<Archive Obituary> Georgia O'Keefe (March 6th, 1986)
Bill Schenley
Georgia O'Keeffe, the undisputed doyenne of American
painting and a leader, with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz,
of a crucial phase in the development and dissemination of
American modernism, died yesterday at St. Vincent Hospital
in Santa Fe, N.M. She was 98 years old, and had lived in
Santa Fe since 1984, when she moved from her longtime home
and studio in Abiquiu, N.M.
As an artist, as a reclusive but overwhelming personality
and as a woman in what was for a long time a man's world,
Georgia O'Keeffe was a key figure in the American 20th
century. As much as anyone since Mary Cassatt, she raised
the awareness of the American public to the fact that a
woman could be the equal of any man in her chosen field.
As an interpreter and manipulator of natural forms, as a
strong and individual colorist and as the lyric poet of her
beloved New Mexico landscape, she left her mark on the
history of American art and made it possible for other women
to explore a new gamut of symbolic and ambiguous imagery.
Miss O'Keeffe was strong-willed, hard-working and whimsical.
She would wrap herself in a blanket and wait, shivering, in
the cold dark for a sunrise to paint; would climb a ladder
to see the stars from a roof, and hop around in her
stockings on an enormous canvas to add final touches before
all the paint dried.
Miss O'Keeffe burst upon the art world in 1916, under
auspices most likely to attract attention at the time: in a
one-woman show of her paintings at the famous ''291''
gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, the world-renowned pioneer in
photography and sponsor of newly emerging modern art.
From then on, Miss O'Keeffe was in the spotlight, shifting
from one audacious way of presenting a subject to another,
and usually succeeding with each new experiment. Her colors
dazzled, her erotic implications provoked and stimulated,
her subjects astonished and amused.
She painted the skull of a horse with a bright pink Mexican
artificial flower stuck in the eye socket. She painted other
animal skulls, horns, pelvises and leg bones that gleamed
white against brilliant skies, spanned valleys and touched
mountain tops, all with serene disdain for conventional
notions of perspective. She also painted New York
skyscrapers, Canadian barns and crosses and oversized
flowers and rocks.
The artist painted as she pleased, and sold virtually as
often as she liked, for very good prices. She joined the
elite, avant-garde, inner circle of modern American artists
around Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. Stieglitz took
more than 500 photographs of her.
''He photographed me until I was crazy,'' Miss O'Keeffe said
in later years. Others have called the pictures Stieglitz
took of her the greatest love poem in the history of
photography.
Her beauty aged well to another kind - weather-beaten,
leathery skin wrinkled over high cheekbones and around a
firm mouth that spoke fearlessly and tolerated no bores. And
long after Stieglitz had died, in 1946, after Miss O'Keeffe
forsook New York for the mountains and deserts of New
Mexico, she was discovered all over again and proclaimed a
pioneering artist of great individuality, power and historic
significance.
Miss O'Keeffe had never stopped painting, never stopped
winning critical acclaim, never stopped being written about
as an interesting ''character.'' But her paintings were so
diverse, so uniquely her own and so unrelated to trends or
schools that they had not attracted much close attention
from New York critics.
Retrospective at Age 83
Then, in 1970, when she was 83 years old, a retrospective
exhibition of her work was held at the Whitney Museum of
American Art. The New York critics and collectors and a new
generation of students, artists and aficionados made an
astonishing discovery. The artist who had been joyously
painting as she pleased had been a step ahead of everyone,
all the time.
Strolling through the Whitney show, one could think Miss
O'Keeffe had made some ''very neat adaptations of various
successful styles of the 1950's and 1960's in her own highly
refined and slightly removed manner,'' wrote John Canaday,
art critic of The New York Times. He described apparent
similarities to Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett
Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Andrew Wyeth.
But the paintings that seemed to reflect those styles were
done by Miss O'Keeffe in 1920 or earlier, Mr. Canaday
pointed out, ''when her seeming models were either not yet
born or were delighting their mothers with their first
childish scrawls.''
With no thought of resting on her laurels, the indomitable
octogenarian went right on working. She painted new
pictures, wrote an autobiography illustrated with her
paintings that sold out immediately at $75 a copy and
cooperated in the production of a film about herself and her
work that won an award from the Directors Guild of America
for Perry Miller Adato, who produced it for WNET-TV in 1977.
Little European Influence
Despite the affinity of Miss O'Keeffe's work to paintings of
other modern American artists, her paintings show
surprisingly little evidence of the European influence seen
in other American art. ''She escaped the fate of remaining
thrall to a European model by taking possession of her
American experience and making that the core of her artistic
vision,'' Hilton Kramer wrote in The Times in 1976 in his
review of her book. Nevertheless, he declared, ''her
painting, though filled with vivid images of the places
where she has lived, was anything but a product of the
provinces.''
Miss O'Keeffe's career, Mr. Kramer wrote, ''is unlike almost
any other in the history of modern art in America.'' It
embraced virtually the whole history of modern art, from the
early years of the century when Stieglitz exhibited the new
art to a shocked New York, to its eventual acceptance as a
part of our culture, according to Mr. Kramer. At the age of
89, when her book was published, Miss O'Keeffe remained ''a
vital figure first of all as a painter of remarkable
originality and power but also as a precious link with the
first generation of American modernists,'' he wrote.
Born on Wisconsin Farm
Georgia O'Keeffe was born on a wheat farm near Sun Prairie,
Wis., on Nov. 15, 1887. Her father, Francis Calixtus
O'Keeffe, was Irish; her mother was the former Ida Totto.
Georgia was named for her maternal grandfather, Giorgio
Totto, who came to the United States from Hungary, where he
had gone from Italy.
When Miss O'Keeffe was 14 years old, the family moved to
Williamsburg, Va. Three years later she graduated from
Chatham Protestant Episcopal Institute in Virginia. She went
immediately to Chicago, where she studied for a year at the
Art Institute with John Vanderpoel. Both of her grandmothers
had dabbled at painting, two of her four sisters painted and
one taught art. The elder of her two brothers was an
architect.
Miss O'Keeffe had decided in Sun Prairie that she was going
to be an artist when she grew up although, she wrote in her
book, ''I hadn't a desire to make anything like the pictures
I had seen'' and she did not have a very clear idea of what
an artist would be. For 10 discouraging years, she studied
and painted, supporting herself by doing commercial art for
advertising agencies and by teaching. She attended art
classes at the Art Students League in New York in 1907-08,
the University of Virginia Summer School in 1912 and
Teachers College of Columbia University in 1916.
She was supervisor of art in the public schools of Amarillo,
Tex., from 1912 to 1916, and taught summer classes at
Columbia College in South Carolina and the University of
Virginia. In 1916 she became head of the art department of
West Texas Normal College.
Miss O'Keeffe's early pictures were imitative, but as she
developed her technique, a ruggedly individual style began
to assert itself. The results were out of step with the
popular taste and accepted style of the early 1900's, but
they encouraged her to concentrate boldly on expressing her
own ideas.
''One day,'' Miss O'Keeffe recalled in later years, ''I
found myself saying to myself, 'I can't live where I want
to. I can't even say what I want to.' I decided I was a very
stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to.''
'At Last, a Woman on Paper'
A friend, Anita Pollitzer, showed a group of Miss O'Keeffe's
drawings and watercolors to Stieglitz in 1916. Miss
Pollitzer, later to become a champion of equal rights for
women and chairman of the National Woman's Party, had been a
classmate of Miss O'Keeffe's at Columbia.
''At last, a woman on paper!'' Stieglitz exclaimed when he
saw the pictures. He hung them in his gallery, and the
unknown Miss O'Keeffe created an immediate stir in the art
world.
''Mabel Dodge Luhan brought strings of psychiatrists to look
at them,'' Stieglitz recalled later. ''The critics came.
There was talk, talk, talk.'' Some of the talk hinted at
erotic symbolism.
Miss O'Keeffe stormed up from Texas and upbraided Stieglitz
for showing her work without her permission. His answer was
to persuade her to move to New York, abandon her teaching
and devote herself to painting. He presented one-woman shows
of her work almost annually thereafter until 1946, the year
of his death. He and Miss O'Keeffe had been married 21
years.
After moving to New York, Miss O'Keeffe divided her time
between New York City and Lake George, N.Y. After 1929, she
also spent a great deal of time in New Mexico. She made her
permanent residence at Abiquiu after the death of her
husband.
Stieglitz's vigilant and canny management was a major factor
in her rise to fame and fortune. Miss O'Keeffe continued to
wear the clothes she pleased and to paint as she pleased.
Spare and dark-skinned, she had dark hair drawn severely
back and knotted into a bun in those years. No makeup
softened the angularity of her face with its high
cheekbones, but her large, luminous eyes betrayed inner
fires. Her clothes were usually black, loose-fitting and
shapeless, functional rather than fashionable.
Miss O'Keeffe's paintings hang in museums all over the
United States -including, in New York, the Metropolitan, the
Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art - and in most major
private collections. But she retained a great deal of her
prolific production.
Received Many Honors
Miss O'Keeffe was elected to membership in the National
Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts
and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
She was awarded honorary degrees by several colleges and
universities, including Mount Holyoke and Columbia in 1971
and Harvard in 1973.
Miss O'Keeffe interrupted the cherished tranquility of her
life in Abiquiu to come East to receive the honors from
Mount Holyoke, Columbia and Harvard. She donned the required
cap and gown, marched with the faculty members and sat with
them on the platform hearing herself extolled as a kind of
artistic monument.
Back in Abiquiu, the ''monument'' resumed a daily routine of
work, now with the help of a young protege, Juan Hamilton, a
potter. He had knocked at her kitchen door asking for work
and made his way up from man Friday to secretary. He
supervised production of her book, and assisted with and
appeared in the television film about her in 1977. He
traveled with her to New York and California and managed her
business affairs. Their companionship was so close there
were rumors of marriage.
In 1978 Mr. Hamilton, then 33 years old, came to New York
alone on two missions. One was to put the finishing touches
on the Metropolitan's exhibition of Stieglitz photographs of
Miss O'Keeffe. Mr. Hamilton had helped her select the
pictures and had assisted in the preparation of the book
containing reproductions published by the museum in
conjunction with Viking Press.
Interrupted by Process Server
Mr. Hamilton's other mission was to mount his own exhibition
of the sensuously sculptured pots, evocative of the desert,
that Miss O'Keeffe had prodded him into producing. A gala
party celebrating the opening of the show, at the Fifth
Avenue Gallery of Robert Miller, was interrupted by a
process server with notice that Mr. Hamilton was going to be
sued for ''malicious interference'' with the business
relationships of Doris Bry.
Miss Bry, the longtime New York representative of Miss
O'Keeffe, had been dismissed about the time Mr. Hamilton had
come on the scene, and Miss Bry tried to fight that
dismissal with a Federal Court suit for $13.25 million
against Mr. Hamilton charging that he induced Miss O'Keeffe
to oust her.
''I don't know why she is suing him,'' Miss O'Keeffe snapped
when she learned of it. ''I don't know of anything wrong he
has done!'' The suit was later settled out of court.
She traveled to New York to visit friends and see art
exhibitions until recent years, when poor eyesight and
failing health kept her at home.
Miss O'Keeffe won numerous awards, including the Medal of
Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in 1977; an
award from Radcliffe College for lifetime achievements by
women, in 1983, and the National Medal of Arts in 1985.
She is survived by a sister, Catherine Klenert.