9781422276471

G eorgia O 'K eeffe AN ETERNAL SPIRIT

O’Keeffe once admitted, “I believe it was the work that kept me with [Stieglitz]—though I loved him as a human being.” Their separation during the 1926 National Woman’s Party convention was the first of what became frequent and long seasons spent away from each other. In 1929 she traveled to NewMexico to spend her first summer in blessed isolation in order to paint. Thus began a cycle that would last for almost two decades, spending winters with Stieglitz in New York and summers in her beloved desert. According to friends and family, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were obviously in love for their entire lives. They wrote frequently during their separations and confided their feelings about things both personal and professional. In 1937 O’Keeffe wrote raptur- ously to Stieglitz about the colors of the desert and the painting she was working on, adding that he would have loved the sight of the evening sky from the hill as much as she did. Her inclusion of him in her memory of the event seems to make her miss him, and despite her obvious pleasure at being in the desert, she adds, “I wonder should I go to the lake [Lake George] and have two or three weeks with you before you go to town. I will if you say so. Wire me and I will pick right up and start.” After Stieglitz died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved per- manently to New Mexico. Her second major retro- spective took place in 1970, at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, after she had worked in compar- ative isolation for a number of years. She returned to the art world during a period rich in the social commentaries and ironies of pop art, with minimal- ists and conceptual artists doing things that nobody previously ever thought could be considered art. For the first time, O’Keeffe was without the glare of the spotlight that Stieglitz had usually helped to provide, but her lack of confidence did not keep her from including a substantial body of new southwest- ern studies among her 121 paintings, spanning the fifty-five years of her career. The response to the Whitney show served to prove O’Keeffe’s enduring brilliance as a major artist. During her lifetime, O’Keeffe won countless honors and awards, including the Medal of Freedom, the highest American civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, and the Gold Medal for Painting by the

National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, filling the seat after the death of e. e. cummings in 1962. O’Keeffe arranged annual exhibitions of her own work as well other artists in various New York gal- leries owned by Stieglitz. She had numerous one-per- son exhibitions in prominent galleries, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others. She has often been referred to as the

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