Features

Georgia O’Keeffe: A Place of Her Own

By Zane Fischer
Georgia O’Keeffe’s bedroom is small and spare, with a narrow bed, dark plaster, and two entire walls of plate glass. The only ornamentation is a row of smooth, rounded stones and a Buddha’s hand, positioned in a gesture that indicates fearlessness, protruding from the earthen wall near the modest fireplace. From this cloistered perch in the village of Abiquiú, O’Keeffe could see the entire world. Past the cottonwood trees lining the Rio Chama. Beyond the chalk-smeared bluffs of Plaza Blanca and the snaking road to Española and Santa Fe. Out even into Texas, Wisconsin, Chicago, Virginia, South Carolina, New York, Peru, and Asia. All of the geography that tinted her life, that was ground with pigment and oil under her brushes, and that led her ultimately to work among earth, bones, and sky in a land as remote, as celebratory, and as wildly independent as her own soul.

     It’s easy to imagine it that way, at least, looking out at the same view in the presence of Agapita Judy Lopez, executive director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, as she recalls the smiling and inquisitive eyes of the famous painter that often fixed into this faraway nearby. When Lopez gives a tour of O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home (available only by appointment to a set number of people each year), it’s plain that her job swells beyond nine-to-five and blossoms into the happy duty of preserving the beloved memory of “Miss O’Keeffe,” as her friends and loved ones called her.

     Two decades after O’Keeffe’s death, the artist’s life has become a fixture of America’s collective mythology: In 1916, a talented young art teacher captures the eye, and then the heart, of renowned New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz with her innovative charcoal drawings. She goes on to become famous for her floral still lifes, sensuous Southwestern landscapes, and studies of high-desert bones and blooms. The daring painter was at the vanguard of an emerging American modernism in the young century, when Pablo Picasso, though already accomplished, was perceived as little more than a libertine across the pond. But Agapita Lopez is a local girl, and her memory of the woman who chose New Mexico over New York in the 1940s is altogether more intimate. Lopez remembers the intense focus of an artist’s life becoming yet another daily rhythm in the small village of Abiquiú.

     For Lopez, working for O’Keeffe was almost a family job: if it was good enough for her grandfather, it was good enough for her mother, and good enough for Agapita. The work became a passion. Now arcing into middle age, Lopez can still recall almost everything about her legendary friend—from her long gaze at the bedroom window to how she gathered herbs in the garden, stored her vegetables through winter, got lost in the shapes of pebbles, tended her chow dogs, and secretly provided the village of Abiquiú with desperately needed services and amenities—all with a curious blend of raw emotion and fastidiousness.

     A profound sense of adoration for O’Keeffe marks most people who make the effort to visit this area, an hour’s drive north of Santa Fe, and Lopez is continually touched by this. “People come from all walks of life to be here. They like her for different reasons, and they all have a different idea. Some admire her for what she represents to women, some for her art, some for the way she lived, but they all seem to love her.”

      But even after spending much of her life in O’Keeffe’s company, Lopez never expected to be at the helm of the artist’s possessions: nearly 1,000 works of art, her historic archives, even the Abiquiú property, which O’Keeffe bought in 1945 for a winter home. Yet that’s where fate finds Lopez on a cool, clear day, the quiet of the village limning her thoughts. The topics of death, rebirth, and a new era of the painter’s legacy are very much on her mind, as this year marks not only the 20th anniversary of the artist’s death but the end of the O’Keeffe Foundation as well.

     When Georgia O’Keeffe died at St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe on March 6, 1986, a conflict ensued regarding the distribution of her substantial estate. An agreement between her family and her longtime assistant and companion, Juan Hamilton, was reached, and with it a compromise: the establishment of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. This trust would hold the bulk of O’Keeffe’s assets and personal effects for a period of 20 years, during which time the foundation would find an appropriate final resting place for her immense holdings: more than 800 works by O’Keeffe, paintings O’Keeffe had collected by her peers, an unusually large set of historic archives and documents, and the ownership of her Abiquiú home. That transfer takes place this March 6. The designated recipient: Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which will receive one of the most significant single boosts to any museum anywhere in the world in recent memory.

     “It’s a good thing to do,” says Lopez, who, like O’Keeffe, wastes no unnecessary color. When Lopez says “good,” the word carries with it a biblical-sized stamp of approval, the kind that’s necessary for the unprecedented scale of this gift. (For perspective, huge waves erupted in the world of cultural philanthropy last year when the Disney-Tishman collection of African art, valued at up to $50 million, was given to the Smithsonian. This gift dwarfs it in terms of raw value.)

      For Lopez, the transfer means she will likely become an employee of the museum, where she will oversee changes at the Abiquiú home. (Actually, very little is expected to change as the home is already carefully protected to maintain the tranquil village life around it, and remains much as it was when O’Keeffe lived there.) What will change, with a little luck, is that people will finally be able to see O’Keeffe’s life in full, with the kind of fabled clarity the artist cast on the world in her prolific outpouring of painting, sculptures, and works on paper.

      “One of the problems with educating the public about O’Keeffe’s role in history is that she’s so iconic,” explains Barbara Buhler Lynes from her spacious, subdued office on Grant Street. An elegant woman wearing a sweater knit with the muted striations of a high-desert landscape, Buhler Lynes speaks confidently about O’Keeffe—and she should. As the author of the artist’s catalogue raisonné, the curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and the Emily Fisher Landau director of its Research Center, Buhler Lynes is one the world’s foremost O’Keeffe experts. “In a way, O’Keeffe’s been lifted out of time,” she continues, “and she can take on a superfluousness because of that.”

       If O’Keeffe’s job as an artist was to transcend culture, Buhler Lynes’s task as a scholar is to reintegrate her into a discernible era and context, a challenge in our celebrity-obsessed culture where photographs of the artist are as recognizable as her work. But the Research Center’s commitment to focus on O’Keeffe’s role as a pioneer of American modernism rather than quixotic poster girl was key in the foundation’s decision, says Juan Hamilton, who serves on the foundation’s board and was perhaps the person closest to O’Keeffe in the decade before her death.

      Gray has infiltrated Juan Hamilton’s groomed hair and mustache, his tan skin criss-crossed by the same subtle lines familiar to the ceramic medium he’s practiced since before entering O’Keeffe’s world. At 60, he’s finally ready to set aside 34 years of living in the artist’s shadow, including the last 20 years since her death. As he prepares an austere exhibition space for his own art work on Canyon Road, he muses on the process the foundation went through in selecting the museum. “No other institution or entity has come forth with such enthusiasm and dedication for O’Keeffe,” he says. “We had to seriously consider many options, but once the O’Keeffe Museum had proven its determination and viability, well, I don’t think it could have worked out better. She said in her lifetime, ‘If someone puts up a building, I’ll put up the paintings.’”

      The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in 1997, thanks largely to local philanthropists Anne and John Marion and their associated Burnett Foundation. An elegant building on Johnson Street was remodeled to echo O’Keeffe’s spare aesthetic, and the artist’s summer home at Ghost Ranch, 16 miles north of Abiquiú, was acquired as well. In 1998, George King, formerly of the Katonah Museum of Art in New York, was hired as director. A scant three years later, the museum proved itself by creating the Research Center, a separate facility devoted to the study of American modernism. By year seven, the museum was accredited, giving it a sort of national seal of approval that confirmed its high standards. And it did so in record time. (Only 750 of the country’s 16,000 museums are formally accredited, with the O’Keeffe Museum gaining that distinction faster than any other museum in history.) Receiving the foundation’s enormous assets further catapults the museum into rarified air. “It is now the repository [for O’Keeffe’s work],” says Hamilton, “and it becomes a magnet for collectors with charitable intentions as a place to donate works they own.”

      The importance of this month’s event isn’t lost on the museum. Remarkably coiffed and dressed more like an understated Italian swell than the gracious museum director he is, George King remarks: “Aside from the museum’s opening, this is the biggest event that has happened. …Our arts holdings are why we exist, and it’s from them that everything is spun off.”

      The museum prides itself on being the largest single institutional holder of O’Keeffe’s works, and this transfer ensures that status permanently, increasing its collection from 271 to 1,102 (roughly half of what O’Keeffe produced over her lifetime), with additional works by the artist’s contemporaries and an unusually comprehensive set of archival notes, documents, and photographs. (The exhibition A Celebration of New Works: Recent Gifts, Promised Gifts, and Extended Loans runs through June 4, and features many of these rarely viewed works on paper.) “Of course there’s more to take care of—more conservation, more stewardship—but the trade-off is what it means for our audience,” says King. “We can organize more exhibitions around O’Keeffe and modernism in a broader and deeper way.” Buhler Lynes, erupting from her usual scholarly reserve, is even more enthused. “It’s huge. It quintuples our collection. It gives us greater responsibility and also a much broader base to work with.”

      That broad base also means, both King and Buhler Lynes emphasize, that the museum has more bargaining power. They can now more easily exchange works with other institutions, allowing O’Keeffe’s output to stretch into a variety of contexts rather than being secreted away in a storage vault. And putting O’Keeffe’s work into the company of her peers—not only for scholars and residents at the Research Center, but also for the everyday public visitor—was a priority in the foundation’s mission to ensure that O’Keeffe’s legacy would be preserved. “The problem with a museum devoted to a single artist that is not often thought of,” cautions Hamilton, “is that the artist ends up competing with himself or herself. In another museum, the work would always be hung next to that of others and certain relationships would be evident. You would see an evolution.”

      The final factor was whether Santa Fe had enough clout to merit such a collection. Several art capitals, including New York City, where O’Keeffe first came to prominence as an artist and married Stieglitz, could lay legitimate claim to her, and despite the O’Keeffe Museum’s impressive beginnings, entrusting everything to a small, relatively junior museum in New Mexico was a gamble. “The risk of a Santa Fe—based museum is that people would think of O'Keeffe as somehow provincial," says Hamilton. "But I think that's fairly easily dispelled."

In terms of the impact on Santa Fe, the addition of hundreds of rarely seen works will benefit an already popular museum, but another tremendous boon lies behind the scenes. The Research Center will now possess O'Keeffe's complete archives, library, and notes on process, the exacting details O'Keeffe recorded, from how she created paint colors to the thoughts behind her work.

Those who knew O'Keeffe simply hope that Santa Fe and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum will respect this painter's remarkable life as fervently as she herself respected the region now known as "O'Keeffe Country." In the early 1970s, while living in an old gym­nasium in Cerrillos, New Mexico, artist Carol Sarkisian, then a seamstress, befriended O'Keeffe. "She and Juan would come to visit, and Georgia would be so beautifully dressed. She would take the scarf out of her hair and then fold it on the table into something like a perfect little Japanese square," Sarkisian recalls. On one visit, around 1975, Carol, her husband, Paul, and son, Peter—all three are well-respected artists in their medi­ums—were roller skating. Hamilton put on a pair of skates, Carol recalls, and, as he whizzed past O'Keeffe, he scooped her up in his arms and sped around the circumference of the building with her. "She was almost 80, and she was laugh­ing and kicking her legs out; she enjoyed every bit of it. I thought she was just amazing and wild."

O'Keeffe had to overcome the status quo of the era she was raised in to pur­sue her life as an artist. If, in lauding her now, the museum that bears her name can preserve, celebrate, and truly illumi­nate the life behind her paintings, some­thing great will be achieved. "Think of her," says Sarkisian, eyes wide, her hands fingering the same pure cotton cloth that she once used to fashion kimonos for O'Keeffe. "To live where she did, to be a woman alone in New Mexico in the '40s and '50s doing the kind of painting that she did. And to do it day after day. Can you imagine that?"