In Dialogue: Georgia O'Keeffe in the American Southwest with Wanda Corn

[00:00:45]Heat. Heat.

[00:01:29]We are expecting a pretty full house this evening. So, if there are some seats between you, um, I'd ask that you please scoot in a little bit to make room for the folks who are, uh, checking in right now. Thank you.

[00:05:25]Good evening, Benos, and a special welcome from our board chair, Edward A.

[00:05:30]Hart, to all of you here in the Santikos Auditorium at the San Antonio Museum of Art and the many people that we have joining us here tonight online. My name is Emily Nef and I'm the Keelso director at SAMA. I'm really glad you're all here. We have long anticipated having the renowned art historian Dr. Wanda Porn come to San Antonio. And here she is ready to be introduced in just one moment. But you know the drill. You know the drill. Please silence your cell phones. If you need to leave the auditorium, we ask that you exit through the back. The glass doors there. We do close um SAMA on Friday nights at 7 o'clock, which is when this event ends.

[00:06:13]So, we'll see you tomorrow at 10 a.m.

[00:06:15]when we reopen, or we hope we will. Um, the presentation this evening is, um, see, super.

[00:06:34]Um, the presentation this evening, it's organized in tandem with a special exhibition on view in the Steves Gallery titled Canvas to Clay, Georgia O'Keeffe and Maria Martinez, Tomato Ortiz and Tonala. A tongue twister of a title. And here is another image that shows both women. Um, they were the exact same age and internationally renowned artists associated with or from New Mexico. This is a concentrated show. It reveals the inextricable relationship between art and nature. It encourages the soulenriching benefits of slowlooking and finding beauty in the everyday and affirms the long-standing cultural connections between what is now the southwestern United States and Mexico.

[00:07:20]Something that San Antonio and Sama is uniquely positioned to do through both our geographic location and history and rich art collections here at Sama. We're grateful to the Robert J. Clayberg and Helen C. Clayberg Foundation for making this exhibition possible along with vital support coming from Kelly Dogget and Art Bridges and generous loans from the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Thanks to you all and please check our website for all of our programs, but especially for those programs associated with Canvas to Clay that are coming up and you will not want to miss them. And so now it is my very great pleasure to introduce introduce Dr. Wanda M. Korn, the Ruth and uh Robert and Ruth Halprren professor Emmerita of art history at Stanford University and among the most significant scholars of her generation.

[00:08:16]Her scholarship is wide-ranging, but for t tonight's purpose, um I will focus on her work on early American modernism, namely as you see here, the brilliant 1999 publication, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National identity 1915 to 1935, which examined the circle of artists surrounding the influential photographer and gallery emprasio Alfred Stiglets, including of course Georgia O'Keeffe, whose brilliant phrase The Great American Thing formed the title of the award-winning publication. One of the pleasures of doing research on O'Keeffe or any scholar is to discover the pathy power of her pros. Not all artists are writers, but O'Keeffe was.

[00:09:02]And those of you who are fans of Stephen Herriagan andor of Texas history and the great achievement that is the big wonderful thing will recall that its title comes from O'Keeffe as well and you see the cover of that book on the left. It's a real doorstoppper. Um and I've read every word. It's wonderful.

[00:09:21]This is my roundabout way of reminding everyone because we probably won't have time to talk about it tonight that Texas played an important role in O'Keefe's development. She taught art in the public schools um of Amarillo and later when this photo was taken, you see her at right in a photo taken around 1917 when she was teaching art at what is now West Texas&M in Canyon, Texas. So if you've noticed thus far that O'Keeffe had a distinctive sense of style and was acutely attuned to self-presentation, wellorn conceived an exhibition and book about it. Georgia O'Keeffe living modern that traveled to seven venues around the country, helping visitors to understand the true union of art and life that O'Keeffe modeled. Professor Horn has a new book coming out in the fall titled The Couple with the Pitchfork, American Gothic from easel to Icon, referring to the iconic painting by Grant Wood. So stay tuned for that, too. For now, I hope you will join me in welcoming Wanda Corn.

[00:10:46]hot any minute.

[00:10:49]And while we do that, we'll >> Is yours working?

[00:10:53]>> I don't know.

[00:10:54]>> Oh, there we go.

[00:10:57]>> All right, let's get started. Wanda, welcome to San Antonio.

[00:11:01]>> Thank you. And thank you for that very nice introduction.

[00:11:04]>> Well, it's great to have you here. It's really it's really a lot of fun. But let's start with place and let's start with where we are and what we are seeing on the screen now. So we're going to talk tonight about the Southwest, your part of the world. I grew up in New England. I taught on the west coast and but I suppose by virtue of having spent as much time researching uh Georgia O'Keeffe in in the southwest in her area uh I can claim some kind of honorary short-term citizenship. Uh but I'm very happy to be here in Texas with you all to talk about her and about this part of her life which you know in a certain way she had a bifurcated life. She had for her 40 years or so in the southwest.

[00:11:53]We'll explain that a little bit more, but and then earlier than that, she was her teaching years in in Texas and then she had um her years living in um New York. And some of those years in New York, she traveled in the summers to the Southwest, beginning already her, if you will, her Southwest chapter. But it really was only after the loss of her husband in 1946 that she was, if I can put it that way, [snorts] free to go to the Southwest and live full-time. He never visited her spaces uh in the southwest. Um he was a true New Yorker and if he had any orientation, it was to Europe, not to the the west western part of the country. He she liked to say, never went uh west of the Hudson. Uh but so what we're talking about is a part of the country she discovered in 1929 when she's living with her husband in New York and where she has previously been spending summers in um Lake George which is where his family had >> and and the he here just for those who may not know is Alfred Stiglets >> I know. Excuse me. Yes.

[00:13:02]>> Yeah. Just to make sure. Go ahead.

[00:13:03]>> Well sometimes people don't know who Alfred Stiglets is and we forget. So thank you for the reminder. In any case, eventually she had two beautiful properties. So, this is um and I'm going to guess many of you perhaps have visited at least one of them. Do we have hands for Abeku? Yeah, good number.

[00:13:21]Well, the rest of you should get there one of these days. It takes a little planning and you do need to make reservations very early in the season because they they sell out. They take only very small groups to the to the big house, the one here on the on the lower left, which is in ABQ. So, there's what we might call the little house or like Emily likes to refer to it as the summer house at Ghost Ranch, which is uh about 15 miles from the big house, which is the Abekue House. she first had her um the the first property she bought was this little house uh the the ghost ranch house which is in Red Hills country which you and it's also faces the pednal this beautiful um space um beautiful mountain uh which she painted many many times and she bought that little house was built in the 30s so it was pretty um crafted already it was adobe And u she did do a number of made a number of changes to it but it was the local the location of it in pure pure unadulterated nature with where she could couldn't see a a a single electric line or a u paved road. Uh that's what made her very special. And she did consider it when she got the big house that her summer house because she loved to be out there, but there were there were problems there. She couldn't grow anything. She was wonderful gardener. Um she didn't have water rights um in this little house. Um and she had lots of rattlesnakes as well, but that never seemed to bother her. She knew how to get out her cane and break their heads and on she went. But uh in any case, this is a very small house and what she did adapt was like turn the living room into a studio. The the bigger house was really a project and it was a project that she as her h she there were some 23 years between her and Alfred Stiglets.

[00:15:25]So she quite rightly guessed that she was going to have a a post Stiglet's life. And in the 1940s, she's bought this in 1940. she begins to think about where she might land um and be a full-time uh New Mexican. Uh and she's seen these ruins, not this gorgeous house that she she created and she and and um a small team of people around her created, but it was a it really it was a house that been around for a couple hundred years um and has a very long and noble history and it was owned by the church. So she uh in this in this very small dusty town called Abeku um which was as I say about 15 miles or so from the other and she could get water rights and she had acorage for gardens and for orchards or fruit bearing trees. Um, and that became the project after working with the church and trying to convince them she'd be the best um the best person uh to to keep this property going that she kind of had to build from basically the foundations or not they aren't even foundations but from the ground up. and she built this much more extensive house which is the winter house. Um, and it had several bedrooms and had courtyards within. And maybe we go to the next picture and we can see some of the interiors in both houses.

[00:16:53]This is the little house. So, go back to the little house where you can see her bedroom. Oh, >> that's it. Yeah. And this is the big house. um wi-i which is built around a couple of court court courtyards and she has a sitting room. It's hard for me to see these upside down. [laughter] Um uh and she liked it as purely rustic as possible. Um that is she left the grounds. Uh she she didn't she didn't she used tiles but she she didn't uh pave ever. Um and for the longest time until she gave up and why she kept it adobe and she had it mudded uh on a yearly basis. Eventually uh she finally had to give into the elements and and um uh and make it a more permanent uh structure.

[00:17:44]>> Few more interior. We have a few more interior just so one of the the things that anybody who goes to the Epic House, so it's the big house that's open to the public.

[00:17:55]um the winter house. Uh and anyone that goes through that house, particularly 21st century people who are in the midst of their own clutter, uh as we all are, including myself, cannot help but be impressed by the lack of stuff, the lack of chop of any kind of um um photographs, for instance, the lack of any art. She she did put up a a work of her own and sometimes a work of one of her colleagues, but they're very sparingly placed in in the in the house.

[00:18:31]But there is a kind of m minimalism, a kind of modernity, a kind of lack of clutter that is so totally impressive and has not been imposed on the property by the curators that are now in charge.

[00:18:44]It's really what what you see is the way she was living in the 1980s. She lived almost to 100. She didn't quite make it, but she got to 98.

[00:18:53]>> Mhm. Um uh and she basically though she moved in in in the late 40s about 49 after she settled her husband's estate. Um she was always fussing and making it better and changing the furniture. She increasingly became a kind of almost a collector of beautiful mid-modern uh chairs. Uh and I like to use her bedroom as an example of her purism because in this bedroom first of all the most important feature is a beautiful picture window which was quite hard to do. Two picture windows coming into um into a corner and that's what she wanted to look out at. So her bed, as you see, is facing that's her view.

[00:19:43]Every morning she's looking out over the um Chama River uh landscape. Uh and that was what was so important to her. She brought picture windows, I swear, into adobe architecture. This was not indigenous at the time. It became indigenous uh as future generations. and she'd probably be astounded as to how much her her living indoors but living with the outdoors always being present um took over as an aesthetic in and around Santa Fe in particular. Anyway, one bed, one table, one lamp.

[00:20:22]Occasionally she would have one thing on the on the walls. It might be a a piece of jewelry. And then one of her rock uh was it one of selection of her rocks which we'll talk about a little bit later on. And then I just might point out that little EMS chair wire chair that's by her bed and also the um stereo system. She was a great lover of classical music and way before the rest of us um really understood that she had to have speakers in all the house in all the main rooms of the houses um and had stereo sound um she paid a good fortune for that in the 50s when the rest of us were just getting used to that whole idea but she loved her music and to the end of her life she listened on a daily basis. So this is just to show you that every room has this kind of simplicity but also this thoughtfulness and I would also say very much thoughtful as to the way she would see it every day. She she rarely put two chairs across from one another except at her dining room table.

[00:21:26]Um [snorts] and most of us have our living rooms. Maybe we'll go to the next slide I think.

[00:21:31]>> Yeah. There. Yeah.

[00:21:32]>> But you can see how distant the chairs are from one another. And really the one the chair the seat that she liked best was the one in the corner.

[00:21:40]>> Um and this this window came late. This is after she's done her picture windows in her bedroom and in her studio. And she's realizes this tamarisque tree ancient tree that's outside this window can barely be absorbed and seen from inside. So in this long process of of reshaping the the property um she turned it into this three-paneed picture window so that the really the star of the sitting room she called it sitting room uh was the tree. Uh, and though she had curtains that she she could pull, um, she rarely she rarely did. And this was her big social space such as it was, but it isn't set up for lots of people to be sitting around with one another and, you know, drinking wine and having fun. It's it's a it's a quite austere space. It has beautiful again, if you look on the one on the right, you can see her her record player and her stereo system that's in the in the shelves. And then there were various iterations of this room and it changes its chair um population if I can put it that way. It starts out with aholstered with with furniture which has white upholster um um coverings so that everything looked like a little white lump. And then eventually she fell in love with midcentury chairs such as those by Sarinin or Bertoya or Ames um and began to buy things from Herman Miller particularly um in New York.

[00:23:17]>> So here we go. Wanda, you actually met Georgia O'Keeffe. Can you tell the story about how that came about?

[00:23:24]>> Yeah, this is this is probably the most extraordinary space in the house. uh the Abeku house because it's a large and unencumbered and you're seeing it as she would have wanted you to see it which is here on the on your left. It was her studio and for a woman who had uh never had a um studio that was all her own.

[00:23:50]She had always painted even in New York in New York City she painted basically in the living room of their apartment.

[00:23:56]Um, occasionally in one apartment she had two bedrooms and she turned one bedroom into a studio, but she never had had a designated studio until she had a chance to be her own designer of her own space.

[00:24:09]And she did a humdinger of a space to work in. She loved this space. It was not off limits to people unless she was painting and then it was totally off limits. So, we have no picture of her, no photograph of her, and she's probably the most photographed American female artist of the 20th century, but we have no picture of her ever sitting at an easel. We have one picture Anel Adams took very early in her life where she's in a car and she's got her she's got her her canvases on her knees and she's painting out in nature. Um, but she was very private about this space. If she wasn't in it, she was fine. and she invited photographers in it and many of them took pictures of her. In any case, >> it she loved plywood.

[00:24:56]>> Plywood tables was one of her special interests. They're gorgeous. But she'd get the biggest pieces of plywood she could and then she'd put basically saw horses under them and she used them for all her dining room tables and she used them as you can see here for holding her paints. And they're very practical and very functional, but somehow they work.

[00:25:18]their simplicity and their again lack of any kind of decorative quality to them just keeps that theme of of um less is more which controls really her her aesthetic. Um so this is the way it would have looked in her lifetime. Um at at one point she had a desk at one end where somebody was helping her keep records or or do correspondence and so was it. But this is the way it looks today. So those of you that have visited will be reminded that the p two pictures on the on the um right are what you would see today and that is the way it looked at the end of her life. She had macular degeneration the last 20 years of her 25 years of her life. So she increasingly could not paint and increasingly this space then turned into her living space even though she had a whole house next door. Her bedroom was right off the studio, which again is very interesting piece of architecture, but she really th this was kind of O'Keeffe space in the big house. Um her studio, her workspace and her bedroom were the the um the O'Keeffe spaces that she occupied. In any case, the bed there was both for her napping, but also for a caretaker that might spend the night with her in the in the um later um years. But I did have the privilege of having an interview with her when I was writing The Great American Thing. She was the only artist I was writing about that was still alive. And so it was really special to me that I could talk with someone who not only was still alive, but she knew every other artist I was writing about in the book. Um, so this was in 1980 when I was uh actually traveling from the east coast to the west coast to take my position at Stanford. Um and um I worked the old girl network and and uh got an appointment through through um a a friend uh because it was not easy to she was at that time I don't know if you know this about O'Keefe but she really was not uh um what should I call she was not a um she was not a mass iconic presence until after 1968 6970 Two things happened that really changed her public presence. One in ' 68 was a Life magazine cover story about her in New Mexico living this very independent life which she had architected and and been just totally in control of. And in 1970, following right on the heels of that article, there was a Lloyd Goodrich, who was the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, gave her her first really major retrospective in a New York museum. She had had a smaller one in the 40s at the Museum of Modern Art, but it really was small and it didn't have a catalog and it didn't make a splash. But in 1970, I for instance, and can be I can and other women tell me the same thing. It was the first time I'd ever seen her work. We hadn't studied her in our courses and we didn't know who she was and we were just knocked out by going into the Bruer building and seeing two floors I think it was um of her work including one of her big cloud paintings and so on and to learn that she was still alive. Well 68 and 70 are just exactly when the second wave of of women's feminism were arriving. So she was also being picked up, if you will, celebrated for breaking the glass ceiling and being a woman who had had a successful career as an artist. Now this is not to say that she wasn't very well known amongst art people in the twinning in the early 20s and in the 30s and 40s that she had a reputation, there's no doubt about it, amongst um the u art establishment, but she didn't have what I would call a mass public. And that's what happened to her. And it it the fan mail roared in. In fact, the fan mail is some of the most interesting archival stuff that you can read. Um because it tells you as much about frustrated women in ' 68, 69, and 70 than it does about O'Keefe. I mean, they all want to be O'Keeffe. They want to have their own independent lives and they want they they want to have a career. And then anyway, they're it's fascinating reading and there's and there's a very good book out that that covers a lot of that fan mail. Uh and I I dipped in enough into it to know and she herself complained to me when I did interview her that she didn't know what to do with all this mail because she'd been brought up to be a proper person and you wrote back if you got a piece of mail and she just it overwhelmed her. Uh and so somebody suggested to her that she have a form letter. Well, you know, in those days it was micro >> microcarbon copies.

[00:30:21]>> McCarvin cops. Anyway, so finally she wrote sort of like two lines. If I answer every letter like this, then I'll never have any time to make any more paintings. Something quite summary like that. And then she had other people send it out. I don't think she ever got much control over it. And she herself realized that she had passed into a kind of new zone of um being in this world.

[00:30:44]It's what we would call celebrity. And we know that celebrity can be cruel. Uh and uh and that's one of the reasons, and this is long getting to the interview, but it's one of the reasons that not many people could get interviews because people were just trooping out and sometimes without any invitation or any plans, knocking at her door. So, she was she was getting very very um difficult to see. In any case, I interviewed her in this space. this the bed was not there but these white chair I took these two pictures on my last visit to the house and and I took them very specifically because it kind of brought back a wave of recollection her sitting in that white draped that's part of her decor by the way that's and she's sitting next to the telephone and then because she couldn't see her helpers had made that um telephone list that she was sitting there and then My husband was and like there's a little one of those little baby em black chairs was positioned to her one side and um I came with my questions. I also came I was terrified because I had heard she was brusk and she would she might you know I didn't know she was going to bark. I didn't know what she was going to do but she was fine. We had a lovely conversation and she answered my questions and if you've seen her on film speaking you know she speaks um in very short sentences. She's just like her decor. It's very simple, you know, noun, verb, maybe an adverb, and then period.

[00:32:17]So, you get through a lot of questions pretty fast because she doesn't take too long answering them. Uh, and and she'd smile and and every once in a while, she never answered. She never asked me what I was up to. I mean, I think she'd been told that I was writing a book and I was going to have a chapter about her, but and I had been warned not to ask only questions about her friends, the other people in the book, because then and I was also warned not to ask her only about her art of the 1920s and 30s, which is what I was writing about at that time, because she thought of herself as an artist who was still, this was 1980, and though she was not doing much painting at that point, she did think very much of of herself as having had a late life career. So I had to bone up and and you know create some questions that I didn't know whether I would use use her use or not. The phone did ring three times while I was interviewing her and each time she barked. Whoever was on the other end, she knew who that person was and she took care of a little bit of business very fast. And I thought, well, there's that George O'Keefe and then there's my George O'Keefe.

[00:33:30]>> [laughter] >> and she [clears throat] was very um helpful to me. But I'm going to tell you two stories that are about her economy and also about how wise and wise and uh what should I say lots how how much wisdom she had gained in in over the over the years. One was when uh I I think I had been told I had a half an hour. Well, we easily went for an hour or so. And then all of a sudden she turned and I by the way could not tell how bad her eyesight was. She was so good at looking right at me. She had me sit right in front of her even though I think she could see maybe better peripherally. I don't know. But anyway, she turned to my husband and she said who was sitting who's a tall man and he was sitting in this little baby Ean's chair you know all hunched over and she said and you young man you haven't said a word. [laughter] And that let me know that the interview was over. [laughter] And she kindly walked us out to the car and um you know we said farewell. But also on the way out she said well you're going to go to Ghost Ranch, aren't you?

[00:34:36]Well honestly I did not know about Ghost Ranch. And I barely knew what I was seeing here. I was only in this one room and I had driven up to the house and into the into the um parking area. And so she very kindly said, "Well, you can't leave this area without seeing ghost ranch." She says, "That's that's my magical place." She didn't quite put it that way, but sounds like Joan Ddian, but and she said, "That is a very special place." And she she didn't invite me to see her house, but she told me how to get there. And thank goodness she did because then I saw the other side of her domestic arrangements out there. And you're swept away by the scenery, the change in scenery from what is more green and more river um uh side landscape in the winter house and then you go up to Ghost Ranch and it becomes, you know, volcanic and vagarian and red and it's just gorgeous, gorgeous. Um, and I actually had a bit of an epiphany right then and there that I was writing about her in New York. Um, and I was writing each chapter in my book is about a single painting and I was writing about one of her flower paintings. But at that very instance, I said, "There's something wrong with this. This is her America, not those flower paintings that she's doing in the 1920s." So I had a little epiphany and I changed completely what I was going to write about. I was not going to talk about the Stiglets years. I was going to talk about after Stiglets or what she did when she was away from Stiglets. Um and it became a very important I think not an only moment for me but I was not the only scholar but a couple of us were beginning to realize the Southwest was missing in her history. That was the history she had formed all by herself and we were all obsessed with the history Stiglets had given her uh and made her famous for. So this was a very important interview and and very very consequential uh in many ways. I'll tell you one quick other story and then we got to move on. I know um but this this is also so classicly as I came to know her. So, we're walking out to the car and I'm walking with her and she looks up to me in a little kind of um mischievous way. She says, "You haven't learned a thing today that you didn't know already, have you?"

[00:37:09]And I was fortunately it was true because she tells the same stories like we all do in our 80s over and over again, right? I had heard most of those stories but I at least had the presence to say it doesn't matter what you said it's how you said it and that was made a big difference and it's true it did make a big difference to me I got the austerity of her presentation but I also learned the degree to which discipline matters to her and and the degree to which she is um well I I could see her in her surrounds and really she did come to think of the Abeku House in particular as one of her great works of art and she wanted it saved and she wanted the public to see it and there's a long story and we won't go into that but so that's really what she wanted.

[00:38:01]Okay.

[00:38:01]>> Oh Wanda that was so wonderful. Um I was going to say how did an artist living and working in New York City end up in New Mexico? Why New Mexico and why abuse? Why not Santa Fe? Why not TA? And you'll talk a little bit in a minute.

[00:38:16]This this was just to remind people of that moment. You already referred to the flowers. Um did you want to say anything about these or do you want to go on to the southwest?

[00:38:24]>> No, we'll go to the southwest. But this this is just to say this is this is her before she discovers the southwest. So this is pre29 work basically.

[00:38:34]>> Um and I I I want to just say this quote if I may. It's what we call a cultural landscape, but I like the way that she phrases it. She talks about I can get all that into a picture by suggestion. I mean the life that has been lived in a place. And I wondered if you could talk about that in the context of these three pictures.

[00:38:56]One of the things that everyone I think that knows her personal story, her biographical story admires is is the fact that she did make such a project out of changing her space where she was living from um the east um or she had also lived a little bit in Chicago. She had grown up in Wisconsin. But uh when she came to the southwest and she and her good friend Rebecca Strand came in the summer of 1929, both of them having troubles with their husbands at the point at that point. So in part it was an escape from home problems. Um and secondly, she wanted to go back. She had gone through uh Santa Fe once before on a on on a car trip, I think. Um and she wanted to go back and investigate this.

[00:39:43]Plus she had an open invitation to go stay um in a hienda that had plenty of other uh u living quarters, outuildings and so on for artists and writers that Mabel Dodge Luhan had set up in Taos. So her first couple of summers were in in Taos which was really part of a little artist colony that Mabel Dodge Luhan was trying to um establish at the time. But she herself thought what was so wonderful one of the wonderful things about where she was was how different it was. It was not a place she understood. She had tried her skyscraper paintings in New York to try to get a little New York into her vocabulary, but place really mattered for her. And that makes her very much a a late 20th century figure, I think, in in her understanding. And she came to understand this so much that she would often say, "It takes me two or three years to understand a place and to get it to permeate um my paintings." And so when I look at particularly let's say these two paintings, the one of the church and the one of the black cross um and and the one of the bones, I mean all three of these are done in the first three years that uh she's gone to the southwest. She is finding place and in some ways she's doing it touristically except she's making such extraordinary paintings out of them. But what is she doing? She's visiting churches. She's taking drives out into the landscape and seeing some of the penitente crosses that are in the landscape just like this is in in Taos that cross or a cross like it exists today. Um against the the Talos mountains. Um, and she's beginning to walk in the desert, which was a favorite activity that she followed um her entire life and pick up things, whether uh she's picking up bones or picking up rocks. The rocks generally were on river trips, but um she she was beginning to these are pictures where she's beginning to understand that she's living in a different America than the one she had been living in. and she was trying to figure out how to make that into a vocabulary if you will. She's bringing a lot of her lessons from her flower paintings such as moving in very close compressing space the far away nearby as she called it. If you look at the way the mountain is for instance that is the far away but it is up close pushing that black cross into our into our um immediate field of vision um and and so on. She, in fact, the one of the discoveries I made when I did so much work on the cow's skull red, white, and blue, the first discovery is that she hadn't painted it in the southwest. And I was shocked. She'd painted it in Lake George. And why? Because, well, Stigas needed her. So, he called her back and she didn't feel she'd really finished her summer's work. So, as she told it, she got out a barrel and she threw in a rug and um a Navajo rug and uh several of her bones um and sent it all back to Lake George. And then she did this setup where she made the painting that is now so famous and is at the Metropolitan Museum. And if you think about that, the Navajo rug is the the long red. She paint they it was probably a black stripe that she painted red and then her cow's skull against a black stripe that could have been the rug in the rug, but it could also be very much like a crucifix, a cross. And so it relates a little bit to the painting that Emily's put on on the other on the other side.

[00:43:23]So this is her, if you will, getting used to being a south becoming a southwestern painting. And one thing we probably should say is that when these works were first shown, they weren't shown in the southwest. There was no gallery culture that was going to adopt old George O'Keefe um at this point. Uh that would come much later, but they were shown in New York. And uh you many New Yorkers never went west of the Hudson. So when they saw paintings like this, they didn't know what they were looking at. They were particularly bothered by the bone paintings, but also the cross paintings. And you put the cross and the bones together. And it looks like she's having some kind of religious experience. And so she was written about as if um well she she was written about that maybe she was dealing with death, the metaphysics of death.

[00:44:10]These were maybe momento mori um which is a long tradition of painting skulls um in art. and she got furious about all these New Yorkers writing about her paintings as if she was some kind of mystic uh going on a St. Francis trip to the Southwest. And so she she got very annoyed and she said, "Look, this is the essence of this. This is America. This is a part of America." Basically, she was quite defensive. Um but in rightly rightly so. Um and these are bones are not just about death. they're about beauty and they're about the the history of this part of the country. So, she she really had to fight for her rights to um actually be an artist of the Southwest because at that point we didn't have that notion very clearly defined.

[00:45:00]>> You're not going to believe this. We're going to um have to Well, no, no, no.

[00:45:04]Let's don't skip a thing. Um but I wonder if maybe we'll we'll just say a little bit about each of the paintings in the exhibition.

[00:45:14]So, we have four lovely, lovely O'Keeffe in the exhibition here, which if you haven't seen, you must take a look at.

[00:45:21]Um, although I guess you have to come back tomorrow at 10:00. [laughter] Um, >> we'll see you then.

[00:45:28]>> Um, >> it's like voting. Come early, come often.

[00:45:30]>> Yeah. I mean, one of the one of the things we might say is one of the revelations I had when I got really serious about looking at her southwestern work is something first of all in the 20s and 30s she often did work that was quite abstract and even some of her flower paintings you're so deeply into the flower that you can't see the edges of it and you don't even know what you're looking at if you're not sort of conversant with what she was doing. So in the southwest um she had to she became much more dedicated than any of us I think understood at the time but now do to basically finding motifs. She in other words she didn't make things up. She would go out and she would find a tree or she would find a mountain or a mountain and a tree um or hills. And what she didn't do is take the most obvious beautiful extraordinary experience. she would take something that wasn't necessarily obvious, like a dead dying cottonwood tree. Um, but what we've learned over the years is that there is always a specificity to her work. There's always a start point. Um, and that was very important to her because it was when she's in nature herself and she's making these selections.

[00:46:43]>> So, well, there's Oh, sorry. Did you want to talk about >> That's good. Okay. And now you can take a tour at Ghost Ranch. That is the ghost ranch is run by the Presbyterian church and they've finally decided they should own a little bit of O'Keefe. Our property is part of their lands but not not visitable. You can't visit it. But they take you on a wonderful jeep trip and you go from one motif to another that she painted and they show you a picture of it as you're standing in front of the very tree that that um uh that you know that uh made it possible.

[00:47:18]And you know the Anzel Adams photo that you were referencing referencing is um either that version or that version of um Gerald's tree and that tree is still there.

[00:47:29]>> It's really >> So she's very she's a real looker when she goes outside. Uh she doesn't miss a thing. It seems it seems to me and it's it's it's quite obvious that she does she's not she she's not fanciful. She's not imaginative. She doesn't do her nightmares. She does her nature. And they're very specific.

[00:47:52]>> And this wonderful I had never seen this this beautiful sunflower. We don't quite know Emily and I Emily knows a lot about O'Keeffe. We don't quite know how this sunflower happened. We don't know if it's an east coast sunflower or southwest sunflower, but it's a beautiful small painting of just an intense, you know, usually she did her lush irises and roses and and uh so on.

[00:48:16]But um and for those of you that have gotten to the house, one of the surprises might be how much dedication there is to gardening.

[00:48:25]Uh, and that's another thing that didn't they wasn't all there at the beginning.

[00:48:28]But because she had water rights, which is very important for that part of the world because they don't have um they don't they don't have uh city water. Um, and so they have runoff from the mountains nearby. Um, and she gets she gets mountain water once a week and they basically flood these gardens uh once a week. It's quite amazing because they really put them under six inches of water and then that's it for the week.

[00:48:55]and uh off we go. But she became very interested. She always gardened. She had even a little garden in in at Lake George partially because she liked to eat organically. She was really a farm-to-table person before we ever knew that would become as popular as it is today. Um so maybe she we we wondered if she grew some of these things. And here she is. And she also went to Japan. And in Japan, they have such a beautiful gardens and such appreciation for um um sculpting trees and bushes and raking the pebbles and the sand. And she had some I I've seen the rakers in her yards uh doing very similar kinds of things.

[00:49:43]So, she was very very impressed by by uh Japanese gardens and brought some of that aesthetic with her.

[00:49:50]And then we were going to say a quick word about rocks and her she collected bones and they're they lie around on her patios and occasionally on but the thing that impresses most people are her rock collections and you have a beautiful little painting a still life of rocks.

[00:50:08]Um and then many many pictures of people putting her and her rocks together such as the one that you have on the other side. And then I think if we have the next one. And then she would place them on on windows, steep window sills um on this lovely uh uh stone platform that's out in one of her um uh courtyards. They were she would have a lineup in her sitting room. She'd have a lineup in her bedroom. And there are many stories where, you know, she would steal other people's rocks because she liked them better. and and there there's a real kind of uh u fetish almost about these.

[00:50:47]They're all uh river rocks. They're smooth river rocks. And she was fussy.

[00:50:52]She didn't take any old rock, but it had to be, you know, particularly gorgeously shaped and organic I in feel, I think, and and in in shape. Here's a little trivial pursuit I'm throwing in, which is that at the 1968 Hemisphere, which everyone in this room is well acquainted with. She was a good friend with the American designer Alexander Gerard, and he had the huge pavilion at Hemisphere.

[00:51:17]Guess who the rock curator was when he set up that installation? It was O'Keeffe. She had had shows at the Aean Carter and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. that there was some travel and I and I don't know I'm I'm partly doing this selfishly. If anyone has any memory or any oral um accounts of her her role as a rock curator for Alexander Gerard, you know who to call. But let's go on to this one because we really want to end with the photographs. So, this would be the next to last. So this is this is the fourth uh painting that's in your your exhibition and it's a um we think it's a riverscape. Yes.

[00:51:59]Colorado River >> looking down Colorado.

[00:52:03]>> What's always wonderful is that it's also could be a tree growing in front of you, right? Except it happens to be in pink and yellow, but that's this is quite abstract and probably is a little imaginative in color. But she she became fascinated with flying in the 50s particularly in 60s and be what she could see from airplanes and began to do her clouds at that time but also a whole bunch of landscapes that are seen from above um rather than from a um groundbound uh position. Um but this lovely photograph on the other side is by Tony Vicaro who was one of many photographers who pilgrimaged to um Ghost Ranch and and um Abeku to photograph her. She was um uh she began her career as a model for photographs because her husband Alfred Stiglets decided she was the love of his life. And he had always wanted to do a person's life because he thought no one photograph could capture anyone. But only photographs taken over many many many years um could begin to let a person um live photographically and imagistically. And so he decided that O'Keeffe would become and she was agreed agreed to it um his model. And he he did a whole series of of works of hers. And that led then to Ancel Adams following in his wake and Carl Vanveetton, another New York photographer. And when she became a widow, um, which she never would have used that word, by the way, um, just as she never used Stiglets's name, um, but when she was on her own, let's put it, um, people would pilgrimage to, um, her place if they could get permission for her to sit for them. And at first, she was very strict.

[00:53:56]She only wanted really the very best photographers, the best black and white photographers. she did not was not interested in color photography. So there's a little story that goes along with that image and you can see that there's an image by Tony Tony Vicaro took the image that's in the upper left there and the one that we just saw uh as well and this says so much about her um in the same kind of experience I had but she um she'd been approached about being um highlighted along with two or three other women as women artists um in 197 1960 I think it was was early um I'm not sure of that date but no it's 19 does it say 60 okay it is 1960 okay good anyway look magazine wanted to feature um a few women artists and the assignment that they gave uh the editor of the story and the photographer was they wanted a picture of the artist with a work of her art in color. Well, O'Keefe had been contacted about the article and she said that she only wanted a photograph by and she named three uh names and I think it was something like Philip Hollsman, Anel Adams or Todd Webb. Well, Tony Vicara was a look photographer. He freelanced and did a lot of he'd done photographs in World War II and had an amazing career. So the editor came out with him, but he was not one of those three photographers. And she literally, as he tells the story, and I did interview him about it, and that's my picture of him.

[00:55:45]He's he is very social, very outgoing, and and very very proud that he succeeded in getting her attention. But he said it took him five days that she just simply ignored him and she drove them around. She liked to drive people around in her big Cadillacs and um but she didn't pay any attention to him and it was only when the house staff said that they wouldn't be there in the weekend and she'd have to fend for herself but there was some food in the refrigerator for them to cook and he Laro Italian made a nice pasta alfredo uh for her and then because he had nothing to do since she was completely ignoring him she was um he began to weed her garden um and uh um began to kind of be useful around the house. Anyway, long story short, finally she the ice broke and and they and then she decided he was not only all right, but she had to show him her whole world out there. So, he spended the the editor seeing that was finally happening that he was allowing her to he she was allowing him to take some pictures. she disappeared, went off the scene, and he stayed for another four or five days and taking all kinds of pictures, but he still had not gotten the picture he had come up with because she did not want any any work in color. So I said to him, well, finally, because this is the famous picture that of course Luke ran and became one of his best known pictures, but also one of the pictures she was kind of proud of. I said, well, how did you Oh, and the other thing is she wouldn't let him into his studio to see her and a work of art. That was one of her nos. So, he had to dream up some excuse to get the painting out of doors.

[00:57:31]Uh, and I don't know what his story was.

[00:57:33]I can't remember. And then he had to wear about four cameras so that she wouldn't know which one was the the color photograph that he was taking.

[00:57:43][laughter] And he was so proud of that that he had succeeded in getting his commission, but also that it had been really a piece of work and so on. And he even got her to smile. You know, that was something that was actually very important to her that she did not smile. It was something she and Stiglets, it was part of their aesthetic, that smiling is temporary. It means it's not a serious pose. It's not classic. Um, and many photographers that I interviewed told me that one of her rules was no teeth.

[00:58:17]In any case, he did get her to smile, but he also got her to be impish. And her impish side came out. And that's her looking through. They had a a picnic in a car because I think they got in a rainstorm and she's looking through a piece of cheese there and he's in the front yard.

[00:58:32]For me, it was also very important to know this story because he's the first time also to photograph her in that dress, which is one of her wrap dresses, um, with her beautiful Mexican belt. Um, and that's supposed to be funny. I think I think she's supposed to be holding up her house, you know, they're having a it's a bit of trick photography.

[00:58:55]So, they got along like dynamite. And when I um that Carl would always tell the story, so I have to tell it on his behalf. In the 1970 opening, he was invited and she was surrounded by fans um at the opening and he went up to her.

[00:59:12]He stood outside the little ring of people around her and caught her eye and she immediately broke with whomever she was speaking to and she said, "Tony, Tony." And she went over and she hooked her hand within his arm and said, "Let's go see our painting."

[00:59:30]>> Which is this one.

[00:59:32]>> That's what that is the best place to stop, Wanda. I think we could all stay all night and hear more of these wonderful stories. I think we have how many? Just one or two? Sounds like we're only going to have time for one or two questions. And are we going to use the microphone going out into the audience?

[00:59:51]And the reason we'd like to do that, if you can hold your question till a mic gets to you. That's for the b or we can repeat it, but it's for the benefit of our online visitors.

[01:00:05]Hi, I just wanted to say that I live I moved here from Santa Fe and I had a very very dear friend there who is from Abiku. He was raised there and he used to sell Georgia O'Keeffe arrowheads. She would pay him a nickel for every arrow head that he found when he was a little boy. I love that story.

[01:00:26]>> Thank you. Thank you.

[01:00:29]Any other questions about the I have a question about the climate in this place. Is it like high enough ele elevation to be comfortable?

[01:00:47]Because I noticed that there's no ventilation, cross ventilation, no ceiling fans. Uh, how how in the world did she stay comfortable in this place?

[01:01:02]>> Emily, do you have I mean, she was very comfort. It's very dry.

[01:01:06]>> Very high. I've never been uncomfortable. And you're >> high desert.

[01:01:10]>> It's desert. It's high desert.

[01:01:12]>> Cool in the evening.

[01:01:14]>> Mhm.

[01:01:39]Yeah. Okay. So, for our virtual people, the answer from someone here in the audience who has a home in Santa Fe Santa Fe or some Yeah. said that she she lived without any kind of air conditioning. I I don't know that.

[01:01:54]Yeah.

[01:01:57]7200. Thank you. I should remember that cuz my husband didn't do too well last time he was there [laughter] thanks to that. Um any other any >> any other questions?

[01:02:16]I cannot understand how she tolerated New York.

[01:02:22]>> Okay.

[01:02:23]>> I mean, nothing against >> how did she tolerate New York? Well, I think that's a very >> No, that's a very decent question to ask. Um, >> you know, New York's an art city, the art city in her lifetime. So if you're gonna make it as an artist in her lifetime, you had to New York. It would be a good thing to be in New York. So, you know, she got to New York because Stiglets invited her. They weren't yet partners, but it was clear that something was rumbling around between them. [snorts] Um, and the story is that he said she was teaching in Texas [snorts] and uh, and you know when she was teaching she didn't have much time to do much work. Um, and so he basically said come for a year and you know take a sabbatical so to speak. We didn't use that word but take time out and I have a niece who has a an apartment that she doesn't use very much and you could paint there for the for the for the year. Um, and you know, it wasn't long before he had moved in with her, but nevertheless, [clears throat] that wasn't part of the arrangement at the beginning. So, she went to New York and she also knew New York. She had been a student at the Art Students League. Um, but New York is where you made your reputation. It's New York is where the galleries were. New York is where the museums of modern art were. Um, and New York was where Stiglets was making reputations um, of a few Americans. He didn't adopt many, but that he really believed in as much as he believed in her and John Marin and Arthur Dove and Charles Demoth and a handful of others. Um, but she didn't love New York. She was very happy to get out into nature whenever she could. And his nature was Lake George.

[01:04:18]And the problem for her there is that he came from a very big family and the Lake George property was a main house and then it had a lot of outbuildings. Um but it also had lots of stiglets living there all summer long. So it was like a train station as far as she was concerned. And so she tried to she loved it best when everybody went back to school and went away because there were children two or three generations of stiglets that would visit. Um so she she liked Lake George. She then gave it a bad rap after she had discovered the southwest and but in fact she did beautiful pictures of Lake George.

[01:04:57]Beautiful pictures of the lake, beautiful pictures of the trees, beautiful pictures of autumn. She loved September, October, November um in Lake George. she'd stay as long as she could before she started getting it started to get cold. But once she discovered the Southwest, then it was like, "Oh, there's so much green up there." You know, she she kind of poo pooed the the richness of of woods [laughter] and and so on. So, but I think I think and she did try to make her peace with New York. She lived, you know, one of the things she did in New York is insist on in living in a skyscraper. And people didn't do that yet. Uh when she and her husband and she made all those arrangements, but she found a residential um skyscraper that was uh really for perfect people like her. She didn't have to cook all the time because there was a restaurant and a facility as part of the um uh part of the house. But what always as a woman strikes me is that that was an arrangement for four or five months of the winter and then they'd have to pack up all their furniture and put it into storage as they went to Lake George. So it was not a permanent arrangement. It was by rental and it was monthly and then the next year they go to another apartment. And the better a painter she became and the more successful her paintings were in supporting them, she actually became the bread winner in the 30s, um the higher they could go. [laughter] And so she she really loved being as high as she could get. So she made New York in a certain way work for her. And really when you that we have very few photographs of her New York apartments, but they're just like her Abbeyq house.

[01:06:48]There's almost nothing in them. There's a few things on the window sills and they became bones once she discovered the Southwest. She'd bring her Southwest stuff. She put a rug on the on on the wall, but um and uh she'd have nothing on the mantelpiece, which drove a lot of visitors crazy because they they were looking for the chachkis that would Where's the garbage? where where [laughter] you so she did she actually controlled her her setup in New York in a way that suited her.

[01:07:19]She did she even went to the pent she even had one year in a penthouse which was probably the pinnacle experience of high high living. Um but then she could look down on New York and she could have all those wonderful experiences of the of the buildings and both she uh made pictures. There's pictures of the East River from her high rise apartments, but he also made beautiful photographs of skyscrapers going up that he could see both outside his studio, I mean, excuse me, outside his gallery and outside the windows of these um of these apartments that they would take. And there was a beautiful show in Chicago a couple of summers ago where it's called um >> My New York, >> my New Yorks. And they that did an excellent job in answering your question. Actually, it was really trying to it was really trying in a certain way to answer your question, but how did she make New York work for her?

[01:08:21]Good question. All good questions and we're so happy that you came out tonight, Wanda. Thank you so much.