I Went To Visit Georgia O'Keeffe
but she wasn't home!
In 1984 my family went to New Mexico to see the west. But I was going to see Georgia O’Keeffe.
It was a time in America when women artists were being discovered and publicized. Women art historians filled magazine pages, books and museums with these artists’ works and their personal stories.
Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe emerged as two icons. They were so different! Frida was hot and Georgia was cool. Both were compelling.
I’ve written a post here about how a friend and I were deterred by our husbands from going to Mexico City to see Kahlo’s famous “Blue House”.
I thought, “Well then, I will do what I want to and go find O’Keeffe’s house.”
The tone of this last sentence makes me think Georgia herself was speaking through me. (Frida wouldn’t have said this, she would have just done it.)
I had read about O’Keeffe’s early visits to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s compound in Taos, and about her later escape back to New Mexico from New York City, Alfred Stieglitz, and Lake George. In 1984 it was well known that she was living in Abiquiu, New Mexico. I wanted to go there, to see the landscape that O’Keeffe had made so mysterious in her paintings.
In a state of detached awe Ghost Ranch reaffirmed her vision of the world as a place of brilliant light, fantastic form, and pure color. … [She lived a] stoically simple lifestyle.
O’Keeffe’s subject matter was all around her. She drew and painted what she saw: bare desert, plain adobe walls, bones and floating flowers.
About her Patio with Black Door painting, O’Keeffe wrote:
When I first saw the Abiquiu house it was a ruin. … As I walked about I found … a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side.
That wall with a door in it was something I had to have. It took me ten years to get it - three more years to fix the house so I could live in it and after that the wall with a door was painted many times.
So off I went to New Mexico to see what Georgia saw.
Abiquiu was a small, nearly deserted town and I had no idea where to find the house of one of the most famous women in the world.
I went into the Abiquiu Post Office and asked the postmistress where Georgia O’Keeffe lived. She was not surprised at my request! She said Miss O’Keeffe lived “just up that road over there, but she’s not home today. She’s in Santa Fe.”
I think this road, below, was the closest I could come to the gated wall that surrounded her house. I could tell she overlooked a valley.
But my failure to visit Georgia O’Keeffe’s home fit well with the nature of my quarry. Earlier I said here that she was “cool”, and she did have a reputation for aloofness along with her directness of expression.
Many people who worked with O’Keeffe said that it was easy to get along with her as long as things were done her way.
She exclaimed, ‘When so few people think at all, isn’t it right for me to think for them and get them to do what I want?’
I have tremendous respect (“detached awe”) for this woman who usually dressed in black or white. She had what was perhaps the love affair of her life with Stieglitz, gained all she needed in order to paint whatever she wanted to, and claimed her space beside well-known American artists. Then she drove away from it all to finish her long life in her chosen landscape.
O’Keeffe went to live where “she felt free to be completely herself”.
I think the postmistress of Abiquiu knew what I, too, was really looking for that day.
How lovely. I was just reading about O’Keeffe in preparation for the library Chataqua event Wednesday evening. (Today’s was very well done , Eisenhower.) In 2014 a 1932 painting by O’Keeffe sold for $44.4 million. I need to revisit Santa Fe now.
I also had a desire to see the area where she lived, and where she enjoyed painting.. Really appreciated her art., and maybe her life style.
I went to Greenville Sc many years to the museum to see some of her work. Amazing.