O'Keeffe, Georgia, Home and Studio

The home and studio of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe in Abiquiu, New Mexico, is one of the most important artistic sites in the southwestern United States. The buildings, their immediate surroundings, and the views they command of the magnificent landscape that inspired many of O'Keeffe's best-known paintings all combine to provide insight into the vision and process of a major figure in twentieth-century American art. This insight becomes particularly useful for evaluating the work of an artist whose life and persona have taken on mythic proportions within our national culture. O'Keeffe has become, according to critic Mark Stevens, "an iconic figure, a woman who represents an essential version of the American dream." She embodied the dream in the two great pilgrimages that defined her life, the first one to New York City in 1918 and the second one to the West in 1929. These two destinations themselves have symbolic importance in the national psyche they are the "essential, yet contrary, destinations of the questing American spirit." In the first pilgrimage, she breached the masculine preserve of art at a time when few women could gain entree and seemed effortlessly to take her place among the male artists of the Stieglitz circle. In the second, she deliberately withdrew from New York, the nation's intellectual and artistic center, to make the quintessentially American journey West responding to the call of the majestic, heroic landscape that has beckoned pioneers throughout American history. She made the journey by herself, a remarkable step in an era when women rarely conceived such a notion, let alone acted upon it. In the choice to pursue her life's work solitarily, apart from husband and marriage, "she gave the feminine a powerful scale." The mythic quality ascribed to O'Keeffe has often obscured the precise nature of her contribution to the history of American art. A visit to the painter's home and studio the place she created and refined over a thirty-five-year period as a space for living and working helps to clarify the contribution and affords a personalized framework for better grasping and appreciating the cultural values embodied in her art. O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiu, wrote art critic Michael Kimmelman, "is probably [her] best late work, in fact, her fullest statement about art and life." From the first public exhibition of Georgia O'Keeffe's art in New York City in 1916 to the establishment of a museum dedicated exclusively to her work some eighty years later in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she has remained an American original, resisting categorization. "Remarkably unaffected by the fluctuations of artistic trends," wrote art historian Lisa Mintz Messinger, "O'Keeffe created her own highly individual style of painting, which synthesized the formal language of modern European abstraction and the subjects of American pictorialism." Her images of flowers, fruit, barns, skyscrapers, trees, bones, the Texas plains, and the high desert of New Mexico form a cohesive body of work, consisting of a limited number of themes that she worked and reworked with an increasing mastery over the course of her long career. O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the second child in a family of two sons and five daughters. Raised on a dairy farm, she developed an affinity for the forms of nature, as would a farm child who is exposed daily to the rhythms and cycles of the seasons. After she turned fifteen, her life became a peripatetic one: she spent her teen years in Virginia and her early adulthood in Chicago, South Carolina, New York City, and western Texas. Despite her many moves and changing circumstances, she remained dedicated to one goal. From an early age, she knew she wanted to be an artist, proclaiming her decision to a playmate in the eighth grade. "I don't really know where I got my artist idea. ... I only know that by that time it was definitely settled in my mind," she later wrote. However, at one critical point in her life, O'Keeffe wavered from her path. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905 and the Art Students League in New York City in 1907, she lost interest in painting, abandoning it in 1908 to pursue a career in commercial art in Chicago. Her enthusiasm for painting was rekindled four years later, in the fall of 1912, when her sisters persuaded her to attend an art course taught by Alon Bement at the University of Virginia. Bemont was a disciple of Arthur Wesley Dow, an innovative educator who was head of the art department of Columbia University Teachers College in New York. Dow had developed a revolutionary approach to teaching and creating art. Basing his approach on Japanese design principles, Dow visualized composition not as the projection on canvas of objects accurately represented, but as the harmonious interrelationship of forms that together expressed an idea, a mood, or a state of mind. Extending aesthetics into the realm of daily living, Dow believed that his theory of composition could be applied to every human activity, thus providing a path to integration and harmony. "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," O'Keeffe explained in 1974. The impact of Dow's ideas on O'Keeffe was profound, affecting the way she created art and the way she lived her life. She took classes from Dow at Columbia University Teachers College in the academic year 1914 1915 and again in the spring of 1916. "This man had one dominating idea," she told an interviewer in 1962, "to fill a space in a beautiful way and that interested me." O'Keeffe incorporated Dow's idea that all physical choices should be aesthetic ones into her own curriculum at the Amarillo High School in Texas, where she taught art classes from 1912 to 1914, and at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, where she was head of the art department from 1916 to 1918. "I liked to convey to [the students] that art is important in everyday life. I wanted them to learn the principle: that when you buy a pair of shoes or place a window in the front of a house or address a letter or comb your hair, consider it carefully, so that it looks well," she said. Some thirty years passed before O'Keeffe was able to apply this concept in a rigorous personal way. The opportunity came in 1945, when she acquired the house in Abiquiu the first living and working space over which she had total control. In her work as a painter, however, Dow's theory affected the development of O'Keeffe's art almost immediately after her first class with him in 1914. "By this time I had a technique for handling oil and water color easily; Dow gave me something to do with it," she said. Inspired by his ideas, she abandoned her formal training in 1915 and embarked on a remarkable series of abstractions drawn in charcoal. These works came to the attention of the prominent photographer and New York gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz early in 1916. Later that year, Stieglitz showed the charcoals at his Little Galleries of the Photo Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue (commonly referred to as the gallery 291), where he featured the work of many avant-garde European and American artists of the day, sometimes for the first time anywhere in the world. At 291 in the spring of 1917, he held O'Keeffe's first solo exhibition, an amazing achievement for a young teacher from Texas, whose one-person show debuted at the premiere modernist gallery of the period. In 1918, with an offer of financial support from Stiegltiz, O'Keeffe left her teaching job in Canyon, Texas, and moved to New York City to pursue a full-time career as a painter. Stieglitz vigorously promoted her art and also began to photograph her, producing over the course of twenty years a composite portrait consisting of more than three hundred images. The two began living together soon after O'Keeffe arrived, and in 1924, they were married. Through her professional and personal association with Stieglitz, O'Keeffe found herself in the midst of one of the most important circles of American early modernists, including the painters John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Charles Demuth. Their discussions about the revolutionary achievements of European modernism were stimulating to the newcomer O'Keeffe, encouraging her growth as a painter. However, the members of the Stieglitz circle were concerned not just with integrating into their own work the abstract visual language and mystical overtones promulgated by avant-garde European artists such as Wassily Kandinsky. Most importantly, they wanted to adapt these ideas to the creation of a distinctly American body of work. To Stieglitz and his colleagues, O'Keeffe's art embodied an innately American quality, undiluted by foreign influence.68 Taking note of O'Keeffe's inborn sensibility, sculptor Constantin Brancusi observed, "There is no imitation of Europe here; it is a force a liberating free force. During the period from 1918 to the late 1920s, O'Keeffe produced many of her signature paintings: the lyrical, emotionally charged abstractions and the sensual flower close-ups, both of which invited erotic interpretations that persisted throughout her career despite her objections to the contrary; her visionary pictures of Manhattan skyscrapers and East River panoramas, which continue to stand as among the preeminent images of the city; and the luscious renderings of fruit, leaves, and trees often painted during summer visits to the Stieglitz family vacation home at Lake George, New York. This range of subjects related in part to the seasonal routine of the life she shared with Stieglitz, who insisted on maintaining an annual pattern of spending the winter months in Manhattan and the summer months at Lake George, often surrounded by the members of the Stieglitz clan. By the late 1920s, O'Keeffe had become weary of the Manhattan-Lake George orbit prescribed by Stieglitz, and marital conflicts and professional pressures had taken their toll on her. She began to look for new sources of artistic inspiration and emotional support. An extended trip to New Mexico from April to August 1929 provided the inspiration for which she had been searching. Arriving in Santa Fe (which she had visited for the first time in 1917), O'Keeffe soon ended up in Taos as a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan, the transplanted New York socialite and hostess extraordinaire. At Luhan's house, O'Keeffe met a number of people who became lifelong friends, among them the journalist Willard "Spud" Johnson, the curator Daniel Carton Rich, and the photographer Ansel Adams. Mostly, however, she concentrated on exploring and painting the country around Taos. That summer she wrote New York critic Henry McBride, "You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here and finally feeling in the right place again I feel like myself.... I have the most beautiful adobe studio never had such a nice place all to myself Out the very large window to a rich green alfalfa field then the sage brush and beyond a most perfect mountain it makes me feel like flying.... " The high desert of New Mexico, with its surprising geological formations, vivid colors, and intense light, gave O'Keeffe the visual sources that revitalized her creative spirit. As art historian Jack Cowart characterized it: "The sky, the vastness, the sounds,... canyons, rocks, and bleached bones struck her as authentic and essential to her life as well as to her art.... In the Southwest, she found primal mystery ... ." In a letter written at Lake George in October 1933, she urged the artist Russell Vernon Hunter to see New Mexico as she did: "Try to paint your world as tho you are the first man looking at it The wind and the heat and the cold The dust and the vast starlit night. ... When the spring comes I think I must go back to it I sometimes wish I had never seen it The pull is so strong So give my greetings to the sky." Succumbing to the pull over the next twenty years, O'Keeffe established her own seasonal circuit between New Mexico and New York, a routine separate from that of Stieglitz's. She sometimes spent as many as six months a year in New Mexico, returning to Stieglitz and New York in time to exhibit her latest paintings during the winter exhibition season. O'Keeffe was neither the first nor the only artist in the Stieglitz circle to respond to the lure of New Mexico: Marsden Hartley had gone there in 1918 and John Marin in 1929 both men, like so many others, the guests of Mabel Luhan in Taos. Along with O'Keeffe, they, in effect, participated in a migration of modernist painters to the region during the 1920s and 1930s. The group included Raymond Jonson, Stuart Davis, Randall Davey, and Andrew Dasburg, all of whom were attracted by what D. H. Lawrence called the "spirit of place." The distinctive character of the land and the separateness of its multilayered culture challenged them to try to pinpoint the essence of "the Great American Mystery the National Rip Van Winkle the United States which is not the United States." More than most of the artists in the group, O'Keeffe succeeded in establishing a relationship between herself and the landscape "so uniquely personal and intimate that her work there became a consummate expression of them both, to the point that it changed the American public's perceptions of the Southwest." Among the most original, and enigmatic, of these desert motifs were O'Keeffe's images of animal bones, a theme she began to paint in 1930. By nature a gatherer of such souvenirs as rocks, shells, and flowers, O'Keeffe found that in the desert "there was nothing to see in the land in the way of a flower. There were just dry white bones. So I picked them up." Throughout the decades of the 1930s, she worked on a variety of still-life compositions featuring animal skulls. In the 1940s, the bone series culminated with O'Keeffe's monumental images of animal pelvises, twelve pictures of which she painted between 1943 and 1945. At first, she placed the pelvises in landscape settings. Subsequently, she paired the images down to the pelvises alone, focusing on the voids of the sockets, through which she sometimes provided a glimpse of the moon, sometimes only sky. For O'Keeffe, these images were her own private "symbols of the desert," but in time, they became cultural symbols of the American Southwest. Despite the uniqueness of the bone imagery, the New Mexican landscape remained O'Keeffe's most enduring theme. It was not until in 1934, however, after she had made several trips to New Mexico, that O'Keeffe discovered the Red Rock landscape north of Abiquiu, the southwestern subject with which she would be most identified. That summer, a friend told her about the striking terrain around Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch located 60 miles west of Taos in the Chama River Valley, not far from Abiquiu. Her first sight of the eroded and brilliantly colored cliffs at Ghost Ranch convinced her that, as she later said, "this is my world up here." She immediately began to explore the motifs that she would paint again and again: the high pink and yellow cliffs at Ghost Ranch; the flat-topped blue mountain called the Cerro Pedernal; the wrinkled red hills around Abiquiu; and the strange volcanic formations at the nearby White Place. In subsequent years, she returned to Ghost Ranch, where, beginning in 1937, she rented the small house of Arthur Pack, the owner of the ranch. Pack built the U-shaped, flat-roofed adobe for his family in 1933. When O'Keeffe bought the house from Pack seven years later, she enlarged windows and knocked out a wall to create a studio. Furnishings remained sparse, and as decoration, O'Keeffe collected animal skulls, bones, and rocks during her daily walks. For the most part, however, the interior of O'Keeffe's house at Ghost Ranch was secondary to its exterior views the portal on the south faced O'Keeffe's favorite mountain, the Cerro Pedernal, and windows on the north faced the artist's beloved pink and yellow cliffs. "I've done much less [than at the Abiquiu house] to make it mine," she said in 1968. "All my association with it is a kind of freedom." For this reason, as O'Keeffe stated frequently over the years, she felt renewed by her summer and fall stays at the Ghost Ranch house. However, the house was not practical as a year-round residence. It had neither running water nor a readily available source of fresh fruits and vegetables, and it was extremely isolated, especially in the winter. There was no telephone or telegraph. As early as the mid-193Os, O'Keeffe had been interested in the property in Abiquiu as the location that best afforded her not only privacy and inspiration for painting, but also self-sufficiency. As Alfred Stieglitz's health declined in the 1930s and it became clear that she would leave New York, O'Keeffe focused on the Abiquiu house as her permanent destination. When she finally moved to Abiquiu in 1949, she was sixty-two years old and a major figure in American art. She had brought five decades of aesthetic experience to bear on the rehabilitation and design of the first and only full-time residence that she owned. The house in Abiquiu "became the fulfillment of a vision that she had already had.... It conformed to an idea of how she wanted to live... ." Here, the application of Dow's principles to all facets of life could be made. Thus she orchestrated the aspects of her life "in a simple and clear way, the way she liked a room to look, the way she liked to dress. It was unpretentious and, to some, austere," wrote her assistant Juan Hamilton. "Her genius was a oneness with herself.... There was a connection 0-3 between her internal and external world that was full of truth." The power of that truth is clear to the visitor. O'Keeffe's Abiquiu residence is the most conscious and complete expression of her philosophy of "filling a space in a beautiful way." In rooms handcrafted out of mud and adorned with the artist's treasured rocks and bones, art and life successfully became integrated. Every element conforms to O'Keeffe's sense of color, design, and the harmonious relationship of one object to another and of the house to the land. The residence in Abiquiu, more than any other place O'Keeffe occupied, exemplifies her sensibility by being at one with the art she created during the last thirty-five years of her life. Other places are associated with O'Keeffe through the art she produced while living in them. These include the room she and Stieglitz occupied on the thirtieth floor of the Shelton Hotel in New York from 1925 to 1936; the penthouse apartment the couple rented on East 54th Street in New York from 1936 to 1949; the Stieglitz family summer home at Lake George; and O'Keeffe's house at Ghost Ranch, where she spent most summers and falls from 1937 to 1984. Some of these residences no longer exist (such as the Stieglitz summer home), or they have been substantially altered since the artist's occupancy so that they cannot convey a meaningful association with O'Keeffe. The latter is the case with the artist's New York City residences and, to a large extent, with her Ghost Ranch house. Although the setting of the Ghost Ranch house beneath O'Keeffe's favorite pink and yellow cliffs still conveys her intimate relationship with the landscape, the interiors of the house lack sufficient integrity to express the essence of her contribution to American culture. The Abiquiu residence, however, remains remarkably intact and able to convey three important aspects of O'Keeffe's contribution: 1) the personal values she expressed in the way she lived her life; 2) the aesthetic values she communicated in her art through the manipulation of form, color, and themes taken from the surrounding environment; 3) the spiritual values she was able to convey by transforming symbols of nature into universal motifs. With their simple and practical furnishings, elemental colors, and spectacular views out the huge picture windows, the interiors at Abiquiu reveal the fierce and disciplined focus of an artist profoundly dedicated to her work. There is nothing extraneous in these spaces, all elements work together to support the artist's vision. "I like to have things as sparse as possible," she once said. "If you have an empty wall, you can think on it better. I like a space to think in... ." Certain spaces of the house and studio in particular impart the contemplative quality of this period in O'Keeffe's life. In the sitting room, the brown adobe surfaces of the walls glow with the soft light that filters in from the skylights and large window opening onto the garden. "I used to live almost in this room," she said in 1981, describing how she would sit by the fireplace and look out the big window. She also liked to read in the sitting room, where she initially kept books before moving them all to the book room, and to listen to music, an activity she avidly pursued throughout her life, having been a student of both piano and violin in her youth. Evidence of her great love of music exists in the presence of a fine stereo component system that she chose only after careful research in the 1960s. O'Keeffe's bedroom evokes contemplation as well, and also reductivity. The elements of the room are pared down to essentials: a bed, a table, a reading lamp. Rocks, shells, and fossils are carefully arranged on an adobe ledge. Simple white cotton curtains cover the enormous picture windows. When the curtains are closed, the focal points in the room become the elegant adobe hood of the corner fireplace and the bronze hand embedded in the wall beside it. When the curtains are open, the focal point becomes the panoramic sweep of the Chama River Valley and the Abiquiu Mesa, dramatically underscoring for the visitor the uniquely personal relationship between O'Keeffe and the landscape. O'Keeffe produced her last three important painting series during her years in Abiquiu: the patio pictures, the images of the winding road out her bedroom window, and the Sky Above Clouds series, her impressions of what the sky looks like from an airplane. In two of the three series, her sources were limited to the confines of the house and its surroundings. The qualities of reduction and focus so evident in the details of the residence itself are discernible in the images O'Keeffe created by closely observing her immediate environment. In both of these late series, she started with depictions that were fairly realistic and, as she reworked each theme, she pared the compositions down to two or three essential elements. "I work with an idea for a long time," O'Keeffe said. "It's like getting acquainted with a person, and I don't get acquainted easily... . Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same thing, it becomes simplified till it can be nothing but abstract." O'Keeffe's reductive process is apparent in the thirty patio pictures she painted between 1946 and 1960, which document her profound fascination with the Abiquiu patio wall and its door. Doors had always been featured in O'Keeffe's work, but in these paintings, they became the central motif of the compositions. In the earliest pictures of the series, O'Keeffe presented the patio wall and door in a straightforward, representational way: the architectural context is clear from the descriptive elements O'Keeffe included, such as sky, ground, the clay paving tiles of the courtyard, and sometimes the irregular line of the top of the parapet. In later works, O'Keeffe eliminated details until the context is not identifiable. This is true of a 1954 work misleadingly titled My Last Door, an image that is two-dimensional, a totally abstract arrangement consisting of a flat shape isolated against a blank rectangle. The mood of such late works is tranquil and meditative, not emotionally charged, as O'Keeffe's earlier images tended to be, perhaps echoing, as one art historian wrote, "the mood of the artist as she faced life in New Mexico after Stieglitz's death." Similarly, the series of images O'Keeffe created by observing the view out her bedroom window to the east is marked by a progressive elimination of elements. The earliest paintings, produced in 1952, include the details of roadside trees and of the vegetation and topography of the Abiquiu Mesa. However, in one of the last pictures of the series, The Winter Road I (1963, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), O'Keeffe radically limited the elements to only the calligraphic sweep of the road against the white background of snow, endowing the image with "a mysterious, evocative presence," one that "invites an attitude of mystical contemplation." O'Keeffe described her fascination with the view in her 1976 book: "Two walls of my room in the Abiquiu house are glass and from one window I see the road toward Espanola and the world. The road fascinates me with its ups and downs and finally its wide sweep as it speeds toward the wall of my hilltop to go past me... I began drawing and painting it as a new shape. The trees and mesa beside it were unimportant for that painting it was just the road." O'Keeffe's focus during the last significant decades of her painting career on quiet evocations of her home environment can be compared to the great meditative studies of the sea that Winslow Homer produced in the 1890s and early 1900s, at the end of his life. Just as Homer's depictions of the elemental forces of nature are inextricably linked to his home and studio at Prout's Neck, Maine (a National Historic Landmark in private ownership), O'Keeffe's mysterious contemplations of her patio wall and its door are identified solely with her house in Abiquiu. For both artists in the last, more meditative phases of their lives, home and the artistic process are bound together. O'Keeffe described the connection in 1962:

One works because I suppose it is the most interesting thing one knows to do. The days one works are the best days. On the other days one is hurrying through the other things one imagines one has to do to keep one's life going. You get the garden planted. You get the roof fixed. You take the dog to the vet. You spend a day with a friend. You learn to make a new kind of bread... You may even enjoy doing such things. You think they have to be done. . . . But always you are hurrying through these things with a certain amount of aggravation so that you can get at the paintings again because that is the high spot in a way it is what you do all the other things for. . . . The painting is like a thread that runs through all the reasons for all the other things that make one's life.