Boots As Her Palatte
Sometimes your own imaginings about an artist become just as potent as any real fact. And listening to Wanda talk about a younger audience’s interpretations of the exhibition, where they saw O’Keeffe as a master of her “brand” and the ultimate marketer, I realise that I am not alone. The artist’s life is open to interpretation just as her art is. And though at first I was dismissive of this vision of O’Keeffe as a brand-maker, there was a moment where my own imagination of her became a truth I wanted to believe in too. When Wanda described how she saw O’Keeffe’s boots, well-worn and covered in dust, I saw, in her telling, all the ochres, burnt cinnamons, vermillion reds, and golden turmeric of O’Keeffe’s beloved desert landscape. In this image, I saw how she rendered the palette of her landscapes so accurately. And even if this vision is a fallacy, sometimes these moments of imagination, though not real, tell us a truth in their lie.
Speaking to Wanda for over an hour and a half about her work on O’Keeffe,the joy and vividness with which she told each story from her deep well of knowledge meant that even through the mechanisations of Skype, my imagination ran wild and barefoot too.
You curated the Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern exhibition, which was wildly popular when it opened at the Brooklyn Museum and then went on to travel to six other venues across America. Your approach to the exhibition was looking at how O’Keeffe’s life, and particularly the clothes she wore, contributed to and affected her art. I want to know what was the first piece of O’Keeffe’s life that you saw, whether it was a painting or a piece of clothing, that really prompted you to look at exhibiting her work through this lens?
My first attention to her was as a painter, and the story that everyone was interested in in the 1970s was her relationship to Alfred Stieglitz and her years in New York: the fact that they had been lovers and then married, that he had been very important to the start of her career, and that he had also made this incredible photographic portrait of her for over twenty years. I got all involved with the New York story, so to speak, as it seemed everybody did at this time. So I think the most important thing to know is that when I started to think of her, it was as part of a book I was writing called The Great American Thing, and that led me to ask her for an interview. I was dedicating a chapter of my book to her, and I eventually named the book after something she once said: ‘How is the great American thing ever going to happen if American artists keep running off to Europe to learn how to paint?’
So I visited with her in New Mexico. This was in the fall of 1980. By then, she had been living in the Southwest for over thirty years, ever since the death of Stieglitz, who was a generation older than she was. And I was so smitten by her environment, the landscape and the home, where I interviewed her. I was a little terrified, so I didn’t really look very closely at anything but her, but I found the house extraordinary in its fusing of the local and the modern. Adobe is beautiful, but it’s very regional; it’s very different to the way most of us live elsewhere. I could see she had pieces of furniture that later I could identify that Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames, and Harry Bertoia had designed.
I was also interested in the landscape. The landscape struck me as lunar. It was so much starker than the Southwestern landscape that we associate with Taos and Santa Fe. She lived some sixty miles north-west of Santa Fe, and she had chosen this place because of its unusual landscape. But the point is, I began to understand her New Mexican oeuvre and [to] ask ‘Why aren’t we paying more attention to that?’ when she was, so to speak, her own keeper. Stieglitz had never come to visit her in New Mexico, and when he died, she moved there for good. So the New Mexico story began to interest me more than the Stieglitz one. I was one of the first art historians to take seriously her divided art career: the early years with all the sexiness of New York and Stieglitz and being the only woman in the Stieglitz circle, and then this second career of painting nearly a half century in New Mexico that no one was really looking at. In those years, she established two homes—and when I say established, she built one of them practically from ruins—the big house in Abiquiú, and then the little cottage she retrofitted at Ghost Ranch. She built and furnished both of them to her tastes. This led me, if you will, to think more about the ways she designed her life.
At that point, I hadn’t really noticed the clothes, I have to admit. She wore a black wrap dress on the day I interviewed her, but I didn’t think anything about it until much, much later. She died in 1986, and I got a chance to go back to be at her house. It was going back after her death and really immersing myself in her environment that I began to realise that she was a choreographer of her life in every respect. You know there were no tchotchkes in that house. I couldn’t put together the kind of environment she did, because it was so stripped of ordinary domesticity. I realised how special she was and how disciplined she was and how extreme she was in making other parts of her life—other than what went onto the canvas—a part of her soul and her way of being in the world.
She was a gardener too, and she was eating her own organically grown vegetables well before today’s emphasis on sustainable living patterns. I learnt Ms O’Keeffe was a very basic but good cook. And I found a couple of other artists from her generation that [also] did interesting things with their houses and things they did in the kitchen. That’s where it all started. I had to finish my book, The Great American Thing, which did not go into this territory much. But it was after that book was finished that I began to think about whether there was a way to tell a story about this generation of artists, of which O’Keeffe was one, that looked at their lifestyle as fashioned and put together in modern ways, similar to the styles they used in their art.
I know that O’Keeffe was a very American-influenced artist, but do you think she was influenced by European art in any way?
What made her unusual is that she didn’t go abroad early on; she didn’t have the money to go abroad, and she taught school during her early years when many other Americans figured out a way, even on a shoestring, to study in Paris or possibly Munich or Berlin. She didn’t do any of that and didn’t really feel as if she was suffering because of it. She felt she was doing quite fine on her own, particularly when she discovered Arthur Wesley Dow, who had a huge influence on her. He directed her to Japan and Japanese aesthetics in every aspect: in poetry, in printmaking, in scrolls, in calligraphy. And when she saw the Japanese traditions of line and condensed space and emphasis on surface design, once she learnt all about that, she had no need for Europe. Dow introduced her to Asia, and frankly that’s where her clothes aesthetic came from or was reinforced.
What was unusual about her was that she didn’t seek any bohemian adventure outside of the country. Stieglitz, when he became her promoter, made a great deal about her being an authentic, unspoilt American. And he would use as evidence that not only had she never gone abroad but that she had spent her time as a schoolteacher in rural Texas—and what could be more American than that? She was proud of knowing something of the American West. She didn’t really dispute his pointing that out but absorbed it as something special about herself. She didn’t see it as a plot so much as it just happened to be the way she lived her life. And he found a way to market her art as that of an “unspoilt American” who painted straight from the soil. She was an American painter unsullied by time spent in Europe.
It’s amazing that you actually got to meet her while she was still alive. What were your impressions of her? What sticks in your mind about her?
When I met O’Keeffe, my work on her at that point wasn’t as profound as it became, because it was actually visiting her in place that took me to ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to rethink what I know of her.’ I knew the secondary literature and other people’s thinking about her, and it did not describe for me what I uncovered in New Mexico. First of all, she was very genial and gracious, and I was a bit nervous because I had been told she could be sharp with people. I was also told that she hated only talking about her past, that if I saw a work of art of hers on the wall, it was most likely to be something fairly recent. And here I was, writing a book of the 1920s and ’30s, and it was 1980, so I was trying to get her to go back fifty years. And I did see the sharp side of her—not to me—but she got a couple of phone calls while I was there. On one phone call, someone said something that irked her and she kind of barked. I didn’t know what the bark was all about, but I saw the side I was being spared. But she was nothing but helpful and nice. I think the thing that impressed me was that she talked exactly as she wrote. She was very terse, to the point, minimalist. It didn’t surprise me, but when she took one of my questions, she might answer it in just one or two sentences.
My husband was with me, and she walked us out to the car after our discussion. I think she realised I didn’t know much about her part of the country. She clearly loved her New Mexico. Place was everything to her. So she said, ‘You simply can’t leave here without going to Ghost Ranch, which is my other home.’ We didn’t have to go to the house, she showed no interest in us going to the house—in fact, that was off limits to almost everybody except her and her entourage—but she said, ‘You have to see that landscape, because that’s me.’ And she described how to drive there, some fifteen miles away. And we did. And it opened my eyes to her relationship to the specialness of that landscape.
What do you think it is about those landscapes of New Mexico, that dryness and that lunar landscape, that suited her personality and her own aesthetic?
The first thing you have to understand about O’Keeffe is that nature meant everything to her. She was more a student of nature than of anything else. She liked to say things like, ‘If people were more like trees, I’d like them better.’ Or she would say, ‘If I spend too much time with people, then I don’t get to see the nature around me.’ She’s not romantic about nature particularly, but it’s very clear that she had routines in life that took her away from social occasions as much as possible so that she could be completely enveloped by the natural world around her. It’s a thread that runs throughout her work, from the dairy farm where she grew up in Wisconsin, to the time she spent in the Panhandle of Texas, to the canyons and the dry earth of northern New Mexico. She’s not a student of cities or of manmade landscapes but the raw out-of-doors. It’s very geological where she chose to live; you feel like you’re in landscape that is millions of years old. It is dry and its colours are dusty. She always compared the colours of the Southwest to the overwhelming greenness of Lake George where she vacationed with Stieglitz in upstate New York.
Once she had discovered New Mexico, she made fun of the sameness of the blue of the water and the green of the hills around Lake George—how could she get fulfilled in landscapes like that? The remote landscape she chose to live in is, for some, an acquired taste. It is native land to Indigenous Peoples and to Hispanic villagers whose ancestors came north from Mexico and South America. For her, it was a place she discovered through summers of careful looking for the right place to set down roots. She had travelled in this country more than other artists had, and she took great pride that she had spent time in Colorado, that she had passed through Santa Fe and Taos in her teaching years, and she had done her two and three years in Texas. And then she had gone to South Carolina, and that’s how the nature there had become such a major deal. The magnetism of her landscape meant everything to her. You know, each of us has our own relationship to nature: some people don’t give a damn about it, other people have to get out-of-doors for their thirty minutes every day. But some people can’t breathe without being immersed in it. She’s one of those.
I know that you are an art historian rather than a fashion historian, but looking through the lens of the exhibition, what do you think dress, or a sense of style, can say about a person that other things can’t?
I haven’t thought much about it in general terms, but I have thought about it in the life of artists. I don’t think fashion as a subject gets one very far with every artist. Picasso was a self-conscious and creative dresser, but not Matisse. In the case of O’Keeffe, she really wanted singularity; she created a personal style that she found physically comfortable but also psychologically. It was an identity issue for her. There are things she just couldn’t wear. She would be very uncomfortable in clothes made in a style that wasn’t hers. And interestingly—it took me a while to understand this—she never wanted to stand out for being weird or strange or counterculture in any obvious way. She did not want to annoy people or look like she spent all day putting herself together. Her style was that of “less is more” in every aspect of her life. The way she put sentences together, how she addressed an envelope: less is more. How she put food on a plate, it was less is more. It was her indigenous aesthetic, her modern style.That’s what my exhibition was all about: here’s somebody who made her art and her life according to a uniform aesthetic. She was embedded in early 20th century modernism and expressed it in every aspect of her being.
[Another] thing I did focus on in the book is the centrality of black and white in her vocabulary; she always wore those two colours when she dressed to be photographed or self fashioned for a public event. So I thought some about the role of black and white in her paintings. We assume that she was a great colourist; she talked about how much she loved colour in her art. Once I saw how important black and white were in her wardrobe, I realised she’d done several paintings that are just black and white, or all whites, or all greys and whites. She would set this colour combination forward every once in a while as a painterly challenge. Somebody will do an exhibition about this, I’m sure, someday: the place of black and white in her palette. We’ve just been so diverted by the colour thing that we haven’t noticed.
Her lover and later husband, Stieglitz, photographed her throughout her life, and I know that she wore those black and white clothes because they photographed better and it was formal, but in what other way do you think these photographs affected her dress sense and also her art? Because I know you talked about how these photographs helped her move away from the flower paintings.
The relationship with Stieglitz couldn’t be more complicated as a personal relationship, but then you throw in the fact that he took photographs of her for twenty years, and she had to dress and pose for him. One of the things I tried to do in the book was explore her occupation as a model for first him and then dozens of other photographers. This was not an insignificant activity for her. As I began to write the book, it became clearer and clearer to me that her life in front of the camera did in fact help her form her dress aesthetic. She learnt how to dress for Stieglitz’ camera, and that helped to evolve her style. That’s a story in itself, the way the photographs operated in their relationship and in her life. It’s another piece of her life that we can’t minimise, as it was a yearly, time-consuming activity. Even before he died in 1946, other photographers began to ask her to pose, and she became a model until her own death in 1986.
In the 1970s, she became a celebrity. She was on the cover of Life magazine in 1968 and had a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970—both events at the start of the women’s movement. Suddenly she’s got an expanded audience, one that included a lot of young women, some of whom became her groupies. Seen as an artist who had broken the glass ceiling, she became bigger than life in the 1970s, and frankly she wasn’t well prepared to negotiate this new Hollywood-like fame. Everybody wanted a piece of her. She did manage, however, to write and design a beautiful book about herself, and the filmmaker Perry Adato made a great documentary about her. But she was known to say ‘I think I liked it better when I wasn’t so well known.’
I really wanted to know about O’Keefe’s shoes, because they’re a part of her clothing that we often don’t see in her photographs, and for some reason I just imagine her being barefoot.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photograph of her in bare feet. She was a very dashing footwear dresser, even as a young woman, before she became a dashing painter. She was of the suffrage generation, so no high heels for her, but flat shoes very early on. She didn’t wear transparent stockings but thick socks. This was all a vocabulary for the “new woman” who was refusing to wear things like her late-Victorian mother, and flat shoes and heavy socks really spoke to feminist politics. Wearing just black and white, and foregoing corsets, tripled the degree to which people saw her as a radical woman dresser.
The shoes found in her closets were very worn. She didn’t buy new shoes every year; she wore them to death, and when she found what she liked, she would buy six or seven pairs of them. I would say that her heels were always one inch, one-and-a-half inch, and not at all stiletto. She liked ballet flats. With her everyday denim, she wore sneakers and boots. She had two or three pairs of really rugged, shit-kicking boots which she’d wear to walk in the desert. They’re very dusty and dirty. She had a real ethos about shoes; she hated to be wearing the wrong kind of shoes if photographed. I do have one or two stories where she is reported to have said, ‘Oh, wait a minute. I have to go change my shoes.’
What you brought up in the exhibition that not that many people know was that she was this amazing seamstress, and you had pieces of hers that she had mended. I was wondering what kind of gestures of being a seamstress are reflected in O’Keeffee’s paintings?
One of the things I learnt from making the exhibition is the degree to which there are fabric-like activities and events in her paintings. When you’re putting an exhibition together that has thirty gorgeous paintings in it, those of us hanging it began to see filmy folds in her abstractions, transparencies like those of silk, and billowing qualities … that are what you might call a fabric vocabulary. We think of her line as serpentine; it is a moving not a static line, and that too is a property of many fabrics.
In what way did you want to unclench your audience’s mind after their viewing of your exhibition about O’Keeffe? What was it that you were really putting forth?
I think what was at the top of my mind as a scholar and as a curator was not necessarily what happened in the exhibition. My motivations—and all my wall labels pointed to this—was showing the degree to which Georgia O’Keeffe made a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art) out of her life. In a Gesamtkunstwerk, no part plays a role secondary to another part. It was a term used to describe one of Wagner’s operas, for instance, where the music and the singing and the staging are equal partners. That’s really what my curatorial aim was, and that’s why the exhibition had not only clothes but paintings and photographs of her, and even some works that showed the way she lived; we included pictures of her houses. Now, what did people find so engaging about the exhibition? They could not help but get my message; we pounded them over the head with it. Here’s a garment that looks like a painting that looks like a photograph.
Many younger viewers who went to the exhibition, however, weren’t so interested in my curatorial intentions. What they saw was a woman who created her own “brand,” who used her clothes and her look to become a media persona, the way they aspire to do using social media like Instagram. They saw in O’Keeffe someone who used the vocabulary and the media of an earlier era to create a distinctive self, using all that was available to her at the time. That wasn’t at all my goal, but it was what I learnt from reading the exhibition’s reviews and evaluations.
Do you think she was that self-conscious in creating that “brand”?
To me, it was self-conscious in that she knew what she liked, but it also evolved naturally rather than as premeditated. I twisted and turned the first time I saw the word “brand” in a review, but it came up again and again. “Marketing” also came up—not a word I would use. These are today’s words but applied to yesterday’s actions. I don’t think she was all that calculating, but I know that Stieglitz was very conscious of what it meant to be in a newspaper or be in a magazine like Vanity Fair, and I do know he always insisted on having his photographs used when the press needed a portrait of her. He wouldn’t allow the journalistic press to photograph her. He was media conscious, I guess we would say, and he understood the ways the image industry would help build a reputation—his and hers. She learnt a lot from him, and it is fair to say that the two of them participated in the start of modern media celebrity culture as we know it today.
But she was primarily driven by aesthetic motivations of the same sort that led to the founding of the architecture and design department of the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s. She believed that if we all just would pay a little bit more attention to orchestrating beauty in our everyday life, we’d all be better off for it. That’s where she was coming from. I don’t think she self-consciously set out to say, ‘I’m going to create a new lifestyle, and I’m going to teach the world how to do it.’ It was a more natural process, but she did create little teachable moments. She would tell her interviewers, ‘Every decision you make in your daily life matters. How you arrange things on your mantlepiece. Less is more. Where you put a stamp on an envelope is an aesthetic decision.’ I remember hearing that she adjusted the tie a young man was wearing, saying ‘Everything matters.’