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Georgia O'Keeffe's West - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Peter H. Hassrick

The opening this past July of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has occasioned a surge of public approbation for the artist and a refreshing mixture of new insights and perspectives about her work. Her art, once again viewed and reviewed, remains as compelling, accessible, and visionary as ever.

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The location of the museum may connote to some that O'Keeffe is a regional artist best appreciated in the context of the New Mexico uplands. However, the museum's collection reveals a painter of national importance who drew inspiration from a wide variety of American themes and subjects -- Manhattan skyscrapers, Adirondack landscapes, midwestern barns, and even apples, the colorful harvest of orchards around Lake George, New York. Nonetheless, there is no denying that the West, particularly New Mexico, was O'Keeffe's special place. The West engaged her fullest self-expression as an artist and enabled her to most truly fulfill her vision. The West harbored her physically and spiritually with such graciousness, such empathy, that she chose to spend more than half her creative life there.

During her years in Texas (1912-1913 and 1916-1918) O'Keeffe was a teacher and an artist in search of self-identity. Buoyed by the western experience of her prime mentor, the painter Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), she took her first steps into the arena of professional art as an art instructor in the Texas Panhandle. There she found a stark beauty that artists before her had seldom noticed, much less celebrated. For O'Keeffe the endless horizon at once invigorated her artistic spirit and yielded to her commanding ability to transcribe its physical and spiritual essence. As the painter Russel Vernon Hunter observed in 1932, Texas was where O'Keeffe

struck a stride in her creative work.... The structures of her paintings adumbrated the topographical structure of this northwest Texas region which has a lean-beauty, not entirely desert and voluptuous, but spacious, direct, powerful, with great sweeping areas that move uninterrupted into infinity.(1)

Evening Star VII [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED] is a tribute to this powerful and infinite landscape. O'Keeffe likened the Texas plains to an ocean on a "wide, wide land." On her evening walks she found no trees, fences, or even paved roads. "I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star."(2)

The sweep of the infinite often brought out the artist's most brilliant responses to nature. She also found astonishing self-realization when put in a position of interpreting the corporeal and beyond. When she wrote to her friend Anita Pollitzer in 1916 that it was "absurd" how she loved that dusty stretch of Texas earth,(3) she was defining the singular nature of her personal quest to do what few artists have done so well: to deal with the transcendent nature of seemingly ordinary things and places. Much of the rest of her life was spent establishing a balance between the earthly and the ethereal on her own terms.

New Mexico promised even more than Texas when O'Keeffe made her first extended visit there in 1929. The high deserts and elegant mountain peaks that define the northwestern part of the state not only inspired her but also in large measure defined her later art. It was in New Mexico that she found America's wonders arrayed most resplendently.

Anglo artists had been drawn to New Mexico for more than a generation before O'Keeffe found her way to Taos in the summer of 1929. Like others before her, she was attracted to the awesome landscape and the extraordinary light that defines and colors its contours [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED]. She explored the indigenous cultures of the Pueblo Indians and the Hispanic population. She thirsted for adventure and escape, for independence and self-fulfillment. She wished to engage herself in pure nature, the West being the region where nature was perceived to have survived in its purest state in America at the time.

Some found Taos an intellectual Eden, and others thought it a poor man's Europe, but for O'Keeffe it was a place of beguiling innocence, uniquely American in spirit and content. There she could be spiritually responsive to the earth. D. H. Lawrence phrased it best in an unfinished play he started while residing in Taos in the 1920s:

The white people still haven't got the rhythm of America, the perfect rhythm of American earth. The Indians have had it so long, maybe they're in danger of losing it. The new revelation will come when the white people, when some white Woman gets the perfect rhythm of the American earth.(4)

No one took up this challenge with more determination and success than O'Keeffe.

If the Indians intuitively fathomed the rhythms of the American earth, most Anglo artists were drawn to the Indians as indirect links in their own search for that same harmony. Painting Indian dances and recording the cadence of everyday Indian life satisfied most artists' longing for a connection with the truest essence of America. For O'Keeffe, however, this was not enough. Instead of painting the Indians themselves she chose to portray their symbols of spiritual connectedness to both the heavens and the earth - their kachina dolls [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED]. As she described them, these dolls had "a curious kind of live stillness" that revealed what she took to be the spiritual meaning of Pueblo culture.(5)

Georgia O'Keeffe's West - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Peter H. Hassrick

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