Santa Fe and the Okeeffe Museum I

After my spelling bee in Cheyenne, WY on Saturday, June 16, I headed down to Santa Fe for a few days. It was good to get some distance between me and Cheyenne, and the great cultural contrast between Santa Fe and Cheyenne helped accomplish just that. We arrived in Santa Fe late in the afternoon of June 17, after a longish hour or so stopping in the interesting southern CO town of Trinidad, and checked into our motel. The Best Western in Santa Fe has a bad online reputation--most visitors there comment on the "dirty rooms." True to form, our room was dirty but we urged the young man at the front desk, Kalani, to sort of "be a man," and he upgraded us to a (clean) suite for the same price. Thus, we got the best of both worlds, and thoroughly enjoyed our stay there.

Excellent culinary opportunities abound in Santa Fe, but we found ourselves, after an initial dinner on the Plaza, repairing to Whole Foods market, where we could buy whatever healthy product (or unhealthy, for that matter--have you seen some of their chocolate cakes??) we wanted and eat it at booths that were next to the check-out counter. As usual, I wanted to buy items whose names I didn't know how to spell but my more practical friend chose items that actually were good for us. We had three meals at WF in two days; I am sure that at the end of the time they were thinking of offering me a job as security guard.

Sunday night saw us venturing to the Santa Fe Plaza, that distinctive feature of Spanish-style city planning which should have been more imitated in Anglo city planning. The Plaza and its environs is a magnet for people from all over the country, and world, as it has world-class shops and galleries, memorable restaurants, interesting museums, and it also has Native Americans and others selling their wares in the shadow of the 1610 Palace of the Governors.

One Unusual Shop

Unusual shops abound. One that I found delightful was Bill Talbot's Fine Art, Antique Maps & Prints Gallery in a second floor shop on West San Francisco Street. I was the only visitor he had during my time there, and so we struck up a conversation on cartographic history and various mapmakers in the history of the West. He asked me my interests, and I told him I was looking for early maps of the Oregon Territory (from the 1830s-1850s). He managed to find one in his stock. Its name sounds like a 17th century title of a book (that it, it is so long that you don't really need to read the book to understand the argument), "Map of the United States Territory of Oregon West of the Rocky Mountains. Exhibiting the various Trading Depots or Forts occupied by the British Hudson Bay Company: connected with the Western and Northwestern Fur Trade" (Washington, DC, 1838). He informed me that several of these kind of maps were made by explorers on the basis of reports of trappers, mountain men, other old maps and obscure sources and that the maps were usually appended to a report given to Congress, which had authorized the map and the report in the first place. This map, for example, was made by Lt. Washington Hood (Mount Hood was not named after him, but was so named in 1792 after a British admiral, Samuel Hood). What was fascinating to me was to see which geographical features in Oregon were identified and how they were named in 1838. The unfolding of the NW's history can be seen in the maps of the area.

Well, we looked at some other maps, and it was fun for me to guess the date some were made by seeing which geographical features were delineated and named. For example, I "guessed" that another map was probably made in 1856-57, while in fact it was probably made in 1853. I like that kind of challenge. But eventually I asked Bill how much these maps were selling for--and he informed me that the one that interested me was "only" $1700 or so. I quietly gulped, praised his entire collection, and retreated with a smile.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Before leaving Santa Fe for Taos on Tuesday, June 19, however, we stopped in at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum on Johnson St. The museum is a miniature delight; what I mean by that is you can "get through" it in 90 minutes, though each minute of the visit is filled with images, arresting vistas and provocative thoughts from her quotations. For the first time in my life I feel I gradually put together her life in a way that she wanted to be understood. Thus, my greatest joy emerged not simply from appreciating/reappreciating some of her classic works, such as her flowers or the New Mexico pelvis bones, but in putting her art in the context of the life she lived. Art flows from a life lived in freedom or constraint; I felt for the first time that I had been able to understand something of the heart of the artist. I will give some biographical facts about her for the rest of this essay and then bring you into some of her quotations and interpretive comments in the next.

Though praised by her early teachers as she mastered the techniques of "imitative realism" in the early years of the 20th century, she temporarily left painting for four years (1908-1912, she was born in 1887) because imitative realism discouraged her. As she said on one occasion, 'if all you do in painting is imitate someone, I might as well not paint anymore.' She was struggling in her early 20s, then, with a dilemma not uncommon for many creative and talented young people--you have learned things by "imitating" the best, but you don't yet see how and if you have a way to express yourself.

She was enticed back into painting in 1912 when she viewed the creative work of Arthur Dove. His approach to art, in the nascent abstract expressionist movement, was that it was a medium to learn to express your own ideas and feelings. So taken was she by that suggestion that she resumed her work, producing some abtract charcoal designs in 1915. Her work came to the attention of NYC photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) on Jan. 1, 1916, and he saw in her work something that would both revitalize his own flagging artistic fortunes and bring her front and center to the New York scene. Why were Stieglitz's fortunes falling then? Well, he was of German descent. Germans weren't very popular in America in 1916-1918. Indeed, subscriptions to his beloved publication Camera Work had fallen to around 37 in this period. He saw a way he could promote the work of O'Keeffe and invigorate his own image.

Promoting O'Keeffe

He did this through a series of photographs of her, indeed more than 300 of them, from 1917 until the early 1930s. In 1917 they met and soon became lovers and lived together, even though Stieglitz didn't officially get his divorce from his first wife until Sept. 1924. Soon, however, Stieglitz's thoughts about how to portray O'Keeffe crystallized. Here is a quotation showing how that occurred:

"O'Keeffe was transformed, in a few years, in front of the camera from a shy, rather reserved young woman to an identifiable, widely viewed and discussed voluptuous nude model. Her portrayal alters also, from girlish and coy, to brazen and haughty and then to masculine, assertive and even taunting. By 1921, Stieglitz was producing close-up portraits of O'Keeffe that had strong masculine components. The portraits became more complex, dramatic and ambiguous. Stieglitz was drawn to her straining muscles, her long bony fingers, the exquisite definition of her clavicles, her stark profile or her haughty, even icy stare. Her final persona is one of strength and autonomous aloofness."

In other words, Stielitz reinvigorated his failing fortunes by portraying his lover as in her voluptuous sensuality. Georgia O'Keeffe would be a ravishing, sensual, and strong beauty in that wide open decade of the 1920s.

But even though this "image" launched her career, it wasn't fully satisfying to her. The next essay goes into that.

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