imitation, encouraging individual aesthetic decision-making, both on the canvas and in ordinary life. Doing things with style: this became the O’Keeffe creed, affecting everything from how she dressed herself and furnished her houses to what she did with her brush.
You learn the lessons, and then you put them into practice, a process that demands intense effort. In October 1915, O’Keeffe banned herself from colour, working solely in charcoal. Each night, after the long day’s lessons, she sat on the wooden floor of her room in Columbia college, South Carolina, and tried to set down on a sheet of paper her most impassioned feelings. She worked right through Christmas, frantic with frustration, until she succeeded in developing a strange new language of abstract forms, swirling and intertwining like flames or buds. The Specials, she called them: her first authentic, truly independent work.
Picture the young O’Keeffe and you conjure two kinds of images. In the first, she is buttoned up, reserved, a spartan figure composed of monochromatic parts: white skin, black eyes, white shirt, black jacket, hands twisted like a flamenco dancer, hair pulled sharply back or hidden beneath a bowler hat. In the second, she is categorically unbuttoned, tumbling sleepily out of a white chemise or dressing gown, her breasts and belly bared, witchy locks tumbling over her shoulders.
Both images are the creation of the same man: the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, a didactic visionary who helped establish modern art in America. In 1915, a friend of O’Keeffe’s sent him the charcoals without her knowledge. Struck, he exhibited them in a group show, catalysing one of the most fertile art partnerships of the 20th century.
O’Keeffe had first encountered Stieglitz at his gallery 291 back in 1908, when she was at the Art Students League. She attended an exhibition of Rodin drawings, finding the erotic content and atmosphere of noisy debate antithetical to her tastes. Later, though, she became enamoured of Stieglitz’s aesthetic and an ardent subscriber to Camera Work, his photography magazine. While she was horrified to discover her own work up on the walls without her permission, the discovery of a kindred spirit who supported her innovations was exactly the boost she needed.
At first they wrote: an explosion of letters that carried on unstintingly right through their lives, numbering a total of 25,000 pages. When O’Keeffe caught Spanish flu in 1919 they were close enough for Stieglitz to suggest he care for her in Manhattan, though he was married and more than two decades her senior. He visited her sweltering buttercup-coloured studio every day, armed with his camera. After a febrile month of this he forced his wife’s hand by bringing O’Keeffe to the marital home. Emmeline walked in on them mid-photoshoot and promptly threw him out, providing the exit he had craved for years.
Back in Texas, O’Keeffe had foreseen the damage love might do to her cherished independence, writing to a friend “don’t let it get you Anita if you value your peace of mind – it will eat you up and swallow you whole”. Finding a way of balancing these countervailing needs would bedevil her for 20 years. Stieglitz supported her painting, but he also made immense demands on her energy and time, insisting on a frenetic social life that impinged on the calm focus her work required. Then there was his insistence on seeing her as a kind of radiantly erotic child-woman, the epitome of feminine truth and virtue. As Roxanne Robinson puts it in her insightful biography, Georgia O’Keeffe: “Like most, Stieglitz’s pedestal was uplifting but would give her little room to move.”
Oppressive gender stereotypes also affected readings of O’Keeffe’s work. In 1919, she returned to oil, producing her first flowers as well as apples, avocados and other pleasingly rounded forms. Stylised, tightly cropped and enlarged (Stieglitz’s photography was an influence, as was the work of her friend Paul Strand), the flowers excited her with their chambers and contours, their frills and fleshy folds, their latent potential for abstract form. But these subtleties were lost on the critics. Primed by an exhibition of Stieglitz’s nudes, they saw a revelatory exposé of female sexuality. In her work as well as being, O’Keeffe had become an unwilling lightning rod for men’s constricting ideas about that mysterious creature, the female of the species.
In response, she painted a skyscraper. “When I wanted to paint New York, the men thought I’d lost my mind,” she said later. “But I did it anyway.” Her nocturnal streets are peopleless and light-besotted, homing surreally in on sunspots and streetlamp haloes, a small moon surfing clouds above canyons of glowing concrete and glass. Everything is smoothed, not painted from life so much as patterned imaginatively, to encode feeling.
The skyscrapers were a triumphant territory grab, but difficulties lay ahead. In 1927, she had surgery for a benign lump in her breast. That same year a woman began to frequent Stieglitz’s new gallery, the Room. Stieglitz, always drawn to pretty girls, began an ill-concealed affair with the married Dorothy Norman, intensifying O’Keeffe’s feelings of claustrophobia in their relationship, the strangulating sense of no longer being the author of her days.
Penned up in Manhattan or at Stieglitz’s family home in upstate New York, she chafed against the landscape, the noise, the requirements of sociability. Now there was the added pain of infidelity, the humiliation of betrayal. She began to take increasingly long trips to New Mexico. Separation helped, as did the dizzying, wonderful sense of being wholeheartedly committed to her needs, the demands of her taste and talent. All the same, the love triangle took a toll, reaching its crisis in 1932.
Walls again. That spring, O’Keeffe was invited to paint a mural in the women’s powder room at the new Radio City Music Hall. She agreed to the project despite minimal payment because she’d long fancied the challenge of painting “big”, summoning the largest of her visions. Stieglitz, who loathed public art and liked to tightly control his now wife’s fees, was livid when he heard, co-opting his friends to simultaneously inform O’Keeffe of her idiocy and persuade her to be more friendly to his mistress.
Never one to be swayed by a crowd, O’Keeffe stuck firm, only to discover that the plaster of the new building wasn’t going to be dry in time. Unable to apply paint, increasingly uneasy, she pulled out, and promptly tumbled into a full-blown breakdown. She couldn’t eat and wept for days on end. New York’s crowded streets were suddenly appalling, and she became agoraphobic. While her white flowers hung in Stieglitz’s gallery, she was hospitalised for psychoneurosis.
At the age of 96, O’Keeffe was interviewed by Andy Warhol, another creator of a purely American vernacular. She told him about the landscape that was her most cherished home and subject, the wild expanses of New Mexico. “I have lived up there at the end of the world by myself a long time. You walk around with your thing out in the field and nobody cares. It’s nice.”
From the beginning, New Mexico represented salvation, though not in the wooden sense of the hill-dominating crosses she so often painted. O’Keeffe’s salvation was earthy, even pagan, comprised of the cold water pleasure of working unceasingly at what you love, burning anxiety away beneath the desert sun.
Back in 1929 she had spent a summer in Taos with the painter Beck Strand. The pair were taken up by a community of powerfully independent women, among them Mabel Dodge Luhan, the formidable heiress and art patron, and the Hon Dorothy Brett, a stone-deaf Englishwoman who carried a knife in her boots. A single scene epitomises the season’s dykey aesthetics: O’Keeffe and Strand in swimsuits, washing the Ford they’d just learned to drive. In the absence of cloths they polished it with sanitary towels – O’Keeffe was nothing if not enterprising – before stripping and giddily hosing each other.
New Mexico was nourishing, but part of its nourishment was the way everything was pared back to essentials, the flab cut away. O’Keeffe was getting down to the bones of things, loving the hard, stripped land and the tough, stringent way it forced her to live. Bones were beautiful, with their apertures and cavities, their bleached resilience. She painted them suspended impossibly against the sky, pink and white calico roses tucked coquettishly where ears once were. In 1931 she set a cow skull against draped stripes of red, white and blue. As Randall Griffin observes in Georgia O’Keeffe, it was another territory grab, “calculated to provoke and to cast O’Keeffe as an emphatically national artist”.
After her breakdown, she dispensed with half measures. She had compromised emotionally and it had almost destroyed her; now she would focus on her own work. Summers were henceforth spent in New Mexico, while the winter’s mad socialising went on without her. As a consequence of her increased happiness, things ran better between her and Stieglitz, though he missed her painfully, bemoaning her absence in long tormented letters. His growing frailty exposed the gulf of years between them, but also the abiding tenderness of their bond. The knack of arranging things in idiosyncratic ways may have been O’Keeffe’s greatest gift, extending from the construction of her paintings to how she solved the puzzle of reconciling two people’s competing needs.
Her base in those years was Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch in Rio Arriba County. Initially she rented a room, but as her commitment to the place deepened she bought a small adobe house. “As soon as I saw it, I knew I must have it,” she said, adding in a letter to artist Arthur Dove: “I wish you could see what I see out the window – the earth pink and yellow cliffs to the north – the full pale moon about to go down in an early morning lavender sky ... pink and purple hills in front and the scrubby fine dull green cedars – and a feeling of much space – It is a very beautiful world.”
What she liked to do was look and then retreat, spending days at a time deep in the landscape, making sketches in the rear of her Ford. Back in Manhattan for the winter, she painted from memory, dispensing with all but the essentials, trying to capture the heart of it: the scent of sagebrush and cedar, the way it felt at dusk as if you could climb a ladder right into the sky, the faraway magically nearby.
In May 1946 O’Keeffe had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the first for a woman artist. Later that summer, Stieglitz was struck by a kind of seizure. When notified by his doctor, O’Keeffe elected to remain at Ghost Ranch. He seemed to recover, only to suffer a massive stroke. No time to pack. A plane, and then a bedside vigil, taken in turns with the hated Norman.
He died in the small hours of 13 July, and O’Keeffe buried him in a plain pine coffin. It had a pink satin lining, and on the night before the funeral she ripped it out and sewed a new one from white linen. An elegant anecdote, though it might be added that she did not cremate Stieglitz with her watercolour Blue Lines, as he’d asked her to years before, and that in the grieving days after his death she rang Norman and banished her from the gallery for good.
“As you come to it over a hill, it looks like a mile of elephants – grey hills all about the same size with almost white sand at their feet,” O’Keeffe wrote of the Black Place, a remote landscape that inspired her more than any other location. The paintings she made there tip geological form over the threshold of abstraction: the serried hills smashed into shards of grey and puce, bifurcated by yolk-coloured cracks or spills of oily black.
Hills like elephants sounds an echo of Hemingway, and there is something of his habits of compression at work in O’Keeffe, a desire to erase everything extraneous, to convey emotion without confessing it directly. She painted very flat, making surfaces so smooth she once compared the sensation to roller-skating. The risk is blandness, but it can also produce – The Black Place, 1943, say – cleanly assembled structures that quiver with unvoiced feeling.
After she had dealt with Stieglitz’s estate, O’Keeffe abandoned New York, wedding herself to this enigmatic place. She’d bought the Abiquiú house a few months before his death, for $10. It took a decade to rebuild, the bulk of the labour done by her friend and housekeeper Marie Chabot. Finished, it looked and felt like being inside a shell. The rooms were kept almost empty, the nun-like daybed and long stripped table floating in whitewashed space.
Elegance shares a border with crankiness, independence with selfishness, and O’Keeffe was by no means a saint. As she grew older, she became increasingly ornery, battling with friends and staff alike. All the same, she made a garden in the desert, a fruitful life composed of hard, keen work, one eye always out for a new subject. Her last great series came in the mid-1960s: the sky above clouds, a perspective she’d been thrilled to discover from aeroplane windows. These are the strangest of her paintings, almost childlike in their simplifications and cradle-colours, the white clouds floating like lily pads on rapturous expanses of blue and pink.
Live long enough and you might find yourself the toast of a new generation. In 1970, O’Keeffe was the subject of a substantial retrospective at the Whitney. Again, the honour was accompanied by a serious blow. “I’d been to town and was going home,” she told Warhol. “And I thought to myself, ‘Well the sun is shining, but it looks so grey.’” The greyness was the beginning of macular degeneration, which would claim first her ability to paint, and then her capacity to see.
And then a stranger came knocking, a beautiful young man, though as in a fairytale he had to try three times before he was granted admittance. Juan Hamilton was 27, a drifter with artistic ambitions. Despite the age gap, a closeness developed between them. O’Keeffe doted on Hamilton, encouraging his pottery and allowing him to take increasing control of her finances, her houses and her friendships.
In 1978 she signed an unwitnessed document giving him power of attorney, shortly after which he purchased a mansion and three Mercedes in her name. And when she died on 6 March 1986, at the age of 98, a 1984 codicil to her will revealed that she’d left him the majority of her estate, although all previous wills had prioritised charitable donations.
In the contentious aftermath, an unpleasant story emerged from the house staff, who said that the day the codicil was signed, O’Keeffe had believed she was marrying Hamilton; that, dressed in white and surrounded by flowers, she had not understood what she was signing. The family went to court, and after complex negotiations Hamilton agreed to hand over a substantial amount of the estate to create the non-profit Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation.
It was a messy end, though what it perhaps reveals is the immense control that simplicity, elegance and calm require. Without O’Keeffe’s sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, exacting presence, chaos loomed. She made it happen, those simple scenes that are anything but, opening a door to a new kind of American art, a new kind of woman’s life. “Making your unknown known is the most important thing,” she said, “and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”
