Transcript of "Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life"

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Hello and welcome. My name is Elizabeth Cayouette. I am a Brandeis BOLD alumna, Class of 2019. I'm a fashion videographer with Aerie by American Eagle, a Sony Alpha Female winner, and a Brandeis BOLD 9 honoree. It is my pleasure to welcome you to today's program. On behalf of the alumni association, featuring Roxana Robinson, author of the definitive biography of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, the new expanded edition, published by the Brandeis University Press in 2020. And Nancy Scott, O'Keeffe scholar and professor of fine arts at Brandeis. This program is sponsored by the Brandeis University Press and is the first event of the 2021 author series. We are delighted to welcome you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends around the world. Thank you so much for joining us.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Now to introduce our speakers. Roxana Robinson is the author of 10 books. Her biography, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, was a New York Times Notable Book, and has been called the definitive work on the artist's life. She has written about American art for museums and art publications. Her most recent book is the novel Dawson's Fall, an interrogation of the moral legacy of slavery. Her proceeding novel, Sparta, won the Maine Fiction Award, the James Webb award from the USM CHF, was a finalist for the Dublin Impact Award and named one of the 10 best books of the year by the BBC.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Robinson's work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harpers, the Nation, Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. She is a New York Public Library, Literary Lion, and has twice been a finalist for the NBCC Balakian Award for criticism. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College and has served on the board of Penn.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

She is a past president of the Authors Guild, and in 2019, she received the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award from poets and writers.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Nancy Scott is a professor of fine arts at Brandeis where she teaches European and American modernism. Professor Scott has researched and taught classes on Georgia O'Keeffe and is a distinguished O'Keeffe scholar. Her biography, Georgia O'Keeffe: Critical Lives, was published in 2015 by Reaktion Press, London. In 2019, she received a Tyson Fellow scholarship for the summer in residence at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, to work on the Stieglitz collection there. Professor Scott's current project illuminates the origins and importance of O'Keeffe's philanthropy of one-on-one works of fine art to Fisk University in 1949. Today these works are co-owned by Crystal Bridges and Fisk, shared in a two-year rotation.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Professor Scott has also lectured on O'Keeffe's connections with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the early 1920s. Her role and interest in women's suffrage, and her exhibition history with Brandeis in the early 1960s. Professor Scott has taught at Brandeis for over 40 years. She is a beloved professor and has enriched the lives of many students, colleagues and Brandeis community members. We are grateful to Professor Scott for illuminating our lives with her extraordinary knowledge and passion for art. Welcome Roxana Robinson and Professor Nancy Scott.

Roxana Robinson:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Feel free to begin, yeah.

Nancy Scott:

Lovely introduction. I'm so honored to be working with Roxana Robinson. And so we're going to have a conversation and we hope that you will all start to put the questions into the chat if you have them. And we'll deal with those after this presentation of images about the new book, which is a revised copy of Roxana Robinson's definitive biography of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. And we're also very pleased that Sue Ramin is here joining us today, the editor of Brandeis University Press, who reached out to Roxana, I think almost as soon as she took on her new role as the editor of the Brandeis University Press and put this idea in motion for the revised edition, which is a wonderful thing.

Nancy Scott:

So can everyone hear me, I hope? Roxana, I wanted you to begin things today by discussing for us your choice of this particular photograph of O'Keeffe for the cover of your new version of the book, your definitive biography.

Roxana Robinson:

So, first of all, let me say thank you for inviting me today. It's an honor for me to appear with Nancy, who has done so much distinguished scholarship on O'Keeffe, always a pleasure to have a conversation with Nancy about this subject. And my thanks also to Sue Ramin for thinking this up. And the book itself is not revised. That would have taken me 20 years to do, but it was Sue's idea to write an introduction, which I did, which the old book did not have, and the introduction describes my meeting with O'Keeffe herself in person, and the way I came to write the book. And also it was sort of an overview of how O'Keeffe has changed in the world of art history since the book was published 30 years ago. It also includes all the letters that O'Keeffe wrote to Arthur MacMahon, which we will talk about later, but those have never been published, and they're quite an important part of her art life.

Roxana Robinson:

So to answer Nancy's question, this is a photograph taken by Arthur Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz, her husband, the great photographer, and it's probably 1930 or 31. And it's after she came back from Santa Fe, and the early series of photographs taken by Stieglitz of O'Keeffe show her as a woman, as an artist, and as a female body, a body that he loved and that he possessed, and that was part of his art life and part of his own physical life. And those images are very powerful and we know them and we've seen them.

Roxana Robinson:

But what happened in the late twenties was that there was a ... a sort of an emotional separation that took place between Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. And as a result, she started going out to the Southwest and she learned to drive, which Stieglitz never did. And she bought a car and she came back in the car. And so he took a series of photographs with her and the car, and the car was her vehicle of escape. It was a declaration that she was not bonded to his daily life, his daily world, but she still was in love with him and she still stayed married to him, but she could leave.

Roxana Robinson:

And there she is leaning on ... that's the spare tire. These cars had a spare tire mounted on the back, and it's all polished and beautiful. So I think somebody was thinking about this before they took the picture, but she is remote. She is pensive. She is not looking at Stieglitz. She's not looking at the camera. This is a woman with a way to escape from the photographer's gaze. And Stieglitz is very well aware of that.

Roxana Robinson:

So I love this image because it holds all those ideas within it. The idea of love and connection, the idea of separation and escape. It's a different kind of power that Stieglitz shows in this image. And earlier images that he took, sometimes he takes a photograph of her while he's down below her, and so she's silhouetted against the skyline and she looks tall and powerful. But in this, he's given her different kind of power; it's interior and it's mechanical, and it's something that he can't protest against. And he notes that. He records that fact, that she's taken on new kind of power. So that those are the things that interest me about this picture.

Nancy Scott:

Great choice. Could we have the next image please?

Nancy Scott:

Thanks. And so when the Arthur MacMahon letters came into your possession, you might want to describe a little bit of how it was that you tracked them down. And you've chosen this particular letter to place as a kind of frontispiece to the section of the letters that are now printed in your book. So I thought it would be fun to have you describe a little bit of your bold process in extracting the letters that were so hard to get, before you go ahead and talk about the letter itself, this first letter of August, 1915.

Roxana Robinson:

Well, as anyone who's an art historian knows, you are kind of a detective. So you are trying to find pieces of information that no one else knows about. And it feels often as though you're in a detective book, and these things are being hidden from you. Often, they're not being hidden from you. They just ... you don't know where to look. And I was trying to track down a photograph of Arthur MacMahon, who was the first really important man in O'Keeffe's life. She had other relationships with other men before that, but this was a sustained one. And it was very important to her intellectually as well as emotionally.

Roxana Robinson:

And so I knew he was important and I couldn't find him. I knew he taught at, he taught political science at Columbia University. He was a graduate student there when she first met him in Virginia in 1915 or 1914, but I couldn't find a photograph of him.

Roxana Robinson:

And at that point, 1989, there was no internet. And I was making phone calls and calling different libraries and Columbia and trying to find photographs and trying to find any family members. And I finally ... I kept being put off and put off and told to go somewhere else and go somewhere else. And I finally made a call and a man answered the phone. And I said who I was and who I was looking for. And I said, I wonder if he was a family member. And I said, I wonder if there's any chance that you have any photographs of Arthur during that period, or anytime near that period.

Roxana Robinson:

And O'Keeffe had seen Arthur during the summer of 1915, and they had spent a lot of time together. And then she went to Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina. And he went to Columbia University in New York City and they didn't see each other all fall, but he came down to see her in Thanksgiving, at that Thanksgiving.

Roxana Robinson:

And they spent a rapturous weekend together and O'Keeffe wrote a friend and said, I'm falling in love, like I never thought was possible. So she ... that weekend was crucial. And I said to this man, "Do you have any photographs? Any photographs at all around that period, that you would be interested in letting me see?"

Roxana Robinson:

And he said, "I have photographs that he took of himself and Georgia in Thanksgiving, 1915. Would you like those?" So it was one of those extraordinary moments. Fireworks went off. I was so excited.

Roxana Robinson:

And so I flew down to see him and he said, "And I have all these letters if you'd like to copy them. Here they are." And those had not been seen by scholars before. So I took them home. I didn't take them home. I took them to this placing and copied them all.

Roxana Robinson:

So I've had them all these years, and this seemed to be the moment to include them. So I transcribed them and then to show O'Keeffe's ... First of all, her handwriting is so much fun. It is so energetic and so beautiful. And it shows so much of her. You see the first two words are joined.

Roxana Robinson:

"I am very much disturbed..." that wonderful little flying T cross, "about that box of yours..." And what she's writing him--this is the very first letter in the in series. And she's writing him because he left his box, his trunk behind and couldn't get over to the American Express office to send it. So she said she would go over and make sure that it was sent properly.

Roxana Robinson:

But also be aware of the fact that this is still basically the era of Victorian manners. And so for her to take the initiative and write to a man first, before he writes to her is very daring. And she knows that. And she says, I just felt like writing you and I'm not going to play games. So there's also that wonderful sort of vigor and bravery that, that O'Keeffe represents for all of us. So I chose this partly because it was just the first letter, partly because it demonstrates those aspects of her personality.

Nancy Scott:

That's terrific. And it's such a good sign of your scholarship too, that you tracked it down to the nth degree, and then you reaped the rewards and now you're sharing them with the rest of us, which is so wonderful. Such a great resource.

Nancy Scott:

You're mentioning Victorian manners and how O'Keeffe set her own course. I also wanted to bring up the beginning of another letter in the collection where she starts the letter. This is another 1915 letter, but when she's getting settled in South Carolina, she writes "Arthur, feeling the wildest of the wild, I greet you." That's how the letter starts. It's just a few months later.

Nancy Scott:

Well, let's go onto the next image please. And I'm so glad you mentioned her extraordinary handwriting because we will not get to see a lot of examples today of the handwriting, but for all of you who are looking at her images, you may see there's a close correlation between those magnificent I's that sometimes will have a curl at the end of the bottom of the I.

Roxana Robinson:

In fact, can we go back to the last slide? And I'll just read that letter, cause, until you get used to her handwriting, it's hard to read. So there's no introduction.

Roxana Robinson:

"I'm very much disturbed over that box of yours. It was sent off by mistake without a bill of lading. And they had to telegraph around to find it. They found a box in Alexandria, that they think is yours. So made out this bill for it and sent the box on from there. The name was very much twisted, but the initials were yours. So I hope it's right."

Roxana Robinson:

So there's that sense of sort of headlong declaration, that is so much a part of O'Keeffe. Okay.

Nancy Scott:

Not a typical young woman with polite manners. Not that she was impolite, but just, she was bold. So this is a particular work that Roxana has very correctly connected to the time when Arthur and Georgia O'Keeffe were still together in Virginia. I believe they were both teaching summer school that same summer, weren't they? She was teaching with Alan Bennett and I believe he was teaching ... He was still a graduate student. He was already starting to work on his dissertation that year. But in any event, this is a pastel. And I have ... I'm going to read the quote first from her letter, okay, Roxana, and I'll let you take it from there?

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah.

Nancy Scott:

So the letter is not written to Arthur, but it's describing the experience of this image you see before you. And she starts; she's writing to Anita Pollitzer, who's also an art school friend of hers at teacher's college, where they had studied together the year before at Columbia. And she starts off with a little design on the page and it has a kind of snaky swirl that looks very much like the pools of water in this pastel that she will make within these few months, probably in October.

Nancy Scott:

She says, "It is political science and me, dabbling our feet in the water. It is about 15 feet deep, right under our feet. It's red from the red clay and comes down with a rush, like all the mountain streams. He got me to put my feet in because he said the motion of the water had such a fine rhythm. I still had on my stockings."

Nancy Scott:

Well, this quote gives you a sense of O'Keefe's relationship with Arthur, but I would like for you to say more about the work of art itself, Roxana.

Roxana Robinson:

So this was ... thank you so much, Nancy. I love that quote. And thank you for bringing it up. This struck me recently because I was looking through the catalog raissoné, and there are two pictures like this, and they're both set among a group of black and white charcoals. This is pastel, but those were charcoals. And that set is believed, is generally believed to have been done in December of that year, when she's teaching at this women's college in Columbia, South Carolina. She's all alone. She stays at this college during the Christmas break and she writes that she took out all her work and she saw that it was all derivative and she tore everything up. And she started working again and she did a series of charcoal drawings, which are purely abstract. And those are sort of the ones that we think of as O'Keeffe emerging for the first time as an artist with her own voice.

Roxana Robinson:

And these two images are set among those. And then I saw the letter that Nancy has just read. And it was written in October, two months before those charcoals were thought to have been done. And it refers to a walk with Arthur, and Arthur wasn't there in October. The last time she would have taken a walk with Arthur would have been in July or August.

Roxana Robinson:

So I was intrigued and I got in touch with Barbara Buhler Lynes, who is the great scholar who did the catalog raissoné. And I said, could you tell me why you've put this among the charcoal drawings? Because it looks, from the letters as though it must've been done in the summer. And she wrote back and said, it was just because everything was jumbled together. And I was trying to put things in the correct order. And I realized too late that it's not in the correct order.

Roxana Robinson:

So these two pastels should precede the charcoals. And it means, if she's really saying like what she says to Anita, she says, these are from that walk, it means that she was actually working in a pure abstract sense in the summer of 1915, when we had thought that she didn't do that until the winter.

Roxana Robinson:

And I love the way, as Nancy described, you can see the naturalistic aspect of this, as soon as she says it. She says, it's a river. The red clay is rising. They put their feet in it. You can see where the dust, that red clay dust, would bubble up in the water. And she says that she's done these two images because she's been talking to political science.

Roxana Robinson:

That's another thing about Georgia, which is really funny, which Nancy knows. Throughout her correspondence, which is enormous ... Remember she lived at a time where the way you communicated was by writing. She very rarely uses a first name. So she will describe, she'll say my sister, she had three sisters or four sisters. You never know which one it is. She'll say the man who brings my firewood, she'll say a friend. So instead of calling him by his name, she calls him political science. Luckily this time we know who she's talking about, but it's a version of abstraction, that is part of the way O'Keeffe sees the world, is that she describes people without using the identifications that we would use. She uses something else, some kind of interior characteristic that identifies the person for her.

Roxana Robinson:

So anyway, this is her and political science. We know she means Arthur MacMahon, dabbling their toes in the water because they've been talking about abstract art, and this is her way of showing him what abstract art is. So this is a wonderful new topic of conversation. And it's quite exciting for Nancy and me to find this, so that we know a little bit more about the process of the way her paintings proceeded.

Nancy Scott:

And we tend to think of the next work as her first true abstraction, but here it is, all in motion at this point. And at an earlier time than even the catalog raissoné had told us. So that's very interesting.

Nancy Scott:

Before we go onto the next one, I just have to say one more thing about the relationship with Arthur MacMahon. It's always fascinated me. He was a real political activist in a certain way, and an enlightened young man about the women's suffrage issue. And he was recommending all kinds of books to her. He was very good friends with Randolph Bourne, who was writing also about ... the book Youth and Life is mentioned in her letters, as well as the book Women as World Builders. By the way, I found both of those books in the Brandeis library, which was very exciting to me, that we had books going back to the early 19-teens, on women's rights issues and about the importance of the youth culture coming into prominence in American society, that is prior to the First World War. So MacMahon stimulated her in all kinds of ways.

Nancy Scott:

He also seems to have gotten her to read a great deal of Thomas Hardy, which I think is fabulous. She's always writing back about and the letters you have, that's how we know now that those Hardy books came through Arthur. Anyway, so let's go on. Should we go on?

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah.

Nancy Scott:

Next image, please. So this is what has for a long time been thought of as her first true work with no clearer object in the work of art. Charcoal landscapes is her term for what this series looked like. And they also pertain to Arthur's influence in her life because she makes an enormous group of them in late November after he leaves and on into December. And she's been rolling up these drawings when she finished, that's a very delicate operation, because this is charcoal, right? Big sheets of paper.

Nancy Scott:

Another art historian, Ann Wagner, has talked about how you can see these sheets. You can imagine them with her arm in a full bodily gesture across the page as she was making them. Because she tells in other letters to Anita Pollitzer that she is working on the floor. So long before the days of Jackson Pollack, she's literally on her hands and knees working on the floor to do these charcoal drawings while she's teaching in South Carolina.

Nancy Scott:

So to you Roxana, I wondered if you could speak a little about what Arthur McMahon had stirred up in O'Keeffe at this point, that made her embark on this new direction.

Roxana Robinson:

So that's a great introduction. And what she did, and she does this throughout her life, many things were interesting about this group of paintings. But one of them is the sense of passionate excitement that fills O'Keeffe. And that is evident in this work. And what she's done is seclude herself. She is really in a remote place. She's in Columbia, South Carolina at a very small Methodist women's college. It's not the New York art world. There are very few people there who understand what she's doing or there's no one that she can really talk to about what she's doing. So it's a bit like her trip to Texas, where she also separates herself from the whole art world, from anybody who talks the way Steve Woods talks or that whole culture of art. She removes herself from that.

Roxana Robinson:

So she's completely removed in Columbia, South Carolina, and she has fallen desperately in love. We don't think of O'Keeffe that way. We don't think of her as being helpless in the grip of an emotion, but she was, she says that in her letters to Anita. She says, "I just don't know what to do. This is terrifying to me. I'm overwhelmed. I'm caught up in the grip of this." She's also very happy, but so she does this series of drawings because she's filled with a kind of emotion. So there's that aspect of it. And that will recur, we'll talk about that over and over again, as we move through her life with these images. This sense of pouring out her emotion onto the paper or the canvas.

Roxana Robinson:

Also, what's interesting about these things is she's not the first artist to do abstract work. We know that Kandinsky and the circle around him were already doing abstract work. Arthur Dove did an abstract work before this. But notice how closely these abstractions are connected to the natural world. We intuitively recognize them. We recognize those tender, bud like rounded forms. They represent growing plants. We know that. Even if she didn't mean it, that's the way we may read it. That beautiful curving form we read as water. This is fluid and flowing. It's another natural presence that we understand. Those jagged forms may relate to mountains for us.

Roxana Robinson:

So although these are purely abstract images, they also reach us in a way that is very familiar to us. So she does something, she does this simultaneous connection and distancing. And she does it over and over in her work. And it's wonderfully powerful. And it's unique really to O'Keeffe. So just be aware of the fact that many of her works do this. You can feel a kind of intuitive emotional connection to them, which you can't articulate. She doesn't allow you to say, "This is specifically this or specifically that." But it's something that you feel.

Roxana Robinson:

So that's what happens in this group of you beautifully moving, fluid, intimate, and mysterious images that she creates. So he leaves at the end of November, maybe the 30th. So they're done in the first three weeks of December, 1915. Very excited.

Nancy Scott:

That was a beautiful set of meditations really on the work itself, which by now is quite familiar to us. But to look at it again, afresh is terrific. So Arthur clearly has ignited something that's quite different in her spirit. It's not just that she says to Anita, "I feel like I am teetering near the edge of being in love," whatever that specific phrase is. And it's almost like she's alarmed by this. And at the same time, she will later write to Stieglitz the next year that those charcoal drawings, some of them were messages to someone. Some were messages to Anita, and she refers to some, as you say, it's mysterious. But there's something that in her mind, if it's not given any visual expression, but she's sending a kind of encoded message, I guess one might say. It's in one of her letters to Stieglitz from early in 2016, because Anita will take this roll of drawings and show them to Stieglitz on New Year's Eve of December, 1915.

Nancy Scott:

And Stieglitz goes crazy. He's very interested in art by women. And he finds that this is the embodiment of art being made by a woman. He's not seen it before like this and the famous phrases, "At last a woman on paper." I'll go ahead and say it, which we've been discussing a lot recently where it comes from. Sorry.

Nancy Scott:

Somebody says, "I'm not loud enough." Okay. I just saw that in the chat. Sorry. I've got my volume up all the way. So do let us know if you can't hear us properly. Sorry. Elizabeth, can we go onto the next image?

Roxana Robinson:

Well, I'll just add one thing and that is she does say to Steve, she said something, it's a message. But she says to Arthur, "I said something to you in charcoal." So those are specific. She relates those specifically to Arthur McMahon, which is very exciting to know.

Nancy Scott:

Thank you. That's very good to remember. And also she's asking him to get her the book by Kandinsky on the spiritual and art. Because he's back in New York. And so that's in the letters you have brought back to light. That's so interesting because we know she reads Kandinsky twice. So the abstractions and possibly Kandinsky, which are enormously avant-garde and just seeing the light in Germany. One of his paintings does come to New York in 1913 for the Armory Show and Stieglitz buys this early Kandinsky abstractions. But she goes to Arthur, "Please get me a copy of this." Which was so fundamental.

Nancy Scott:

Okay. So going right along, next we're going to look at the series of blues. This has to do with her mother's death I think in a large measure. Can we have the next slide, please? Thank you.

Nancy Scott:

So there's a series of four that we've picked out only one, the last. Because both Roxana and I felt it was the most resolved, the strongest. And I'll let you say your own ideas about the series of blue.

Roxana Robinson:

So she says somewhere that she first starts trying to see if she can say everything she wants to say in charcoal. And she said, "I think it was June before I took up blue." And that is when her mother died. So it may well be part of that, but it's still very restrained here. And what I love about this image is, again, there's a reference to that tender bud like unfolding shape that we understand at some level in our own awareness of the world. But then also those diagonal shapes, which are not natural, really. That's something else, that's geometry.

Roxana Robinson:

So she's setting two kinds of shapes next to each other and creating a wonderful, powerful design. So we're going to see that over and over in her work. This combination of fragility, tenderness, and power, which is one of the great aspects of her work.

Nancy Scott:

People have also related the fiddlehead shape to her violin. Because she did practice on her violin and describes hanging out the window of her little room in South Carolina. And that was part of the families inclination. Her father also played the violin and she at one point, I think in high school, had played the piano as well.

Nancy Scott:

So I am continuing to try to speak into the mic and I hope everyone can hear me. I'm so sorry about this, but keep me posted. Okay. I guess it's getting better. Can we have the next one, please? Go onto the next image, which is another, now the blue. Yeah. So here's another of the blue series from 1916.

Nancy Scott:

So by this time she does come back to New York in order to take a bit more classwork at teacher's college, where she had been enrolled in 2014-15. She presumably would have continued to see Arthur during this period of time. Right? But in early May, her mother dies of tuberculosis and it's quite searing for O'Keeffe. She's the oldest daughter. She's been living independently for some time and trying to earn her own way. And the family finances are perilous during this period of time. And she creates this very strong, again mysterious work, with a kind of internalized intensity about it. I think you much more to say about this than I do.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

No, I think everything you said is right. And as part of what it is, I also think that we all are aware of the fact that O'Keeffe was attacked by critics at one point in her career for actually for quite a long time because her imagery is so female. It can be read as female. So we can see this as an unfolding fern head, a fiddle head, or we can see it as an embryo or something uterine. The interesting thing is the lack of symmetry and that kind of attack because men have been using phallic imagery since the cave paintings, they have been using lances and septors and hatchets and halberds, and no one complains when they do that. But when a woman uses imagery that is related to women that is used as a criticism against them.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

So it's another evidence of O'Keeffe's power and her sense of wanting to use everything that's at her disposal. Using any image, using any image that appeals to her. Not caring about the critics, not caring about the response. And at one point a few years later, Stieglitz mounds a show of her work, and one critic says, "Oh, we're going to say, that's just a group of pictures painted by a woman who wants to have a baby." And Stieglitz said, "And so what if it is?"

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

So there is this tension between what women are permitted to paint. Are they allowed to draw on their own bodies? Are they allowed to draw on imagery that is specific to women? And this may not be what was in her mind. It is certainly something that comes to the mind of a lot of viewers. And it's impressive that it was something that she allowed herself to use without any kind of hesitation.

Nancy Scott:

And the next image, please. Is a very close variation. She was interested in this theme, which is all of the above that we've just been discussing. Uterine, shell like. One can imagine a platform opening up like a fiddle head fern unfurling, right? But Stieglitz now makes a photograph of her in 1917. He's very taken with the work that Anita first brought to him. And so we'll speak a little bit more about the aftermath of her mother's death and her grappling with all of that. But this photograph comes from the next year and she's at 291, his gallery. So I thought you might want to say a bit more about Stieglitz's interpretations.

Roxana Robinson:

So, O'Keeffe met Stieglitz, I think it was 1908. Is that right, Nancy? 1909. So she and a group of students from the art students league went over to his gallery because he was famous. And as sort of impresario, he was very, very theatrical and loved to talk. And she went with a group of students who said, "Let's go get Stieglitz talking." So she met him then. He didn't meet her. He was completely unaware of her. She was a quiet woman who went and stood in a corner while he talked to the men.

Roxana Robinson:

Where he really met her, was in that group of drawings that Anita brought to his studio on January 1st, 1916. That was when he met Georgia O'Keeffe and he was undone by her. Then they actually met physically. And is it this, Nancy? 1917 when she comes to the gallery to see the exhibition?

Nancy Scott:

Yes. This is when she comes all the way from Texas. She gets finished with her term and takes the train to New York and he rehangs the exhibit for her.

Roxana Robinson:

So that's when they first meet physically. And so what Stieglitz does, and he's a photographer and he's an artist himself, is he starts using O'Keeffe's body as part of his art. It's deeply problematic. It's fascinating. Scholars will never stop talking about this middle ground in which he uses her physical presence for his art. She had very beautiful hands. She was vain about her hands, which she should be. She protected them. And so he's using her physical presence set against her artistic presence, her work.

Roxana Robinson:

And it's a very beautiful image, but it raises this question of how he allowed himself to take possession of her hands, her body, her time, and in fact, her life? Her emotional life. And all of that is sort of seeing an embryo here in this image, which will expand and become more complicated and more troublesome at times in their relationship.

Nancy Scott:

The next image, please.

Nancy Scott:

So to recap, the rest of the very difficult summer of 1916, she was almost incapacitated, but she does start to make the blue series in those first months after her mother's death. And then she starts to go back out into nature, which this ham tent would convey to us. Was she seeing Arthur the same summer of 2016 in Virginia? She stayed at home with her sisters after her mother's death, were they camping together or hiking together?

Roxana Robinson:

I believe this image is done without Arthur. When she goes up into the mountains, she's writing to Arthur and she tells him she goes with a friend who she only identifies once by her first name. So we don't know who that is. And another couple. Some other people, they're all camping together. And I think this is in August and it's in a long extended trip that ends up in her reaching Texas, where she's going to teach. So this camping trip is not taken with Arthur. And in fact, I don't think she sees him that summer, but I could be wrong. Maybe they both were teaching in the middle of the summer, but this is at the end of the summer when she goes camping up into the mountains and she is rapturous about this trip.

Roxana Robinson:

She loves it. She loves the mountains. She describes the stream and rhododendrons hanging over it and the trees. And I love this picture because it is so lush and the image is not lush at all. Those are some kind of tent materials and there's a deep mountain sky outside. But there's something so tender and so extravagant and lush about the treatment of the paint. Again, it gives this sense of rapture that O'Keeffe finds in the experience of being inside a tent in the mountains with a sky outside. I just love the richness of this.

Nancy Scott:

I seem to remember in one of the letters, it's not to Arthur though. I believe it may be to Anita. That she literally goes and sleeps on a rock outside of one of her camp sites, because she just wants to see the stars at night. So as always, she's very emboldened.

Nancy Scott:

Okay. Can we have the next image please?

Nancy Scott:

So now we see the evidence of Texas, and she specifically is very taken with the wide open plains of Texas. She actually had a teaching job in the Amarillo state school system in I believe it was 1913. So she's always teaching when she can get jobs because she needs to support herself because of the aforementioned problems in the family. But here we have one from a very beautiful series, The Evening Star, of 1917.

Roxana Robinson:

So yeah, as Nancy says, the reason she went back to Columbia Teachers College, was that she needed a degree in order to take this job in Texas, which is what she wanted to do. She wasn't happy teaching in South Carolina. She wants to go back to Texas. So she goes back, gets her degree, and then takes this job. And so just be aware that she's doing what she had done before. She's separating herself from the art world, from all the Sturm und Drang, and the drama of who's getting the show, and what the critics are saying and what they're talking about.

Roxana Robinson:

What she wants is a physical place that allows her to feel free and to absorb the experience of the lamb. She loves Texas. If you have ever been to Canyon, Texas, when I went there, I had a rented car and I got out of the car and stood and turned in a circle and I almost fell over. There is nothing there. It is so exciting. It is so freeing. There's the sense of being the only person on the planet. It's just incredibly exhilarating, it's all sky.

Roxana Robinson:

And so that's what O'Keeffe was experiencing. She went and stayed in a boarding house so that she wouldn't be near any of the other teachers, so that she would just have this experience. And she describes going out at night during a thunderstorm, going out and standing on the porch, and watching the lightning and watching the pyrotechnics. She's completely overtaken by the natural world in this new place, Texas, which is flat. Texas, which is all sky.

Roxana Robinson:

And she writes to Anita and she writes to Arthur about it. She's like, "You have never seen the sky. You have no idea what it's like to be in the presence of this sky." She also falls in love with Paul Strand's photographs, which record the natural world but in a purely abstract way. And she writes to him and says, "I'm doing little pulse strands in my head." So these two things are happening, three things that are happening.

Roxana Robinson:

One, is she's in a place where it's a completely new kind of experiencing the world. There's no place like this flat, flat Texas.

Roxana Robinson:

Two, she's thinking about abstractions in a new way. And three she's still in love. She's now in love with Arthur. She's also falling in love with Alfred with whom she's been exchanging letters. Very intimate, rapturous letters about art, about feeling, about the experience of being alive. So she's sort of running on all cylinders here and this feeling of rapture, of enchantment, and complete commitment to the experience of being alive in this place. She sets these things down on the paper here.

Nancy Scott:

I believe that in fact, she and Stieglitz exchanged some letters about the first star to come out at night, which is also Venus. And they make some allusions to the star they both look at in the dark night sky. That she turns it into a color experiment, a bold one. So let's go ahead to the next one, which is another one from Kenyon. I should tell you all, if you really want to get deeply into the letters that O'Keeffe writes to Stieglitz, that collection of letters has been published in its first half. And it's only, I think maybe 10% of all of the letters. So Sarah Greenough has done a magnificent job on a book called My Far Away One, which is the first installment of what we hope will be a two volume book on O'Keeffe's letters. There are more letters from Kenyon by O'Keeffe than any other letters she wrote.

Nancy Scott:

There are boxes and boxes and boxes of them at the Beinecke library at Yale. So this is from Kenyon. It's one of my particular favorites. She also donated the series to a museum in Texas. And she writes in one... Oh shoot. I thought I had this marked so I could find it quickly. I wanted to give you this quote, Roxana before we... So Roxana and I had a great conversation about this work yesterday. So I wanted to convey the sense of it because O'Keeffe writes to Stieglitz and it's in the middle of a letter that's covering a lot of other random topics, but she suddenly says that "Space that is between what they call heaven and earth out there and what they call the night is as much as anything. So I send you the space that is watching the starlight and the empty, quiet plains." That's a letter to Stieglitz of 1917. How could he not be falling in love with her? I'll send you that space. So your reactions to this work and this period.

Roxana Robinson:

And that's a wonderful quote and thank you for that. And you have something to say about that space, that line of empty.

Nancy Scott:

Well, it's very masterful, as you were saying, the entire work to get this... I want you to say it yourself, because you said it so well, but she leaves an empty line that's quavering and that's the bare paper showing through the orb of the sky above and the ground below. And I think of it as her liminal space because she's sending that space to Stieglitz and she says, and it's not nothing.

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah. It's wonderful

Nancy Scott:

To enter into how to make something very simple into a very profound statement it seems to me.

Roxana Robinson:

And so I'm so glad that you raised that point about that emptiness, that line of absence on the page, which is very powerful. So I love this. This is one of my favorite images as well. And not only is it incredibly beautiful and gives such a clear sense. Again, this is our intuitive response. This is not a purely realistic image, but it's one that we recognize instantly. We understand that it's a heavenly body appearing after the night. It's the sun or it might be the moon, but we understand what that sky represents. We understand the darkness, we understand the light.

Roxana Robinson:

So she is creating something that is purely abstract, but also purely recognizable on an intuitive level. I also want to draw your attention to the fact that she was one of the great watercolor masters that we know. These paintings, this series of watercolors in Texas come as close you can come to painting with light. She simply transcends the medium. You don't have the sense of the brush. You don't know where the stroke ends. You have no sense of the artist here. This is something that is created by magic. So just be aware of this extraordinary mastery that is part of this series. Not only is it beautiful, not only does it speak to us in a deep, intuitive way, but it's also an extraordinary example of O'Keeffe the artist and her skill.

Nancy Scott:

Great. The next image, please. I think we need to pick up the pace a little bit. Now we enter into her oil painting. She's in New York, and I think you had some particular observations, Roxana, about what music meant in terms of her coming up with new ideas for the work.

Roxana Robinson:

This is just an interesting quote that O'Keeffe wrote. So this is from her book, Georgia O'Keeffe by Georgia O'Keeffe. And she says about a similar painting in this series. She says, "I never took one of those classes at Columbia University, but one day walking down the hall, I heard music from his classroom. Being curious, I opened the door and went in. A low tone record was being played. And the students were asked to make a drawing from what they heard. So I sat down and made a drawing, too. Then he played a very different kind of record, a sort of high soprano piece for another drawing. This gave me the idea that I was very interested to follow later. The idea that music could be translated into something for the eye." So that's an early example of this synesthesia that O'Keeffe that was part of her work that she absorbed every kind of central experience and put it into her work.

Roxana Robinson:

I told Nancy that I went to the O'Keeffe exhibition at Sotheby's before the sale there year before last and in that sale, in that exhibition, were some letters that she'd written and pieces that she'd written. And in one of them, she names one of the pieces of music that she heard. And it was Song of the Volga Boatmen. That's the very low tone piece of music that she heard. It doesn't look like this painting to me. I think she did another painting from that song. But it's interesting to know that that was one of the pieces that was played.

Nancy Scott:

It's so much fun to think about. The next one, please. Alison is sending me notes that we're going to have to wrap up rather quickly. And I think we have a lot more to show. So I'll go through the next three images rather more quickly. So by 1918 O'Keeffe is back in New York. Her relationship for the rest of Stieglitz's life, the fraught, but passionate relationship between Stieglitz and O'Keeffe begins in 1918. And she's able to work as an artist and she is no longer teaching, but she's still remembering her Texas motifs. And she also goes up to Lake George, of course, every summer with the Stieglitz clan. So we see fresh fruit and flowers. The next two, please we'll look at the beautiful red flower first. You want to say something. This is one of your favorites, I know Roxana. The red flower.

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah. So this for me is sort of central to the whole relationship between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz. And it's one of the earliest and maybe the earliest enlarged image that she does have a flower. And what Paul Strand did was take recognizable images and make them abstractions and drain them of emotion. So you didn't know that they were bowls or picket fences. What O'Keeffe does is the opposite. She takes an image and magnifies it and infuses it with emotion. So this picture to me, she writes in a letter the same years, and this is the summer of 1919 when she goes to stay with Stieglitz at Lake George, she writes, "We are very happy here. I have never been so happy in my life." And I think this image represents that feeling of tenderness, intimacy, and deep emotional connection that was forged in those early couple of years with Stieglitz.

Nancy Scott:

Great. Could we go forward two please? Those beautiful plums would be from these... We wanted to talk about the black iris. You can go ahead to the next one, please. Great. Thank you. She sends her exhibition announcement of this show to Arthur. I found that fascinating that that's recorded in your revised edition. So she sends him a checklist. She's showing for the first time, both flowers and skyscrapers from her 1926 production. So this is one of her most famous paintings. It's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was called dark iris. And there were a series of three in the original exhibition. I know you have a lot to say about this.

Roxana Robinson:

Well, I'll say it quickly, but this is something that is really important. O'Keeffe did many, many flowers and some of them the images are small within the space and some of them are delicate. And so there were critics who dismissed her because she painted flowers. But this example is something that O'Keeffe does over and over and her work. This is something that combines tenderness and fragility and power. This is an incredibly powerful, masterful image because it's dark, because it takes up the entire space, because it's magnified, because the shapes are so full and fully realized. So that she does something that really hasn't been done before by men or women. To use flowers as an object, as an example, a symbol of power and of beauty and fragility and tenderness, but mastery control of the space. So she's really doing something that hasn't been done before. And it's fabulous. It's so exciting to see it.

Nancy Scott:

The next one, please. This is simply to make a equivalence between how her art is now... The equivalence is that she's trying to master two different means of painting. The flowers are her strength, and everybody knows her as a flower painter, but she also wants to paint skyscrapers and Stieglitz would not let her show this particular work from 1925 when she first made it. But the next year, the same year as black iris, she is able to exhibit skyscraper paintings with her flowers, thereby diversifying the range of her work. I just wanted to read this quote from her book, Georgia O'Keeffe on Georgia O'Keeffe. She says "It began with a sky shape near the buildings going up." So it's interesting. I know we don't have much time, but I wanted to point out that the buildings are encroaching on the sky and it couldn't be more different from the vastness of the Texas plains and the great sky there that she so loved. Did you want to say more about this?

Roxana Robinson:

You've said it very well.

Nancy Scott:

Let's go onto the next one. The radiator building now co-owned by Fisk and Crystal Bridges is a great example of her mastery of the skyscraper language of New York City. And so when she's there, the dynamism of New York and so much of its energy comes out in this work. There might be just a couple of the O'Keeffe symbols you want to mention, Roxana, in this painting. It's so famous.

Roxana Robinson:

Well, and you talk about the syncopation though.

Nancy Scott:

Okay. Well, I see the windows and the lights of the city as a kind of syncopation of the jazz age, that this is a part of the liveliness, the buzz of the city. And there's more.

Roxana Robinson:

Which I love. I hadn't thought of that. So what I love about this is that it is both geometrical, very formal, very strict. Those are straight lines. You can't get around it. Skyscrapers are straight lines, but she puts in her own charming, whimsical, delightful motifs, which is that wonderful unfurling cloud of whites, greenish white smoke, the two sort of ears on top of the radiator building. And my favorite is the fact she's deeply in love with Alfred Stieglitz.

Roxana Robinson:

And she literally puts his name in lights. I don't know if you can see it on the slide, but that red rectangle, that bar says Stieglitz. Does it say Alfred Stieglitz? I can't remember. But anyway, she celebrates this man who has taken over her life, shows her work. She's married to him by now. And this is kind of a love letter. Remember she says, to Arthur, she said I said something to you on paper. Well, he or she says something to Alfred on canvas. It's a wonderful love letter to New York City and to Alfred Stieglitz, who is at the center of it for her.

Nancy Scott:

Great. Okay. So to try to accommodate the time issues, I think we should go through the New Mexico paintings very quickly. I know that they're much beloved and I apologize to everyone that you don't get to hear or see more of them, but this is a black cross painting from her first, first summer, an extended stay in Santa Fe. And then she goes up to Taos as well, where Mabel Dodge gives her a studio to work in, which is extraordinary. If you show the next, if you have something particular you want to say Roxana, please go ahead.

Roxana Robinson:

I can talk about this. Are there more, or I can talk about all three of them. Oh yeah. Yeah. So what she does when she goes to the Southwest is to discover a whole new vocabulary of forms. And what she saw in Texas was the sky. What she sees in New Mexico is something different. So first of all she sees the black cross, again, such a powerful image because it takes over the canvas, it nearly obliterates it. But she gives us that radiance, that distant radiance, which counterbalances the oppression and the brooding almost sinister presence of the cross that nearly obliterates experience. And yet there's that distance there's that sky beyond it. So she gives us something that we, again, we've never seen before. We've never seen this, the cross, which is so familiar to us for 2000 years, but we've never seen it like this in the natural landscape with the sun posed as a counterbalancing force against it.

Roxana Robinson:

So the next slide is the red hills. Again, this is a new kind of landscape. We've all seen landscape for the last 300 years. This is a new kind of landscape. It's muscular, it's powerful. It's also red and intimate. It's red, the color of the heart, color of human tissues. So again, she's evoking ideas and feelings from us that we've never seen before. The last one, that's the skull in the distance. Who would have thought of this? This is an amazing painting. It is so dramatic. It is so gorgeous. And when I looked at this, when I was writing my book, I suddenly realized there were too many antlers. And I had my researcher talked to a paleontologist and said, am I crazy? Or are there... He said, yeah, she's got three sets of antlers, but on one skull. So this is a huge dramatic presence.

Roxana Robinson:

And although she's doing it during the period of surrealism, it's not surrealism. Surrealism was about objects that had no bearing on each other, being found together in the same space. These have a great deal of bearing on each other. This is an animal that exists in this wide open plains. This is the sense of sky and space. Again, this is mastery of an image that is tremendously powerful that this woman has created in a space that we've never experienced before. We get it. We get all of her images. We understand on some visceral interior level what she's doing. It's exhilarating. It's thrilling. And we have never seen this before.

Nancy Scott:

And the next one is another of the bone paintings. This is from 1943. And as she's gone through many ups and downs with Stieglitz, by this point, the pelvis series is so important because that also speaks to all creatures, right? This is from the desert, but we humans too, we all have the pelvis, but there's something that expresses a woman's view also about using the pelvis as a topic. She had never painted these before 1943, but this is a good year for her. She has a one woman retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. And I love these paintings as did her audience. Where did this come from? She just had a retrospective and she's taking on a whole new variation on her Southwestern paintings. The next one. I'm so sorry. We have to rush through this. The pedernal is her point of reference. Always. Would you like to say something more about this pastel?

Roxana Robinson:

You're making a great commentary. Just that again, be aware of the monumentality of her work. You can't tell how big this says it could be 10 feet by 15 feet for all we know, but there's this sense of space and distance and presence that she gets into her work that really is extraordinary. Again, we don't really understand that curve, but we understand it. She allows us to do that.

Nancy Scott:

It's wonderfully mysterious. Is it a reflection of light on a bone that she's holding up in the sky, but then it meshes with the horizon line? It's terrific abstraction and a realist work at the same time, which she often said that she does both. It's true. So we'll go forward past her patio door, which was a wonderful abstraction to something that does touch upon Brandeis, which was referenced at the beginning. I wanted to be sure that those of you who are Brandeisians know that O'Keeffe loaned works of art to the Rose Art museum in 1963. So the American Modernism catalog is in a collection of old catalogs at the Rose in a permanent installation that's called the undisciplined collector. So I hope you have a chance to go to the Rose soon and perhaps to pull out the drawers in one of the cases in the undisciplined collectors room. I also wanted to say that Brandeis awarded her with a creative arts award in 1963.

Nancy Scott:

And there was a huge gala for all the creative arts winners that year hosted in New York at the Waldorf Astoria by Leonard Bernstein. So it was a super-duper affair when O'Keeffe got that award from Brandeis and she gave back her stipend to the university as a donation. So we do have connections. She never came to campus, but we do have material in our archives. She sent her resume to Brandeis, which is a one-page resume. And the next is our last work. We're finally getting there.

Nancy Scott:

Sky above clouds number one, the very first iteration of what becomes a 24 foot long mural, which is today in the Art Institute of Chicago. And this very first version that O'Keeffe painted of sky above the clouds, which clearly reflects that her view has become a global one. She loved to fly in her later life, but this is a painting that was donated to an exhibition held by Brandeis in New York City in the same year of 63. So she did not give us painting, but she did give us the opportunity or our forebears were able to have a benefit exhibition and to raise money for the still young university. And O'Keeffe was extraordinarily generous that this painting was allowed to travel from Santa Fe to New York on the behalf of Brandeis University. So there is some surprising connections. If you'd like to say something to wrap up Roxana, please do.

Roxana Robinson:

Just that painting gives us, again, a sense of her excitement about the sky. There we are in the sky again.

Roxana Robinson:

She is of a certain age, 63 she's set in her seventies then, and there is a sense of removal and remoteness from the actual world itself. There is no longer that sense of passion, a sense of discovery and a sense of distance that she's... I love that series because she... I feel her moving away from the life that we all expect. So it's a great work to end with. I would say thank you for inviting me to be part of this. It is such a pleasure to talk about these works with Nancy, who is such a great scholar, and thank you to the Brandeis University Press and Sue Raymond. This has been an enormous troop for me.

Nancy Scott:

Thank you so much. It's wonderful to have the opportunity I learned so much from Roxana every time we talk, it's been wonderful. Yes, we are ready for the Q and A Alison. I hope we have some good questions. And as long as we have questions, we're happy to answer them.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Awesome. Well, we do have questions. So to start, what about O'Keeffe has inspired you both, what brought you to love her, her work and her story so much?

Roxana Robinson:

I think for myself, she is one of the greatest American artists that we have. She's also a woman, so she was struggling against a lot of deeply entrenched sexism. Her work is extraordinarily moving to me as well as beautiful. There's so many ways to describe the connections that I felt to O'Keeffe, there is a huge answer. So Nancy you tell some of the things that you were that drew you to her.

Nancy Scott:

Well, I have to say that I really think that I first fell in love with O'Keeffe's work and the body of work through the letters and the things that she wrote about herself, because I was able to go into the Beinecke library at Yale. And that was 1982 and 1983 long time ago. And I was teaching European modernism. I was hired to teach European modernism at Brandeis and I mean, I knew the work, but her letters brought them to life for me in a completely different way when I started reading her own voice. And then I also wanted to teach a curriculum that would be about women artists and for the student body. I didn't think it was right that we didn't have anything about women. So those were things that inspired me.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Nice. And were some viewers scandalized by her pelvis paintings?

Roxana Robinson:

Was the question, were some viewers?

Nancy Scott:

Yeah. Were some viewers scandalized by her pelvis paintings?

Roxana Robinson:

I don't think so. I think there were lots of other things to be scandalized about before we got to the pelvis, then those are just bones, but there were very intimate images taken of her by Stieglitz of her breasts and her torso. So those were things that shocked people. And then male critics put their own notions of sexuality on the flowers. And so they said, one critic said, this is... These are orgasmic paintings or something like that. So there was a lot of reading into the images, ideas that the critics had on their own. So, no, I don't... Nancy do you think they were shocked by the... Well, I don't remember that.

Nancy Scott:

I also think that the pelvis paintings are so sculptural that they read more as something distant from the body they are as the body, but they just did their beautiful sculptural shapes that she chooses to float up against the sky and look through the whole of the pelvis and so on.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Well, the next question is, did any paintings come out of the period when she had her major depression?

Roxana Robinson:

Oh, well so there's a period at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties in which Alfred Stieglitz who had a very public affair with another woman, Dorothy Norman, who looked a lot like O'Keeffe, actually was younger and was a volunteer at the gallery. So she was there every day. He taught her to photograph and he photographed her the way he had photographed O'Keeffe to it. And there were a number of things that came together and O'Keeffe felt humiliated and ashamed of the fact that her husband was no longer supporting her emotionally or professionally. And she had went into a decline and had a breakdown, was hospitalized actually. And it was so upset by Stieglitz's presence that he was banned from the hospital because his presence upset her. She stopped painting for a couple of years, I think was it 31 to 34, 32 to 34, something like that.

Roxana Robinson:

There are a couple of years and Stieglitz said she may never paint again. He recognized that he was party to this. And then she went with a friend to Bermuda and she drew a series of charcoal drawings of banana flowers, which I find incredibly planting and intimate and sad really, but they are about a kind of re-entry into the world. The thing about the banana flower is it hangs upside down. So these are... So there's a sense of weight and imminence, but something that hasn't happened yet, they're very soft. The sense of the presence is very soft and rich, but it's a sense of something that we can't yet reach. And they're very, very powerful. And those I think Nancy, you might correct me. I think those are the first works that she did after that depression. And then she did start painting again and started doing bones and went back to New Mexico and went into full activity.

Roxana Robinson:

But those beautiful, subtle, powerful images I think are the first ones that she did after her depression.

Nancy Scott:

The only thing I would add, and I don't need to take up too much time with this, but I think you're absolutely right. Those are the first works that stay, I think she was doing work from the basis of having read all the Jean Toomer letters. Jean Toomer comes and stays at Lake George with her in December of 33 and Stieglitz and he are close friends and Jean Toomer's a very famous early African-American author who publishes a book called Cane C-A-N-E in the 1920s.

Nancy Scott:

And he becomes a kind of protege for a period of time of Stieglitz, but he's very interested in almost esoteric philosophy. By the time he and O'Keeffe meet and have this winter month where they're both in a sense trying to restore themselves. And she does start drawing immediately after Jean Toomer leaves. It's as if he sparked something. And she writes about that in the letters. And she gains in her usual optimistic tone a bit in those letters to Jean Toomer but they're both grappling with crisis in their lives. Yeah. And Bermuda com... I just think the letters between the two of them are quite extraordinary and revealing of a whole other side of her.

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Okay. So someone is wondering Roxana who created the painting behind you, and can you name artists whose work are influenced by O'Keeffe?

Roxana Robinson:

The painting behind me was done by Jonathan Scoville, who happens to be a cousin of mine. And he... I'm sure he would have said he was influenced by O'Keeffe. It's hard to point to... That was one reason that O'Keeffe was criticized by critics saying that she hadn't created a school the way some other artists have. But what she did is to make it possible to paint with a kind of emotional intensity.

Roxana Robinson:

So there are lots of artists who were influenced by her, but whose works look nothing like hers, Katherine Bradford, for example, he was a wonderful, wonderful painter. His painting today was very influenced by O'Keeffe, but you wouldn't know it to look at her, at her work. So I think what you did was to deliver this sense of possibility of blending the natural and the abstract, and to drawing on an interior sense of passion. And that's what we... What has happened on the basis of her work, but people who do pictures of flowers or red Hills or bones aren't necessarily, they're using the symbols, but not the essence of O'Keeffe's work. The essence goes out into work that we may not recognize as O'Keeffe's influence at all. It's a funny situation.

Nancy Scott:

And I might add on to that, for example, when second wave feminism began in full force in the late sixties, early seventies, those artists were very aware of O'Keeffe but they certainly were not painting like her. She had a big retrospective at the Whitney in New York in 1970. And she was then claimed by artists like Judy Chicago, for example, as a leader of second wave feminism. But O'Keeffe's feminism really started with the suffrage movement. And she was a very strong advocate for women's rights, even once writing a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, when it comes to the 1970s, she's already in her eighties.

Nancy Scott:

And she doesn't understand why Judy Chicago would make the dinner party, for example, which shows the organic working imagery on the plates of the women seated at the dinner table. She just... It was not her thing. So the intensity of Judy Chicago's ideas came from O'Keeffe. He was their guiding light. O'Keeffe wanted none of it. She has been criticized in those sexualized ways by the male critics in her early days. And she felt that the women of the second wave feminism just wanted to sexualize her again. And that was very... It was a sticking point.

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah. Good point.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Okay. Well, the next question is, might the jagged forms be a wall or obstruction possibly the suffrage issue?

Roxana Robinson:

The jagged forms...

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

This was earlier in the discussion. This came up forward to the beginning at 12:30.

Roxana Robinson:

I think this must be the charcoal drawing with jagged forms. Can you think of another example, Roxana that we've shown?

Roxana Robinson:

No I think it's probably that maybe that what she means those images are so abstract. You could interpret them in any way, but she is certainly showing different forms of the natural world. So those are certainly some kind of obstruction and some kind of fluid forces and some kind of round and bud light forces that are expanding. And you can identify those in many different ways. You could call them political, you could call them art historical, problem gender. That's one of the great things about abstract paintings or really any paintings. You can interpret them in many, many ways, because they have a kind of richness and complexity that allows for that.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

And do we know if the pandemic of 1919 affected her personally or artistically?

Roxana Robinson:

Somebody else asked me that recently, somebody wrote me and said, "why didn't you put this in your book?" She was part of a pandemic too. And I went back and looked at letters and it didn't seem to have much effect on her, I didn't see anything. Nancy you can tell me if you found things. I didn't find much reference to it. And of course it was huge Millie, hundreds of thousands of people died from it, but it didn't seem to come close to her in ways that I didn't see much of it in the letters. So I didn't see an effect that it had.

Nancy Scott:

Well she does have some sort of horrible influenza in early 1918. That's the reason she leaves Texas. She was quite happy out in Texas, but by February, she was going to Dr. Mack, who was an Amarillo doctor and getting some God knows what kind of shots they gave in those days. But that's... I did some research on the Spanish flu to try to figure out if she have had an early strain. And there's nothing that convinced me ever, that she had had Spanish flu.

Nancy Scott:

I think she had a very severe whatever and infection in the long since, so on. And she went down to a little town called Waring, Texas near San Antonio, where a friend of hers had a farm. And that's where she was living effectively. She was trying to escape the bad weather of the planes. And that's when Stieglitz sends Paul Strand out to Texas to retrieve her and bring her back to New York. Stieglitz is still treating her when she first gets to New York as if she's an invalid and he has a brother, who's a doctor. So, but even then, when you do research on the Spanish flu, it's not that the person has asked about 1919, this is the first six months of 1918 was when she was so sick...

Roxana Robinson:

And it is... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Nancy Scott:

No, no. I was going to say her brother, it seems got the Spanish flu. The brother who died at a very early age. He had been a more, more one and he was in the trenches and then somewhere between the battlefield and on the way home he became critical with the flu.

Roxana Robinson:

He was gassed in the trenches. That was Alexis. But yeah, I did the same research about her illness and it seemed to be completely bronchial and she was treated for coughs and weak chest. And then her family, there were a number of people who've died of tuberculosis. So this was something that was extremely alarming to any member of the O'Keeffe family. But yes, she was treated for months. It didn't seem to be the Spanish flu. It wasn't presented that way. So I couldn't find any evidence that was an important part of her experience.

Nancy Scott:

And she kept making art particularly when she gets to New York.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Okay. So I think we'll have time for one more question. This is a slightly longer one. So the story I read in one of my photography books, as a teenager, that O'Keeffe turned up at 291, furious that Stieglitz had put up her work without her permission and demanded he take it down, impressing him mightily is one of those apocryphal ones.

Roxana Robinson:

So there are two... So Nancy, maybe you can clarify this. It's true. She did go. There's a moment when in one of her books, she describes, it's when she's at Columbia teachers college and another student comes after her and says, are you Virginia O'Keeffe? And she says, well, sort of. And the woman says, well, Stieglitz has your paintings, your pictures up on the wall at 291. And she goes down and says, "who gave you the right to put these pictures up?" And he says, "it's my right." And she says, "you have to take them down." And he says, "you have... I am Georgia O'Keeffe." And he says, "you have no more right to take those pictures down than you would to refuse to allow a baby into the world." But, so we've all heard that.

Roxana Robinson:

And I think that's in the book of the introduction that she wrote to the exhibition of Stieglitz photographs at the met you know the one, I mean, Nancy.

Nancy Scott:

Yes. Yes.

Roxana Robinson:

Isn't that where that story's from. And it sort of contradicts the story that we both also know about her getting on the train and coming here and seeing him and when he first puts those pictures up. So how can we make sense of those two stories?

Nancy Scott:

Oh, well, I think her final reason for giving in to what he says is she tells the story and says, "you try arguing with Stieglitz sometime and see where you get." So she gives into him because he's so... Just all over this that she has to absolutely share her work with the world. Now, I think that the way to disentangle the story, I don't think he took down the 1917 exhibition that he'd hung to honor her new work from Kenyon.

Nancy Scott:

I think it's the prior year when he puts together this experiment with the two other artists whose names we've practically forgotten. I am not going to recall them at all, but stimulus has this idea that there could be a kind of psychological study of three abstract artists. And he puts her in a small show with these two men were abstractionists and she comes down to see them. And he says, you have to share your work with the world, essentially.

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah. But that's...

Nancy Scott:

He's just trying a very small show to put her work alongside two of the men.

Roxana Robinson:

I just mean that, so that would have been when she was at Columbia Teachers College, when she walks into the gallery and he doesn't know what she looks like, he's never seen her. So the token, when she gets on the train from Texas, they already married each other.

Roxana Robinson:

They've already had that exchange. So that would be the first encounter when the two of them are in the same presence space, she walks in and says, I'm Georgia O'Keeffe. I want you to take those down.

Nancy Scott:

I will have chapter and verse right in front of my... I could look it up if I need to. But I think the key thing that sticks in my mind is that I believe he puts up those works when she's just returned from her mother's funeral in Virginia. So she does go back. I think the mother dies in early May. She gets on the train, she goes for the services. And then she lives there that summer and is quite deep depression really. But in-between is when he has the three weeks show in the month of May.

Roxana Robinson:

And she does go back to finish her semester.

Nancy Scott:

...Finishes her semester, needs together teacher training. So she can go on to Texas and yeah. And I think that's when they have that confrontation.

Roxana Robinson:

Yeah. So that precedes her getting on the train from Texas to come and see the show. And when you put it back there. Now you're all listening to what art scholars do is we just... We went every single factory, put them in a row. What about this? When did she say that? That's how we spend our time.

Nancy Scott:

And then we talked about it.

Roxana Robinson:

We talked about it.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman:

Well, amazing. Thank you for that final question. And many, I just have closing remarks, but there are a few questions we didn't get to. I'd imagine you can track down emails for both of you. If someone wants to reach out with any further questions. Okay. Many thanks to our speakers today. That was such a fascinating discussion. I know I personally learned a lot and thank all of you for joining us. We're delighted to see so many of our Brandeis alumni and friends coming together to explore topics with our Brandeis faculty and alumni experts.

Elizabeth Cayouette-Gluckman: