Pavla Berghen-Wolf:
Hello and welcome. I am Pavla Berghen-Wolf, Class of 2018.
Emma Hanselman:
And I'm Emma Hanselman. Also Class of 2018. At Brandeis, we were art history majors and studied with Professor Scott and we were in specially impacted by her course covering the legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe.
Pavla Berghen-Wolf:
For both of us, Professor Scott's mentorship has been long lasting. In fact, it was Professor Scott's course on Georgia O'Keeffe that generated my enthusiasm for early American modernism, which led me to my current career at an American Art Gallery in New York city.
Emma Hanselman:
And for me, while working with Professor Scott during my senior year on an independent study of the artist Sonia Delaunay, I was made aware of the dedication, passion, and skill that she includes in all of her pursuits.
Pavla Berghen-Wolf:
It is our pleasure to welcome you to today's alumni college session, in which Professor Nancy Scott will discuss Georgia O'Keeffe art and music, suffrage in the Southwest commemorating the Centennial of the 19th Amendment. 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment protecting women's constitutional right to vote. Our session today is a tribute to this historic milestone and offers an opportunity to explore Georgia O'Keeffe's art during the suffrage movement and beyond.
Pavla Berghen-Wolf:
This topic feels even more so relevant, given the continued fight for equality and against injustice in this country, we are delighted to have the opportunity to share this event with you. Our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends around the world. Thank you for joining us.
Emma Hanselman:
And now to introduce Professor Scott. Nancy Scott is Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis. She received a Tyson fellow scholarship for the summer of 2019 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Her ongoing project illuminates the origins of O'Keeffe's philanthropy at Fisk University in 1949, where O'Keeffe donated 101 works of art of the Stieglitz collection. The artist also personally oversaw the installation at the historically black university during the Jim Crow era reprising a gesture of liberal philanthropy that recalls her early New York years of activism. Professor Scott earlier published a biography, Georgia O'Keeffe (Critical Lives) in 2015, published by Reaction Press London. There she also references certain works of O'Keeffe that were once shown at Brandeis, when O'Keeffe when the creative arts award here in 1963. The Stieglitz collection is today co-owned by Crystal Bridges and Fisk in a two year rotation. Thank you, professor Scott.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I hope you can all hear me. Welcome to this virtual event and I hope you're all settled somewhere comfortable and cool today. It's getting quite hot in Boston already. I am showing you first a jimsonweed plant to symbolize one of the great flowers that O'Keeffe painted, quite often. It's a work of art, that I stumbled upon, a photographic work of art, you might say, and we'll see the painting that comes from this great flower later in the presentation. I want to start with the chancing upon the jimsonweed because it's such a special and extraordinary flower symbolizing to me in many ways, the clashing elements that are a part of O'Keeffe's artistic personality, both beautiful and daring, both bold and also somewhat frightening. This is the plant actually that comes from a nightshade family and can be poisonous or can be used in native rituals as it was in the Southwest as a hallucinogenic.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So there is this mix of forces that inform O'Keeffe's early life, and she is quite a radical young woman as she steps into art school in New York, early in her career. Here's a kind of template for the lecture today. O'Keeffe, we're looking at art and music because music is very much an inspiration in her childhood, in her early education and the music is going to be in the works of art actually. So those two are bound together. An important category for our celebration of the Centennial of the 19th Amendment is about suffrage. I will demonstrate how her interests, she's not a suffragette. So strictly speaking, she is actually an artist who is very involved with friends who are interested in suffrage and her reading and her activism comes through these friendships of her early days in New York. I'll explain that in a moment and the Southwest will be the last section, with some touchstones along the way about this Brandeis involvement that Emma has so well explained to you already, which is great.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So this is just a little capsule of key dates in O'Keeffe's early career, and then through to her death in 1986 at the age of 98. Of course, everything about apiece life changes when she meets Alfred Stieglitz. And that is facilitated really by her dear friend, Anita Pollitzer, who is the chief suffragette of this saga. Here are two very famous photo portraits of O'Keeffe by Stieglitz. One of which he makes of her, when she first comes to see her Texas work exhibited at the 291 Gallery, she has on her traveling hat, she's taken the railroad all the way from the panhandle of Texas to New York City to see the exhibition in 1917, that he hung her work.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
On the right, you see a photo of her holding sculpture by Henri Matisse, which indicates her very deep involvement in both a European art style that Stieglitz has been exhibiting in his 291 Gallery through the years from really 19 '9 '10 '11, which she would not have experienced firsthand, but she comes to New York by well, 1908, actually she sees the first Rodin drawing show. She does not see the Matisse show. She's back in New York in 1914, '15 to study and receive her teacher training at Teachers College. Those years exposed her to Stieglitz's gallery, but the two of them really become entranced with one another when he sees her works of art for the first time.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This is just a symbol of her training at The Art Students League which was the first place she was allowed to go off to school in New York City. She had a very spotty artistic education, as you can see from the header on this particular image, studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This had to do with family finances, quite frankly, these large gaps in the years when she's not studying art. So between Art Students League and starting to study art again in the summer of 1912 at the University of Virginia, those are periods of the family's financial issues, and also O'Keeffe's own illness. She had a very bad time of it. One disease, in fact, that could not be controlled and caused her to lose all of her hair and have to have a very long, long recuperation, when the family had moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. Then she comes back and an aunt funds her time at Teachers College.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So this is the middle period, that wonderful year of the art students league. And you can see how many men are here. This is the point of this image. There is the portrait of O'Keeffe, which was created by an artist named Eugene Speicher in 1908. And he said to her, "You have time to pose for me. I'm going to be famous someday. So I hope all of you who are out there will have a good hearty laugh over that one." This is the only woman who actually showed up for the reunion in 1950. Her name is Peggy Bacon.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
She was sometimes exhibited by Stieglitz and related galleries. This is Kuniyoshi and we can almost not see, very important Japanese-American artist. So, here's the first introduction to Anita Pollitzer, she is talking to W. J. Jameson. I had meant to take out the Senator. He's not a Senator. I double checked that last night. He was the finance committee chair, actually of the Democratic Party. It was the Democrats who really pushing the vote for women. And it took a very long time before the vote was ratified, August of 1920 and it was Tennessee that pushed that vote over the edge.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So Anita and Georgia, Georgia creates her own caricature, self portrait on the left, writing to Anita. She called herself Patsy in those days, that's when she still had the curly hair. She's going to work like a tiger and she writes these wonderful letters to Anita throughout the years, 1915, '16, when they've been in school together, in New York, they separate and Anita starts to work very much as a foot soldier in the movement for suffrage.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
She writes to Georgia a lot. It's almost like a diary and Patsy/Georgia, who's older and has this sort of big sister relationship with the Anita, tells her how meaningful her art is coming to be during a time of isolation. And she's teaching in South Carolina when she writes so much to Anita. Anita is going to March in the 1915 Fifth Avenue parade for suffrage and describes it all to O'Keeffe. So those are all letters that are wonderful traces of this early divergence of their interests and yet at the same time, Anita will always be pulling Georgia closer and closer to advocacy for suffrage, but we would never call Georgia O'Keeffe a suffragette, okay, she's not marching. She is making art.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
The Senator from Tennessee who pushes it over the edge is named by the way, Burn and his mother told him to vote for suffrage and apparently he broke the vote just that way. So it was very, very narrow in the state of Tennessee in 1920. These things are so hard won. Women as World Builders. We actually have a copy of this book at the Brandeis Library in the original edition. I was able to read it quite some time ago because I became interested in the O'Keeffe-Pollitzer correspondence, which is housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale university. And I read through the entirety of the correspondence, wrote an article about it. This is, Oh gosh, a long time ago in the '80s.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I read the books that O'Keeffe was reading and it became very interesting to me. I wanted you to see a separate cover because it gives the publication date of 1913 and the studies in modern feminism. Essentially what Floyd Dell did was to write a very ardent advocacy for women and their right to work outside the home. And you can see the quote from his book. Actually, I can't see it because it's hiding behind a lot of controls, but it is, "Pursuing one's own ambition in life and to do this with bravery." This is Floyd Dell's clarion called women. Then he does a set of, I think there are about a dozen essays. The one that I particularly wanted to highlight is the Isadora Duncan essay, because he speaks about Isadora Duncan as the freest spirit in the freest body and her dance, of course, completely reinvents American modern dance.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
O'Keeffe would very likely have seen at least one Duncan performance. I can't document this, but in the Stieglitz circle, other artists around Stieglitz by the time O'Keeffe and Stieglitz become intimate, there is definitely a knowledge and a passion about a Sidra Duncan's free dance postures and those works of art are in the Stieglitz collection. Some of them, even at Fisk University in the gift with Crystal Bridges now shared. To move ahead, O'Keeffe's free spirit moves towards abstraction. She becomes very interested to put away her colors and to pursue charcoal abstractions in the fall of 1915.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So we are now past her various years of spotty education, Teachers College, having been the most recent, she is desperate to have a job. And she makes that very clear in letters to a young man, a political scientist, whom she was seeing at that time. His name was Arthur McMahon, and she writes to him that she's leaving for South Carolina and when she does, he says, "Why are you sewing? You mentioned you're sewing." Well, of course she's sewing her own clothing. This did not become publicly admired or known much about until just quite recently when Wanda Corn did a fabulous exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and it came here to the Peabody Essex museum in Salem, where we could see O'Keeffe's own handmade clothing in juxtaposition with many of her works of art.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So to get back to that fall, when she's sewing busily, having to leave New York, having to seek employment elsewhere, she gets down on the floor and makes her works of art, from forms in her hand. She goes completely past old master traditions or the study of art that comes before her and draws upon these interior sensations and emotions. One must say at the same time, she's seen a good deal of work on paper at the Stieglitz gallery, by this fall of 1915, because she's in New York the prior year and charcoals were shown by Picasso during the time and Brock. By the time she was leaving New York, those images might've been in her head. These are not Cubist obviously, but these are works that drop on a charcoal, abstract tradition that she's been enmeshed with.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Next, she has to go back to New York and I will skip over all the details except to say she finishes teacher training, but never graduates. This is her portrait in the West Texas State year book called the Le Mirage and she is a teacher then in Texas, still 2018. Texas is an amazing place for her. This is a series now of her great watercolors, the evening star, which he does in a series of six. Stieglitz loves all of this work and of course it is to him that Anita Pollitzer brings the charcoal abstractions first on New Year's Eve, the night of December, 1915 and she writes so key through the night, post the letter the next morning to tell her Stieglitz's reaction. So Stieglitz learns about O'Keeffe's art first through Anita Pollitzer and he is wowed by this body of work. So this is a Stieglitz self-portrait and then the back view from the famous 291 Gallery.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So to continue with the Texas watercolors, this is train at night in the desert, a series of three and other wonderful one that really is all about the cloud of steam, but you can see she's out there at dark. It turns out when we read the letters, she's been hiking in the Palo Duro Canyon. She loves the flatness, the plains, the sunsets. She has a room that faces East, so the sun comes up in her room every morning, but the reason she has gone out to meet the train and the letters of O'Keeffe, which have been published now by Sarah Greenell the editor, great photography, art historian at the National Gallery, it's Claudia, her little sister, 17 years old, who's on that train. Who's coming to live with O'Keeffe. That's part of the O'Keeffe story we never hear so much about.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Again, the family's poverty due to a number of financial reversals has ended with their mother dying of tuberculosis. So Claudia is the youngest sister, as I say, just 17. She takes the teacher training course. She will later establish a Montessori school in Los Angeles and run that for many years. This is O'Keeffe hiking. So when you see that Palo Duro canyon picture hot and its level-like forums, imagine hiking in a white cotton crisp dress, undoubtedly that she made herself.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So Claudia and Georgia, the oldest and youngest of five sisters, there were seven children in the family in total, like coming on the plans again, Texas water colors. This is a series of three. All of them are at the Fort Worth Museum, the Amom Carter. And she speaks specifically more and more to Stieglitz and the letters that flow from the Texas period and fewer and fewer go to Anita Pollitzer.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This one, she writes a very beautiful passage about looking at the light that comes on the plains and seeing it as not nothing which people say is nothing. She chides them for this. She says, "This is the most important thing where the light just begins to emerge." You can see she's left the paper blank between the orb of light. It's just gradually starting to emanate in this scrape form above the land of the flat prairie.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So that becomes a liminal place for her to enter into further artistic exploration. So here's her first exhibit. That's just her own. He has given her previously in 1916, a tiny exhibit with two other men. And that's called an exploration from a "psychoanalytic" point of view. So he's still puzzled by the early work. This is the Palo Duro canyon there. You can see some of the paintings or the blue series, which are from Virginia.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This is the charcoal study for a train at night in the desert. That precedes the watercolor you just saw. That's the first painting she ever sells. T hat is sold for $100. This which you saw may echo the music of her love of fiddle playing. She talks about scraping away on the violin, that you can see here, it's partnered with a work of art that she regarded as a morning figure, i.e bereavement after her mother's death. Stieglitz of course regarded it as a phallic symbol and gave it abstract names, such as abstraction and reinvention, something along those lines. But you can see he's posing the works in a kind of provocative, ying and yang partnership there.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
She never wanted to show the work and she wouldn't tell him anything of its origins. So here we have the intimate period of their friendship developing. First he photographs her in front of the works and in the gallery, this is her traveling costume, again of white starched linen color that she's made herself that can be used and reused, but it's her hands that are so beautiful. He sees those as the hands of the creator. By 1918, when they are completely madly in love and her former political scientist friend has been thrown over, she poses for him in a little attic studio that they share in the brownstone owned by his doctor, brother, Dr. Lee Stieglitz, and the attic has been given to O'Keeffe as a place to come back from Texas to recuperate from the dread pneumonia that she had suffered earlier that year.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Of course, these were intimate exchanges and posing that she did for her lover, the photographer, but he chooses in 1921 to show only one week of a demonstration of portraiture, which included 140 works. It was meant to show his own revitalization, but of course he decides to exhibits some works of O'Keeffe and she becomes what was known at the time as a scandal in New York. And in fact, people said about her, "The Mona Lisa only got one portrait, O'Keeffe got 100."
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So then she has to deal with this interpretation of the work. This is the pink and blue, on the right, the green and blue music, which are definitely her own responses to musical tones and shapes that she senses as she likes to write about that. But the critics just have a wonderful time piling on these works and making all kinds of outsides and rather ludicrous determinations about what the work might mean. And of course, to the male critics, it means sex, sex, sex.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
We know there is a libidinal and very voluptuous or centrist quality to O'Keeffe's approach to painting. That's one reason it's still so beloved. It is a woman's point of view, but she certainly never intended them. There's a kind of strange dichotomy in her personality. She's both extremely severe and very puritanical, one might say in certain ways, always dressing in black, but on the other hand, there's the centrist rendering as well. But the male critics really give her quite... What shall we say? The kind of fame that one would never want. I have found this in an old Vanity Fair issue from 1922. And you can see O'Keeffe is at the top of these six women and you can see the full title below I hope, The Female of the Species that she has a new deadliness.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
There is no author on this page, but I suspect strongly it was Paul Rosenfeld, a very close intimate friend and critic who knew Stieglitz. The poem titled by the way comes from Rudyard Kipling and has to do with the jungle literally. But it is transposed here by Rosenfeld who worked for vanity fair, who had an editorial role and who writes another column, a long one about O'Keeffe later in 1922 to promote her work prior to her first gallery show with Stieglitz.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So, in these years between her 1918 arrival in New York and her 1923 gallery show, there is a great deal of what we might say is scandalous publicity that starts primarily with the 1921 demonstration portraiture. And you see that the traveling hat, the Palo Dura canyon, that's O'Keeffe as represented here at the top of the page. And if you could read the entire text, and since you're at your own computer, you may be able to see some of it. It does describe in the last paragraph that it's Stieglitz, who has helped her and helped her to become the "life giver." Okay. That's at the end of that paragraph.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
The other important people here, I just wanted to point to are Marguerite Zorach, whose husband William Zorach is a well known sculptor and intimate of the secret scullery. She had a really great career getting started, but then a very rough time as she raised a family and was married to an artist. But Zorach is really coming back in recent years. And this is Ilonka Karasz. This is a woman who... This is a woman... Sorry about this. This is a woman who is one of the most important New Yorker cover artists. She gets her first job as New Yorker in 1924.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I was so pleased to see her decorative silver work at the museum of fine arts here in Boston for this very important show, Women Take the Floor. So for the first time I saw actual objects of Karasz and here she is, otherwise almost forgotten in a 1922 issue of Vanity Fair. To return to suffrage images and to thread in our friend Anita Pollitzer back into the sections of this talk, here is Anita, the only young woman amongst a group of women who seem to be quite serious, dowagers one might say. Anita is holding her hat. She looks like a breath of fresh air, doesn't she? Alice Paul to the far left is the president of the National Women's Party. I captured this from an entry about Anita on the encyclopedia of Jewish women. She was from Charleston, South Carolina and a lifelong friend of O'Keeffe's.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So these women are the women who actually right the ERA. If you did not know, the era goes all the way back to 1923, it was the work of Alice Paul. They called the right for women to vote the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. And so the ERA was then called the Lucretia Mott Amendment. I've just talked to a lot of people about this lately, and I'm surprised that many people don't know how long ago the ERA was actually brought forward. And as you can see, it took until 1972 with second wave feminism for the Congress to pass the law. Gerald Ford and Betty Ford in particular were very strong advocates to get it ratified. As you may know, it didn't get past 35 States when suddenly Ronald Reagan becomes president.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
At that point in the shift of power to the Republican party in 1980, it has taken years for the ERA to become ratified. It was ratified by the blue state of Virginia in the beginning of this year, but even Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said it's not applicable any longer because of the timeline has expired. Stay tuned. Let's hope it does finally get to ratification. O'Keeffe, during these years, as the depression begins, will debate the importance of art. And she's very simple and plain spoken in her words, but she's speaking with a socialist, Michael Gold, who's the editor of The Masses. I must say she read the masses when she was a young woman, also reading Women as World Builders and other works that came her way like essays by Charlotte Gilman Perkins, all of that was in her early New York history.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Here she's really trying to stand up for the continuing importance and influence of art. So I show against that newspaper photo from 1930, a recent work of her fabulous Calla lilies, which exists in many variations on the column, but this one is in a private collection in Massachusetts. So I've been very fortunate to be able to study it on a couple of occasions, very grateful to the people who allowed me to do this. This is simply a wonderful, wonderful, big engrossing Calla. And as one art historian, Barbara Lines has suggested, "She's sticking out her tongue at the critics. She's really had it by this point." I must keep moving, but there's a lot of just rich and wonderful painting in this particular work of art. And it's not just about the joke. The LK refers to a specific critic named Callo Nime, who wrote outrageous interpretations of her art. What else is new?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Similarly the Calla Lily has been very much diagnosed as has been the Jack in the Pulpit. I had to put in Jack in the Pulpit today because they're growing in the town forest, which is about the only place I go these days. I wanted to show you what I spotted. This was in a wonderful exhibit of Stettheimer, Zorach, O'Keeffe and Helen Tour, which was in Portland, Maine a couple of summers ago. You see that little Glint of a detail, doesn't it look exactly like the profile of O'Keeffe holding the Calla Lilly. This is her first New Yorker profile logo, and the drawing was done by a brilliant Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias. So just to say those Calla lilies, those Jack in the Pulpit paintings come along at a very rough time in the Stieglitz-O'Keeffe relationship and may very well in many ways, suggest her own private messages to Stieglitz, but she goes larger and of course these are works that will be very well known in the galleries and the annual exhibitions that he gives her, from that first rough start in 1923.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
To return to the jimsonweed, this is very famous now, simply because of its price. That should not be the only reason we look at the painting, but it is the highest prize ever achieved at auction by a woman artist. I hope there are other breaking news items in future years, but just to say, there ought to be a level playing field and it was hard-won in the case of O'Keeffe's paintings. This was purchased by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and has been much on tour since that acquisition. I photograph this as part of an exhibit called Nature's Nation, which was at Crystal Bridges while I was there last summer.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
The Radiator Building is another shift. Now we'll move away from suffrage and then to a little bit more about a Fisk and Crystal Bridges. The Radiator Building was O'Keeffe's desire to paint architecture. Stieglitz didn't like this idea. He told her better to stick with the flowers. Because I want to be sure that I don't take up too much time talking and I get to hear from you. I won't go through these next images rather quickly, but you will see The Radiator Building in all the images. This was her big success with making a strong and dominant image of one of New York's new skyscrapers. She and Stieglitz lived in a New York skyscraper. That was all new at the time. It was called The Shelton.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This red neon sign here in the backdrop, which would be assigned flickering down Fifth Avenue. You're looking at a 40th street in Manhattan alongside the New York Public Library. This building is called The Radiator Building as it's titled. Architect is Raymond Hood, and it was the first art deco skyscraper. But this neon sign has been repainted instead of saying scientific American, it says Alfred Stieglitz. So it's a kind of homage to Stieglitz to get him on board with her architecture paintings and this painting will go to Fisk University. When O'Keeffe makes the decision to divide the Stieglitz estate after his death in 1949, she donates the radiator building with that 101 selection group of photographs, watercolors and oils.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I wanted particularly to show you the installation at Crystal Bridges just last summer, picturing modern America because an Elsie Driggs painting of the very same year '27 was purchased recently by crystal bridges. This is a young woman full of talent and aspiration who even had the chance to travel in Italy and study Piero Della Francesca and that her career went nowhere after a very active and important period of precisionist painting. And of course, O'Keeffe just does have the good fortune that her work just keeps going and going. This is The Radiator Building at Fisk in 2016. I had a brief fall, 2017, where I was able to do an exchange with Fisk and the curator from Fisk University's gallery came to Brandeis and gave a lecture about a very important Nigerian artist now deceased, Ben Enwonwu who is in the Fisk collection.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I went to Fisk and spent a bit of time in Nashville and gave a lecture to their students and faculty about my interest in O'Keeffe and Fisk and also some of the underlying reasons I think she was drawn to give the work to Fisk. This is the installation that she personally supervise that wall behind the African mask is blue. These walls were white. She got all the walls repainted, ceiling lights lowered, and she's essentially telling a story of the important African art that Stieglitz showed at his gallery in 1914, '15, and then the works he collected from Picasso, Cézanne. We think this work is Diego Rivera. This is a little harder to see. And then the growth of American modernism, we're almost 99% sure this is an Arthur Dove called Swinging in the Park.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
The important people here are Aaron Douglas, who was the leading artist, Head of the Art Department at Fisk. This is Pearl Creswell, who was the Director of the Gallery, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in the '90s, a wonderful woman and a fabulous historical guide to knowing more about Fisk and this is one of the students at Fisk. So O'Keeffe was there in the middle of the Jim Crow era. Emma gave a great introduction, thank you. I don't have to tell you all of that. Here to go back to the issues of race and public issues that are still with us horribly. I must say at the current time, this is a stamp that was not created until 1998, because at the time that this event happened, Eleanor Roosevelt was horribly slimmed by press and many critics because she had dared to take a flower from an African American child, imagine.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This just tells you how hard it was to be a woman who would give away over 100 works of art to a black university in the Southeast part of the United States. Well, O'Keeffe's reason was quite simple. She said, "I knew that if the black students didn't have their own museum, they would not be allowed into the white museums." That's how bad Jim Crow was in that era. It was her scope of radicalism really that allowed her to make the gift and it's her scope of radicalism that tells us that she's also still fighting for the ERA and I have the quote there for you. Okay. So it's time for me to wrap up. O'Keeffe foresees the important medallion, which is our highest award to artists, or it's done differently now. But when we used to have the annual creative arts awards, she received it at the Waldorf Astoria, there was an exhibit and then she also had work exhibited in a show, profiling American modernism in a very intelligent, very careful way that Sam Hunter put together.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This is at the Rose where we have the collectors room by Mark Dion currently installed. You can pull out a drawer and see all of these old catalogs. So American Modernism contained O'Keeffe paintings and so did Boston Collects just thought, you'd be interested in seeing this wonderful array of everything going on at the Rose in the '60s. We have a CV that O'Keeffe sent to Brandeis, when she was told she would receive the createship and selective. She agreed of course, to come to New York and it was a very big affair because the Ford Foundation had given Brandeis a huge gift that year.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Just to say one more word here. You can see that this is a Hans Hoffman catalog, Buckminster Fuller is being shown also along with Paulo Silletti. So there's just so much going on at Brandeis in the '60s when we're just such a new place. This is to go back to the resume, a one page resume, how many people submit a one page resume. Mostly what she focuses on is her travels. O'Keeffe did not start traveling till her '60s. She sends Brandeis a Christmas card. So here is greetings of the season and it's one of her Texas watercolors imprinted on a large scale format card.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I thought that was so charming. Then she exhibits these works with us, these two at the Rose and the light coming on the Plains, which you saw previously all were at the Rose in '63, as part of that American modernism, trying to establish roots that were later much disregarded by the abstract expressionism movement, I must say. Then in the AFA gallery show, I'm showing you here, obstruct works, one very much inspired by the clouds and light on the plains. This one by the Gaspé Peninsula trip she took. Then this one is quite important. She also loaned a trial balloon effort of her first sky above clouds painting.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This is about four feet wide and it remained in the permanent collection. As you can see, it's now at the O'Keeffe Museum, but this painting grew to be the great 24 foot long mural that is today in the Chicago Art Institute. This last painting was owned by Boston Collectors now in the Brooklyn museum, Ram's skull with White Hollyhock. So, that brings us to the skulls. These two, you may not think of as a pairing, but they definitely are. This was the cover of her very important 1976 book, which was her autobiography. More images than text. It's in the sense a meditation on death and transcendence. I think that what I was saying at the beginning about the jimsonweed and it's shifting valances, comes back when she is so enamored of making these sculptural bones and paintings.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
At Brandeis, we do have a very rich collection of native American arts, which I've been able to teach from, but this also allows me to show you the antlers, the deer saddlers, that were part of a specific ritual dance and that also may have given her the notion of seeing the antlers swaying and moving in the dance like space. Remember she has a very musical side in her history and in her family as well. So, imagine this dancer and emotion like the antlers float above the landscape. This is the most famous of the antlers from the faraway nearby and that's what she called her land, so to say, the land so sere and unpopulated, that she loved so much, looking out from ghost ranch, where the geology is extraordinary.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
You can see rocks back to the Jurassic and Cretaceous period. Goat's horn from the same period. And then she gets into painting the pelvis bone. She has lots of friends on ghostwrite and she bring her bones Cowboys, the ranchers, and the pedernal becomes her site of meditation of a sense of linking herself to the earth. You can just barely see a shadow here, sort of beige pink tone. She found the shape of a leaping deer within that mountain. Her ghost ranch house faced the flat-topped which is quite distant from the ranch, but clearly visible anywhere on the horizon. So the pelvis becomes like flying victory, sort of shape. There's one that's really like the flying victory, even more than this, but she sees them undulating almost in the same way she paints the flowers.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
This one is in Indianapolis. I used this one in my book. I was very taken with this pelvis with distance. And so I decided to end a little early in her career, but you're free to ask me lots of questions. She continues painting a lot in the '50s, but more, she comes back in the '60s. She's on the cover of Art Forum in 1966. Her important profile piece is in Life Magazine. She's on the cover of Life Magazine in 1968. And she gathered young people around her, at her house in Abiquiú. That's her second home, which was rehabbed and inhabited after 1945, but the pedernal remains this abiding presence for her. I am very taken with this work. It's a pastel, a large pastel, which to me reflects the end of World War Two. She was only 70 miles away from Los Alamos. She certainly knew what was going on, even though it was not officially known because there were certain German scientists who often were coming to ghost ranch under assumed names and were given leave to come, shelter at the ranch and get a little RNR.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I think of this as a sign of her melding of the bones, the landscape, these simple motifs that she repeats and yet re-bills and two new meanings and new significance. Of course, she's one in a kind and as she also liked to say, "I'm a lone person." This is a body of work that is not about portraiture, but about the self's projection into the world. I'll stop there for now and take questions. I did want to just briefly say that my book is available on Kindle. If anybody is interested, I have a screen that describes a little bit about the book. It did come out five years ago though, so somebody else needs take over, so then I'll stop talking and give you time for questions.
Daniel Larson:
Thank you so much, Professor Scott. We have some questions that are coming in and again, for anyone participating in the webinar, if you have questions, please feel free to include them in the Q and A section of the Zoom window. First question here for Professor Scott. What was the motivation for Georgia O'Keeffe giving herself the name, Patsy? Do we know about this?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Well, she was Irish in one way, and then she was Hungarian and another. She has a very mixed family history. Her grandfather, Georgia Totto O'Keeffe is in a sense she's the namesake of George Totto O'Keeffe. But her father was Irish, I think there was a whimsy about using that more Irish sounding name. She might've been teased about it, but later in life, she would say in an interview with Andy Warhol no less, "Oh, we thought of ourselves as Hungarian." That's the best I can do on that. The Irish side. Her father's name is Frank O'Keeffe.
Daniel Larson:
Next question. Do we know why she was so taken with the pelvis bone and skulls, and also, did she see her art as sexual?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Well, she always denied that the work was sexual. In fact, there are many famous statements, especially about the flowers, "Others see these meanings in my flowers, but I do not." She talks a lot about looking into the heart of the flower and saying, "Take time to see." She really wants her audience to slow down. I've made lots and lots of photos of the centers of flowers, just looking for that very point. Flowers in and of themselves, if you really look at them, yes, they are sexy. To go back to the other question about the skulls in the pelvis, these are objects that were very abundantly available on the desert around ghost ranch, because there'd been a horrible drought. The owner of ghost ranch, a man named Arthur Pack also was trying to repopulate the terrain he brought in Antelope from, I believe, Montana.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
He was a very wealthy person, but maintained this ranch during those years. And so I believe that it has both to do with the depression, literally depression, with a capital D and also her life is very difficult in the '30s. After she paints that white flower of 1932, she herself suffers a deep period of depression. She essentially admits herself to Doctors Hospital in New York and takes a very, very long time to recuperate. From that period of depression, she stops painting altogether and it takes until early... So from late 1932 into early 1934, she simply doesn't pick up brush or pencil. But events change and she gets her old spirit back again. It has very much to do with a certain person who reanimates her, Jean Toomer, the novelist, an African-American man who was in Stieglitz circle. He wrote novels, very famous for the novel Cane from the 1920s. But later he becomes a spiritualist.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Now I'm going along way from pelvis bones and skulls. But I think I'm trying to just reflect the idea that O'Keeffe had been through a lot that caused her to become a very armored sort of individual and to protect her privacy dearly. Those skulls and pelvis bones somehow reflect that austerity. I think they do speak to that shift in her life. Well, she would have probably said, "I found the bones were very interesting."
Daniel Larson:
The question here, acknowledging the incredible feminine, natural beauty of much of her work, as well as the strength of her architectural paintings, do you nevertheless think it was O'Keeffe's relationship with Stieglitz that explains her enormous successes when contrasted with other female artists?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Oh, that's a loaded question. I mean, she would definitely resist thinking that it was all about him, because she was the one doing all the work, but it was all about him in certain ways. It's just so fortunate that she made such powerful connections to the art world through Stieglitz. And as she herself later commented at an ABC News interview with her when she was 90 years old, she said there was nowhere else to go to see great art in Manhattan, art that was modern and radical. There was nowhere else to go with Stieglitz's gallery. It was just, he was trying out everything new. He was very open to everything that was new.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Then that network, of course, I mean, think of how many times in a person's life, the right mentor, the right patronage can really make the difference between making work and not making work or getting ahead. But of course, to go back to her own feelings about this, she worked very hard and she exhibited continuously and Stieglitz's gallery between 1923 and 1946, the year of his death. So she had talent, but what would have been realized in the same way?
Daniel Larson:
I have a question here about her pottery, her pottery work. Could you speak to any of that?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Well, that became a passion that she was trying out in her late life. So this is when she has the young people around her in the '70s and a particular young man Juan Hamilton works his way into her inner circle and he starts making pottery, he was a potter. She's losing her eyesight at the age of 85. She's already 85 years old, you see by 1972, '3, along in there. In those years, she's experiencing gradual macular degeneration. She has some kind of event, probably an optic nerve stroke of some sort, but it wasn't described as such, that causes her to lose the center of field vision in one eye. Then it just goes on from there. She dies in 1986, the age of 98.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
The pottery is a tactile and wonderful way to explore the shapes that she's painted and Juan Hamilton is already doing that kind of work in his studio, so he helps her. He gets important shows in New York during those years. I think it was a great thing for her to be able to do, in those years.
Daniel Larson:
Professor Peter Kalb says, "Thanks for the presentation." And is curious to know if there was any contact between Elsie Driggs and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Oh, great question. I'm sorry, I don't know of any... I've not come across that. I mean, they've been paired in precisionism shows, but no, ask Professor Kalb to tell me if he's ever come across in the same coterie of friends, but I've never seen her name mentioned in any of the O'Keeffe letters or that sort of thing.
Daniel Larson:
I have a question inquiring about her pursuit of financial success. Did she care about financial success over and above or separate from her prior to her art successes?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Well, I think that it was very important to her, yes. Some scholars in the O'Keeffe world have argued with me on this point and have said her marriage was more important to her than anything. And when the marriage with Stieglitz appeared to be threatened in the early '30s, and that was part of what triggered the deep depression, his affair with another woman, Dorothy Norman. It may well be that the marriage was above all else the important thing over money. But money mattered because her family had such disastrous and precipitous collapse because they were wealthy while they were dairy farmers in Wisconsin are wealthy, so to say. They had the land and the riches of the land when the family moved to Virginia, there was just a steady failure that the father couldn't adapt to new ways of life, new business.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
I think at least several of the family members were devoted to making sure they did well in life. One of them married well, that was her sister, Anita. Anita had fabulous wealth during her lifetime due to her husband's job as Head of Pennsylvania Railroad. O'Keeffe, I think it was, it mattered to her to be able to sell the art. Yes, I think that was very important to her. When Stieglitz seemed to fail her, she wanted to go find other avenues to making her own deals with other people. She did occasionally show her work with Edith Halpert, even before she stopped or ceased to exhibit in the Stieglitz gallery, which stopped in '46.
Daniel Larson:
I have a question here about Georgia O'Keeffe's views on women's rights and how they evolved over time. Could you speak to that?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Sure. She actually is not a person we would call a suffragette, she did not like being called a woman artist either. She wanted to be remembered as a great artist not as a woman artist. Nonetheless her friendship with Anita continued through the years in the 1940s, 1945, Anita promoted. She is the youngest of that first generation, as you can see in the National Women's Party. So she's the leader of the national women's party by the mid forties. And she urges O'Keeffe continually to lend her name, to support of the party, apart from dressing down, Eleanor Roosevelt in that letter, I showed and saying, "I feel that we are half the people." It's part of that letter, "If we don't pass the ERA. O'Keeffe will be encouraged by Anita to attend conferences, to give her face and name to publicity about the women's party to keep the ERA movement going.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
There are letters exchanged with Malvina Hoffman, the sculptor, and O'Keeffe, to whom she had to write several times to get Malvina Hoffman to add her name to the Women's Party roster. So there is an actual laughing O'Keeffe who's depicted in a photograph of the National Women's... Let's see her group is called the advisory committee. So it does continue. By the way, I owe this richness of later 1940s, '50s interest on O'Keeffe's part to Linda Grasso who wrote a very good book called Equal under the sky. It was published in 2017. So if anyone's interested strictly in the feminist side of O'Keeffe, this book has it. It's really a very informative, important addition to the field.
Daniel Larson:
The question here. Was Georgia O'Keeffe influenced by other artists of her time or was she more kind of directed self-directed in her artwork.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Okay. That's also complicated. She herself would say in a 1962 interview with a creator at the Chicago Art Institute, that it was Chinese art that primarily influenced her abstraction and her interest in certain ways of painting. But frankly, if one looks back at her early career and what she read, she was very engaged by writings about Cézanne for example. She prepared a lecture for her fellow teachers at West Texas State College in Canyon, Texas. And she was reading Willard Wright. She was reading parts of Clive Bell, the British theorist book on art. That would have been all about European modernism, those early books that were published before 1918. But she doesn't really pattern her art on a specific artist's style and so much as she's continually saying, she draws on forms in her head almost as if she has a kind of communion with the self and begins to draw and to draw with a great deal of extension of the arm and physical force against the paper. That's the charcoals in particular, she does those on the floor.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
She paints on the floor long before Jackson Pollock ever thinks about dripping paint onto the canvas. Okay. So it is somewhat self-directed. I think she's very influenced but I think she sees at the Stieglitz galleries for sure, the Rodin drawings that I mentioned that she sees in 1908 seemed to have influenced some of her drawing style. That's still quite different. I think she really loved the Brancusi sculpture, no doubt that she would have seen that was in the Stieglitz gallery that winter, she was in New York at Teachers College.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
She was very good at picking out works of art that she admired to go to the right museums when she divides up the Stieglitz collection. She did that with extreme care and caution. That's what I spent a lot of my time studying while I was at Crystal Bridges, looking across institutions. And she puts the European and the American works into all the major contexts, which include Fisk. They all got a mix. That means she doesn't not look at European art. I hope that's not too long an answer. But I think her main force is that early, early work that she would have seen in New York plus always trying to turn inward and create abstraction from within her own head. Yet she would always say, "It has to be real and yet good in the abstract sense." So there you have the real pedernal, but everything else around it is obstruct.
Daniel Larson:
You have a comment and question here from Professor Aida Wong. I'll just read it verbatim, "Thank you so much for this wonderful lecture, Nancy. I'm quite taken with The Radiator building, which is not her usual repertoire, as you pointed out, would you say more about its style, poster and art deco aesthetic and its perception at the time? The idea that male/female can be extended to the urban nature dichotomy and how this was something that she rejected, that observing as a stereotype. What do you think were her feelings about this and the your sense of Stieglitz pushing her to keep painting flowers?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Well, great question, Aida. Thank you so much. It's quite a multilayered question. I was trying to jot down some of the points. Well, I will say this, first of all, she painted over 30 skyscraper paintings in Manhattan during these years in the late '20s. So once she got going, it was a burst of energy to show she could paint like the men. It was very validly... I think this is part of what professor Wong is asking me. Yes, she goes for the art deco because it is the style of the period. She loves things that are modern and new, and it's a kind of radical architecture for New York at that time. Rockefeller Center is also rising in the early '30s and Stieglitz photographs those buildings and of course O'Keeffe wants to paint them as well. She paints a huge mural scale Manhattan, that is actually a translation of the center building of 30 Rock.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
So she was very, very upset to be segregated to the flowers associated with the feminine and to be dissuaded that no, she could not be painting skyscrapers. It was very important to her to prove it. Now does that go through her entire later life? No. It's a very specific period of that early depression era, precisionism and she didn't like being labeled with any ism by the way. So she didn't say that she was one of the precisionists, but clearly this is the moment for that style in her art to be most closely affiliated with precisionism. Could you just read me that last part of her question? I'm not sure I answered everything that was posed.
Daniel Larson:
Yes. So you touched on the push from Stieglitz pushing her to keep on painting flowers. I think the note you're referring to is the idea that male/female can be extended to the urban nature dichotomy and if this was something that she rejected.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Yes, she did. She did reject that male-female dichotomy. Yeah. She did receive a lot of attention by the early '40s. She received her first honorary degree in the late 1930s. Then 1943 was a huge year. Chicago Art Institute gave her a huge one person retrospective and one of her most faithful admires was a man named Daniel Catton Rich He became a friend and a lifelong supporter of O'Keeffe. He was somebody who really got her. In fact, we know because of the Brandeis archives that he wrote on her behalf when she received the creative arts award. So that 1943 show just re-energized her and she is not painting skyscrapers then, she starts to bank the bones and the black place and the white place, those other desert locales.
Daniel Larson:
So we have time for just one more question. You just spoke about the connection again between O'Keeffe and Brandeis. Ingrid Shorr asks, "Are there photos of O'Keeffe of Brandeis, perhaps at the 1963 Rose exhibition? And can you speak a bit more about the O'Keeffe Brandeis connection?
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Sure. Thanks Ingrid. The factor she never came to campus. She sent her works to the Rose Art Museum. So she also did not accept the creative arts awards at Brandeis. Because it was such a big deal that year because of the large donation from the Ford Foundation, which was, I think, $6,000,000 it was a matching ground or something like that. So this was held in the Waldorf Astoria. That was where O'Keeffe was headed when she said she would happily come to the ceremony, she was going to New York. In fact, her sister had an apartment upstairs in the Waldorf Astoria. That was the wealthy sister. So no, sorry. We have looked and looked and looked in the archives for a photo of O'Keeffe on campus. There is none that we've been able to find. There are not even photos that I've been able to find the Waldorf Astoria event.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
It's so sad that we don't have it because Leonard Bernstein was the MC. We have the transcript of his talk that night and how he honors each of the individual candidates. I should also tell you that the story that's in the archives, O'Keeffe writes a note to the woman with him she's corresponding at Brandeis, the dean's executive secretary. She says, "I want to return my $1,500 and give it to the benefit of Brandeis." So she takes her prize money and says, "Let it be applied to a future artist." That takes us back to her interest in money. Was she interested in money? No, I think she was just doing very well by the 1960s. This is in her 70s, she's 75 years old when that happens and she wants the money to go back to Brandeis and don't forget she had very deep sympathy for the Jewish community because well, she'd lived with Stieglitz, all of those years and she really cared about us, I think and the work, the work that would come. The person to get that award by the way was Mark Roscoe.
Daniel Larson:
Thank you, Professor Scott. Will now pass things off to Emma and Pavla again, to close off with the program.
Emma Hanselman:
Okay. Thank you so much, professor Scott. That was such an incredible program. This really brings us back to our classroom days when we were students, which is such a pleasure.
Prof. Nancy Scott:
Thank you.
Emma Hanselman:
Special thanks to everyone for joining us today. We're delighted to see so much of our Brandeis community members coming together to continue this lifelong learning.
Pavla Berghen-Wolf:
We invite you to join us for upcoming programs next week on June 11th with Professor Ben Gomes-Casseres on the topic of business of climate change and on June 18th with professors Ramie Targoff and Ryan McKittrick who will discuss the real women behind seats, the words of Henry the VIII. We look forward to you joining us. Thank you.