Georgia O’Keeffe At Home In New Mexico with Carolyn Kastner - Murdock Mixology presentation

greetings everyone and welcome to the Wichita Museum on this beautiful February evening I am Charlie Hedrick the curator here at lamb and I am so thrilled to have you tonight for what is going to be a fun beautiful fascinating talk by dr. Carolyn Kastner we are here to whet your appetites for Wham's upcoming exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe art image style the exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum and curated by dr. Wanda corn has been touring the country to rave reviews and record crowds and we are so thrilled to be bringing it to Wichita and everyone it is kind of a big deal so it's very exciting the show pairs Georgia O'Keeffe paintings with a selection of our clothing as well as portrait photographs taken of the artist to show how she became the iconic mythic figure that we know her as today and we invite everyone to join us for an opening day of all things O'Keeffe O'Keeffe celebrations on March 30th and we're gonna do all kinds of fun things we'll have a talk by the curator of the exhibition dr. Wanda Korn we're gonna have fashion designers and seamstresses working upstairs in the Great Hall making clothes there will be music there will be food trucks there will be O'Keefe Southwest inspired recipes in the muse so just come see the exhibition and then just camp out and spend the whole day here at will so it will be great before I introduce dr. Kastner I would like to thank all of our generous sponsors for the X O'Keefe exhibition and the outpouring for the show has just been so incredible and so tremendous so the list is going to take a couple minutes to read so please forgive me Georgia O'Keeffe art image style is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator dr. Wanda M corn Robert and Ruth Halperin professor Amira in art history Stanford University and made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts the Wichita presentation has been generously underwritten by lead sponsors Paula and Barry downing the Latin her family foundation and Judy Slauson provided additional major underwriting Charles E Baker and dr. Dennis and mrs. Anne Ross are also principal sponsors the Trust Company of Kansas Fred and Mary Koch foundation Celebrity Cruises and imp rise Bank are substantial corporate sponsors generous support has been provided by Louise Barron Donna bunk Devore foundation J Erik angstrom and Robert Bell Mary eaves rich and Joey Giblin Norma griever Sonia Greta Minh and Chris Brunner Gridley Family Foundation John and Kerry Karen Hegeman Sandra Lingle mikandi Michaelis Tom and Mindy page will in christen price Debbie and Ron Sinclair Mary Sue Smith Sarah T Smith and Katy Wiedemann foundation were almost done but a couple more people and in Martin Bauer Emily bonnet via Doctor John and Nancy Brammer Sharon and Alan fury Toni and bud Gates Trish Higgins Richard height and Anita Jones Del Mar and Mary clucky dr. berry and Jane Murphy Georgia and Keith Stevens Marnie bleep stone and David stone and Sue and Kurt Watson are additional exhibition patrons all museum exhibitions also receive generous support from the Friends of the Wichita Art Museum our longtime standard-bearers here at the Museum and of course the city of Wichita and we also really depend on our memberships and people who come and all of you who come and care and I see so many people that we love and know and enjoy and docents and we love you say thank all of you let's give us a round of applause and now to the woman of the hour dr. Carolyn Kastner retired last year as curator of the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe during her tenure at the O'Keeffe museum Kastner organized exhibitions that helped deepen the public's understanding of both O'Keefe and the wider world of American modernism her exhibitions include Georgia O'Keeffe's art and art materials jean quick to see Smith and American modernist Covarrubias drawing a cosmopolitan line and Georgia O'Keeffe's watercolors 1916 to 1918 dr. casler also worked closely with dr. Wanda Korn curator of the upcoming O'Keeffe exhibition during the initial planning stages of that show helping Horne catalog and study O'Keefe's wardrobe she also contributed to the book Georgia O'Keeffe and her houses which is gorgeous and which you could buy at the membership desk on your way out so that's fabulous prior to her move to Santa Fe Kastner lived in San Francisco where she was an independent curator and taught art history at the California College of the Arts she is a devoted lover of Santa Fe the desert the mountains and the American West and following in O'Keefe's footsteps she loves to hike and raft in the region so as we begin our spring long celebration of all things O'Keeffe please join me in welcoming dr. Carolyn Kastner to the podium I want to be really clear I'm not like O'Keefe because I don't rap but I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna tell you this is another talk and if you invite me back I'll tell you that story too but O'Keefe took her first raft trip at 74 I'm 71 and I no longer raft not because it's hard but because it's uncomfortable and you're cold I've been on the green river for five days and it rained every day and you can't get off the river right and then you're in the hot dead water and yours so I want to also go on just to say one more thing about O'Keefe and rafting she was going down the Colorado River to Glen Canyon and two great photographers were on that trip and you can see a lot of these slides on the O'Keefe website now I'm off track already so here we go but but it's just when you bring this up because I have such I remember the day I learned I was working on the art and the photographs from that trip and I just went oh my god she's amazing which goes to a point that we were talking about earlier today which is something I learned not in art history Wanda corn was also my advisor and I was part of the team and every graduate student she ever had is given an acknowledgement in her great book the great American thing because it took her 20 years to write it and so you know there this is a whole opening to the idea that learning about okie from the museum is another experience because people come who are not art historians they come from all over the world many people come who can't read or speak English and they work their way through the museum just because they've seen her art and it's just incredible to learn that most of those people are really there not for her art not even for her flowers but because she created the life she wanted to and even in our time yeah it's an unusual thing for women or men so she's extraordinary so the end of the rafting story is she went three more times in the last trip she was eighty-four years old and there are pictures of her rowing and and and the pictures are so gorgeous because the the photographer who took those pictures was a protege of Alfred Stieglitz and you probably know she did all those hand things for Alfred Stieglitz and there's Todd Webb with those beautiful hands on oars photographing them and so she's an extraordinary woman I'm just an art historian here doing a gig for an evening so hello and I'm just really so pleased to have this opportunity this evening because my first assignment coming to the O'Keeffe museum and you can tell by the last names of the shows I curated I was there to expand the idea of modernism into the diversity of who modern artists really were at the kief museum that was an important part of our job and my first work was to come to work on this book and so I picked every picture that's in here I'm just saying 250 of them so it's a it's a beautiful beautiful book but this is how I began to understand the house think about the house and understand that I couldn't understand the house and so my research followed this so as picture editor I looked at something like a thousand pictures to come to two hundred and fifty of them and this archive that we have about the museum has I've retired for a year but I still say we when I say we it means the museum so just so you know so with this archive of records with the houses with all of these resources it's still an incomplete record so I'm here to tell you tonight what I know everything I know know everything I know by the time you leave tonight but you won't know everything about the house because the records are incomplete there was no permitting process there were no codes right so there are no records and we have a few oral histories here and there so a lot of the information we put together and we can confirm is about photographs we did the same thing with the clothing when did she first wear that outfit when was that picture window first put up in the house so tonight I'm gonna tell you what I learned working on this book and the curiosity that I had following that period because we were explaining the house but we weren't really talking about how she lived in the house and as an art historian touring people in the house I began to understand the power of something like her studio and what that meant for people to see that space and so that's what I'm gonna try to do here and along the way I'm going to show you some art and I'm gonna make the argument to you that her two houses that she purchased in the 40s and kept until the end of her life are two of her greatest works of art so if I haven't convinced you of that by the end then we'll just sit and I'll talk some more all right so I want to just begin by looking here in the setup for the Fashion Show this dress that she's in and last night somebody talked you'll see a picture in a minute I'll show you that one I want to say that people say oh that must be her favorite dress after 1960 you see many photographs of her in this dress and Wanda and I began to call this the wrap dress and she's actually got two of those dresses on and one is white and one is black and she will put one over the other and the silhouette ends up looking very much like her New York suit but in New Mexico it's hard to get a dry cleaner and this is cotton and she could wash it and have it iron and she's wearing a Hector Aguilar belt and Hector Aguilar if you don't know is a very famous modernist Mexican silversmith and when she was done up she looked fabulous in the New Mexico desert so there she is in her home and her friend called her created this mobile and so what my point is tonight is that she lived the same way she painted she dressed with care making hard decisions she made hard decisions as she renovated and then built a house in New Mexico and these decisions are aesthetic excisions and wanda calls it the great continuity i think is the amazing continuity is what wanted to cause us so I feel like I'm the warm up for Diana Ross Wanda will be here and I'm here until she gets enough so after we finished the book and had put it all together I really wanted to advance the project further and to think about how she lived and worked in her two houses and how she situated her studios and where she painted in them and I'm going to show you that tonight and I also came to respect her war both homes conceived designed built and refined over two decades as these great works of art that they are because it wasn't enough that once they were there then she just moved in and went to work not at all they continued to change and they she continued to adapt them to her life and we have so many photographs of O'Keeffe because she was one of the most photographed women of the 20th century and we only say one of the most because we think Marilyn Monroe might be up there too so but it's extraordinary these these two photographers are the who's who of mid-century photography they photographed her in New York and when she moved to New Mexico they came West and photographed her in her two houses here you know the batteries working well just really zoomed right off so O'Keefe first came to New Mexico and this is how the story begins she came before a stay with vexxt R and her friend in the summer of 1929 and she was seeking a new direction in her art and she enjoyed a newfound freedom in the West but it also brought with it some newfound professional and artistic freedom as well she bought a car she learned to drive she explored the countryside went out to an Indian rodeo in Las Vegas New Mexico with Mabel dodge lu han's husband so this was an extraordinary expansive experience that stretched into five months it was an experience that changed her personally and professionally the diversity of the cultures and the geography inspired her and she expanded her visual vocabulary and she actually broadened the very concept of American modernism through that experience in the next 20 years she spent most yours she spent three months most years coming to New Mexico as her husband Alfred Stieglitz continued his pattern of going to Lake George every summer O'Keefe came to New Mexico instead and in 1949 she moved full-time to New Mexico and made it her permanent home three years after the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz she spent the years after his death settling his estate and dispersing art to great institutions and and during that period her Abiquiu house was being built so we actually have more records about the Abiquiu house because she was corresponding with an assistant who was overseeing the project so we have much more information about that and this is what came of that first year over five months she created 25 paintings and half of them were entirely new subjects the local architecture the high desert landscape cultural objects became the fascination of O'Keeffe these interests guided her artistic practice and she explored totally new subjects and environments and experimented with new colors forms and even compositional strategies like this wild abstraction here in the lower corner that came out of her day at the rodeo the colors the rhythm all those kinds of things so I'm going to move on to look at Ranchos church here and then just talk a bit about how deliberate her art is one of my missions being at the O'Keeffe museum was to explain to everyone that I ever talked to you there that O'Keefe was a conceptual artist and this is part of this for art when you meet it feels welcoming it feels easy it feels simple and in fact it's a great construct and it be always begins with the drawing and that the drawing practice she brought with her to New Mexico her commitment to abstraction was another constant in this practice so while her subject matter was changing and the trees were different and the mountains were wild and beautiful her abstraction and her commitment to it it was the through line of this work so she was radically reductive in her drawings take a look at that drawing on the left I'm just gonna do this one drawing but - this is a drawing from the field this is how she this is what she'd bring back and and so some of them are so spare they're as few as six lines in the entire drawing and a painting comes out of that and then often she would do a second and the third drawing was always in charcoal on the canvas and so underlying this simple form that she deploys across this flat surface is a lot of drawing a lot of thinking a lot of composition and also notice how the composition how high the churches toward the horizon line at the top of the painting look at how she draws a border around the drawing she's already sees the full composition and she's in the field not in her studio so she began this particular style of drawing in 1916 and it was a persistent part of her practice until the end of her professional art career which ended in the mid-60s so if this is what underlies everything about her artwork she returned to New York a changed woman this is a Stieglitz photograph that's her smirking at him in front of her own car so she had learned to drive he did not so New Mexico represented this great power to her and it was really an extraordinary experience in her life and as I said for the next 20 years or so as he would go one way she would go the other and it started by staying in the friends homes of friends first in Taos and later in the village of a called a but it all changed when she saw the ghost ranch and the ghost ranch is an amazing sight and it's still this amazing retreat because it's 21 thousand acres of spectacular desert landscape eroded Hills rocky mesas and the weather changes dramatically day-to-day hour-to-hour and even something like what you're seeing here could be one day we made a time lapse of two years ago and we were just astonished to really sit in front of that time lapse and see that we had snow then rain then the snow melted then the clouds went away then it was sunny and that was all one day in March and we were just thrilled and we were gonna go back and get many different kinds of weather and we got three of the weather's right there and that one day in March so being there was spectacular for her the colors were irresistible in the very day it's a difficult place to find it's on it was on a remote road and they didn't have a sign they would put a skull out on the road and actually it's so interesting because people would steal that skull because it was there on a post on the road and nobody was around and so it was very hard to find where to turn off so when she discovered it she drove in and that night she stayed at the ghost ranch and got up the next day and painted some more and the thing is that trip was the key and before she left she had made plans and made a reservation to come back the very next year so she says of that when I got to New Mexico that was mine as soon as I saw it it was my country I'd never seen anything like it before but it fitted me exactly and so this power I'm trying to give you the sense of the power of the land is what's really drawing her here and and this is extraordinary so then to begin with she stayed in something like a lodge as like a motel room it's it's like a camp and it's still that way and you can stay there and you can get tours of where she painted so you eat in the in a food hall with everybody and you take your meals there and so forth but in 1936 she showed up unannounced and the owner of Ghost Ranch Arthur pack who owned and operated the dude ranch had lived in this house and she's painting this in 1937 the next year and the title is the house I live in well he didn't have a lodge room for her so he sent her down the road and said my house is has become a house for the hired people on the ranch and you can stay there and you can stay there for the summer so this is the most fun I had in finding these records is discovering everybody talks about this house and when she came to stay in the house and when she bought the house I had not read that she was sharing this house with four to six other people who were ranch hands men and women and this is a this is already a famous artist and a very privileged woman whose income is entirely derived from making her own art she doesn't come from means and Stieglitz was not a wealthy man himself it and that question comes up a lot so I address it here that you know she made this privilege and to get to that landscape she was willing to share a house and and the beautiful thing is the stories of the people who are so much younger than she was because they were working there they tell the stories of sharing the house with her and lying on the roof and watching the stars at night so this was incredibly important to her so the titles of these very paintings really tell the possessiveness that comes to her very quickly after her first year there she came back and she stayed in the house and and began to describe this as my front yard my background yard and the house I live in some time before 1937 which is before she owned the house she bought the house finally from pack in 1940 she created instead of pointing I have this marvelous Giz oh here she had already enlarged this window it's like which window doesn't belong here right so instead of claiming a room to sleep in she was claiming a room for her studio and and she enlarged that window some time before 1937 and we have no records of how that transaction went on who did it did Arthur Pak know she did it we don't know that so by 1940 then she just said to Arthur Peck I it's over you just need to sell me this house you're not living in it anymore and he said good I'll do that and so she bought the house and seven acres of land and then returned continued to return always to this house so this was emblematic this is now 1940 and she's been coming there for a decade of coming to New Mexico for a decade and so it's a growing commitment she had never owned a house anywhere this is very different from the cosmopolitan life she lived in New York City where she lived in the Shelton hotel and she didn't cook and then in the summers they would go to Lake George and lots of family members were there now she has this wonderful house and now it's hers in 1940 o'keefe bought her second house in the village of Abiquiu in 1945 and she occupied both houses and told the end of her life her homes were inspirational to her artwork and two of her greatest creative efforts conceived and perfected to suit her life but also this important primary purpose was for her art practice the Georgia O'Keeffe museum now owns both properties they received the ghost ranch house as a gift from the Burnet Foundation in 2005 and the Abiquiu house from the Georgia O'Keeffe foundation in 2006 so in 2009 it was the it was the inspiration for this book is people wanting to know about her houses so now I'm going to show you the houses one at a time but I want you to know ahead of time this will be confusing and projects move back and forth and something inspires her and then she takes it to the other house but it's the best way I can do this I'm just promising you that but if you get confused hold up your hand and I'll tell you that as much as I know so in addition to her two houses and the great wealth of art that came to the museum from both the Burnap Foundation and the O'Keefe Foundation we have 60 years of her collected studio materials all of our materials are in our collection and this is an extraordinary thing to be able to study and I'll just tell you one incident that comes to mind I was recreating her studio in the museum and I went to look for paint and I found an entire box of paint that had never been opened six tubes of lead white were in this box and it's just extraordinary and then later I learned from the conservator that lead white is the how she treated the surface for every oil painting well I have a good friend who paints in San Francisco and when he found out a certain red color was and wouldn't be there anymore he bought a case of it so when I saw those six tubes of paint I knew exactly what she had done she never ran out she had six tubes left when she died and so these are the kinds of stories by having her art materials that make it personal to us to understand when I bring her brushes out into the museum I look for the nastiest dirtiest brushes and the things that have been used the most and that's green and red and black because she couldn't scrub the color out her brushes are meticulously clean and every artist who sees them remarks on it and so for me these are the things that you can tell from just having art materials so having the houses and the studios too is an extraordinary opportunity for us so one of the things that I could do though we couldn't bring the exhibition of her clothes to the museum if you've been there how many of you have been to the museum so you know it's very small so we just couldn't show the exhibition the pink dress hanging on the door there is also a wrap dress so she had ten black dresses ten white dresses and then colors like pink and blue and turquoise and green and they were cotton and silk and linen but she was only photographed professionally in the black and white dresses so there was never her favorite dress it was one of ten dresses she had to dress for those photographers so for me this extensive collection of O'Keefe's art materials her life her houses have been an incredible opportunity for me to understand more about her art practice but primarily much more about her aesthetic her philosophy and it she quotes it again and again and she learned it in school and she repeats at every interview she gets a chance she was taught to fill a space in a beautiful way and that informed her art practice when her paintings are up look at them they fill the canvas there's no one sent object and then something else to fill the space every inch of the canvas is interesting so she filled that space but she also did the same in her life and she says of that after all everyone has to do just this make choices in daily life even if only buying a cup and a saucer so as O'Keefe suggests her aesthetic choices included everyday life and it's visible in the way she shaped and inhabited the space of her two homes in a beautiful way so now I'm going to talk to you about the ghost ranch house because that's the house that she owned first and lived in it from 1936 going forward but bought it in 1940 she loved this environment and she just couldn't get enough of it and so it's important to to hear her words about this she writes to a friend all the earth colors the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of Badlands the light Naples yellow through the ochres orange red and purple and all this is between dashes and then it's as if she's just you know oh yeah in purple and then she concludes even the soft earth greens so from the very beginning of her career she was dedicated and disciplined as an artist who was also a very keen observer of nature and precise in preparing her materials and meticulous at refining both color and form and these are the same characteristics she followed as she built her house and so that whole wall and now you can see this is a photograph after she's taken more Adobe away and before I forget to tell you Adobe is made of mud bricks and straw and it's self-supporting material so somebody had to figure out and we don't know who how to hold up the house after she took all that Adobe out to put those glass windows in and we'll talk about that so this characteristic of using fine materials you can find that in the house the discipline of staying with something she did many series in her life and this all comes true in her houses as well so to help people through the book we don't have plans for either house what you would think of as architectural plans I'll show you the plans for the other house are cubes on a grid of paper but we hired an architect to come and really figure this out somebody who was a specialist in Adobe housing so in in doing that has she created a map showing us what the house looked like and we had pictures from the inside but we didn't have anything that showed us the outside of the house so she has Beverly Spears and her credit is on the next slide but oh it's here too yeah so she created a plan for how the packs Arthur packs family had lived in the house so that first window that becomes larger is here and this is the area that she took over for her studio so this is the living space here and there was a study here and then eventually she took this out and then eventually she knocked through a door here so now she has a studio and a bedroom and this door which was always there and access to the outside so what drew her was this extraordinary view so this is the patio it looks like this is two buildings but this is as if you're on the patio here and you're looking out the Pedernales down here so this is her view this is her daily view and you see there are no interior hallways so crossing the patio every day is an activity and something that was important to her and how she lived in this house was derived from the very plan of the house and then I'll show you what she did to the house in order to make it suit herself particularly precisely so the petter no mountain is 12 miles away but you can see it's right there it's always there unless it's snowing or raining and she writes about it the first summer she lived in the house and she's saying my house and this is when she was still sharing the house with other people in front of my house there are low scrub bushes and cottonwood trees and further out a line of hills and then I have this mountain a flat top mountain that slopes off on each side a Blue Mountain in later years she even called it my Mountain so the first thing she did was to commandeer the living room the largest space in the entire house as her studio so think about this this is the beginning of her making it work for her as an artist because the biggest space is usually an entertainment space a living space a social space instead she makes it over to her studio so she entertains on the patio so we have many pictures of her entertaining friends and family on the patio and that view of the mountain is always out there and then as you can see in the upper photograph it just has this quality of framing the end of her house so how could she not call it my Mountain it's really this extraordinary sight that's always there so I want to leave you with that thought that she was seeing it early in the morning and sunrise and she was seeing it at night and under the stars and this is what comes of that and over time she created 24 pictures of the pattern house and the first star very simplified really representational of the experience 41 she's just a year after she bought the house you still get the sense of the land and the cottonwood trees and and all that the colors this is where she takes it and then you begin to see that she makes it familiar to herself and she makes it more and more abstract over time so this is an example of how she works this is she creates even in an abstract painting this sense that when you drive up the highway you go that's the pattern um because the horizon line and the color of the pedernal are constant it's always blue because it's always faraway and it's flat top and so this is an extraordinary quality that really teases us away from the concept of how abstract her paintings are because we think we're looking at the paternal and and in fact you can see here and I tried to show you the difference even the upper left is a lot of detail but still very simplified but when we get down to these lower registers it gets more and more abstract so this is the first passion the second passion was getting to those red cliffs so just to set this up for you as we go through it I've already talked about this window which is visible in our photograph of the house and then this is the next project along the north side this was probably the last thing she did on the north side but just to look at the house here is this picture window so now the studio fills this entire space and here at the end she made this room that had no access to the house after she acquired that room she like Frank Lloyd Wright pulled the windows to the corner probably looking at his house this is after he had made the Fallingwater house that has the mitered corners so she has a corner of glass she has a picture of window and she's missing a lot of Adobe so the first thing that museum had to do after they acquired the house is hire an engineer to shore up that north wall because it was sagging because of the space that the Adobe that had been taken out of there so this is the best we can do for you this one set of pictures that we found from Arthur path and you can see he sits lives a very satisfying Western life there are steer horn 's and animal rugs and Navajo rugs and it's a living room and now in 45 we have a picture of O'Keeffe in this is that first window and I'm just gonna point out some things that show up again this is a north window and her easel is there on the east end of the room and it's perpendicular to that North light and she recreates that later this becomes the model for the Abiquiu studio but her materials always surround her like this she always has things out on window sills and tables all of her brushes are visible to her so there's always this ability to quickly leave and go outside and paint although I doubt that she did that but you had that sense that you could just pick up a handful of brushes so now I want to show you from the inside what this does so this seems simple she knocks out this piece of well she didn't but she hired somebody who did knocks out this piece of Adobe and you've got a picture window that's great but when you go inside you realize oh there's an interior wall right in the middle of that so this is why it was sinking and so that to enlarge the window she also enlarged this area that was a simple doorway and in doing that that is what makes the shift in the house and opens this up to become a light-filled space for her studio so there is the picture of the picture window so we don't know when that was done we actually have no record of that nobody really remembers but we have this picture from 1957 so we know by 1957 she had this picture window and that's why we think having bought the house in abiquiu in 1949 she put a picture window in there and that may have pushed her on to bring this idea back to the house here but here again is another picture of the pack living room and you see now what's going on this is a really sophisticated thing it isn't just one exterior wall that she's needing to move so there it is and this is the museum photography taken in 2010 and it's a whole section this whole section of wall comes out and then the wall here is punctured so there's no support there so these are really extraordinary changes and this goes to her clothes too and wand I'll probably tell you she wouldn't walk in and buy things from department stores if I don't like something I don't buy it if I like it I do buy it she would like something and then she'd like it different so she'd find a blouse she liked but she wanted a mandarin collar so she'd bring it home and take the collar off and that what was standing up would become a mandarin collar so this is a woman who's always seeing into her own comfort her own vision of her life of her clothing and think about those spare drawings that she's able to absorb so much information and and then relay that across the surface of the drawing in six lines so she's she's her imagination is extraordinary I'll just say it that way so now here we are and I just need to show you how this continues to move along so we've been thinking about this area this is a big window she's made this a big window she's opened this area in 1941 just a year after she bought the house she had already knocked through this wall and you'll see that Spears has named this extra room we don't know what it was and it's it's an odd formation and it had a corner and it had a door to the outside but it did not have a door into the house so to use it you had to go outside and come in through this door so it's obvious what she didn't actually knock straight through the wall and created a door and made that her bedroom and so then quickly following is when she removed the corner and put up some support and it's still there all of this that all the glass that she put in is still there so it was it it didn't ever collapse or break so this is now a unit this room is so small there's nothing in there except a bed and a night table there's no room for anything else she can walk from her bedroom through the studio and back and she can walk from her bedroom straight out remember all those red beautiful mesas are out there and she writes about that she was always headed outside to get to those places and so what's important about this then is that the land was driving all this change she brought light in but really she was trying to get outside and to see more from this area that is where she spent most of her time was in the studio so this is significant because she had a practice of going out of her bedroom and walking out on to the land so that door was also important to her and I suspect that was as important as a view because now I'll just show you and I'm sorry about the curtains but anyway that's how the photograph got taken so but there's glass behind those curtains so that's a corner wall of glass so that's her bed and her bed looks out that's the view not just from her bedroom but from her house so then she she writes about this at the back door are the Red Hills and the cliffs and the sands the badlands I go out my back door and walk for 15 minutes and I'm someplace I've never been before where it seems no one has ever been before well of course they had because it was a dude ranch and native people had lived there for centuries but it's that empty um this walk is this would take you about an hour to walk from the bedroom window to the cliff but it's so compelling that you just want to be there so she also writes to friends that she loves getting up in the morning and being on the land when it's already dark so as the Sun comes up she sees every bit of the change of color and I've stayed up at Ghost Ranch not in the house but just once but it changed my idea about light because she's not talking about watching the sunrise she's talking about seeing the color come up the color changing and spending an hour before sunrise to after sunrise I could see how the blues became reds and the purples became another color so they're the extraordinary shifts and she knows all of that she's cataloging the color of the land so this is extraordinarily important to her and more than that staying here gives her an intimacy and continuous contact so this is what we get from that side so these are extraordinary paintings but it also created the very Epiphany of this wonderful contribution to modernism of the bones and the flowers floating over the landscape this is an identifiable ghost ranch landscape as these are on the left but what she's done here is to combine still life the bones and the flowers with the landscape and in doing that she makes something that's impossible but everyone who stands in front of these paintings me included it's just taken away to some place it's totally believable to us it's a composition that doesn't make any sense at all but brings us great joy and I this is what she gets from being in the house and so there's another quote that from 1976 she was interviewed about this style of painting and she says I had looked out on the hills for weeks and painted them again and again and climbed and ridden over them so beautifully soft so difficult I had painted those heels from the car and that's another story she had a studio in her car as well so when but that's not tonight that's another time so she said but I had failed dismally like but I could see them further away and from my window in the rain I tried again they seemed right with the Rams head I don't remember where I picked up the head or the hollyhock my paintings sometimes grow piece by piece from what is around so that contact that intimacy with the land began to influence literally how she made paintings not just a representation of the landscape but she had new ideas and new thoughts about modernism in and where she wanted to take American modernism and on those walks she was always picking up bones and she collected these bones and this is part of it in another series she writes I had a whole pile of bones there on my portal and then one day I just picked one up and looked through it and then she has another idea about bones making it the focal point using it like a lens but she had been doing this from sorry I gave away so last night it was slow tonight it's so jumpy I can hardly stay focused look what she has in her left hand this is a steer head that still has flesh on it yeah and she has gloves on but still really and this is this is like that rafting she's intrepid so she was hiking in this landscape from the very beginning and she was always out on the land looking for new sights to paint but also just being there was exhilarating to her and so the bones collected on her portal and she brought them back and Ansel Adams is a friend who stayed with her and there are very few people who wouldn't stay overnight at the ghost ranch because she was always working when she was at the ghost ranch but Ansel Adams and his wife were two people that were a constants there they had known each other by maybe a decade by this time and so there's a whole series of these pictures and they're laughing in all of them so you can imagine I think he's saying to her put that stinky thing down and she's just gonna carry it on home so so there's the basic story of the ghost ranch house and that was her first house the first house she had ever owned anywhere and then in 1945 she purchased this second home in the Hispanic village of Abiquiu and she loved the ghost ranch dearly but it was a seasonal and very remote place so it was a dude ranch so there weren't utilities there wasn't propane there wasn't water so she couldn't stay there year-round so it continued to just be a summer place you can now stay there it's open like a national park it's open all winter but that's a product of electricity and other modern conveniences that weren't there then so the second house was in the midst of Abiquiu a Hispanic village that was one of many many villages in a valley at one time when you go there now it seems very remote but this has been a valley that has held light for a long time because it's in a river valley so there was fertile land there so this house is much larger though on a smaller plot of land four acres and it was a ruin enclosing a patio when she saw it this is the upper right is a picture of villagers and people who knew how to make adobe houses rebuilding from a foundation of this house so the Abiquiu house had two essentials for living year round a well for domestic water but quickly municipal water followed but the well was a significant part of the decision so she could have water it also had water rights on the acequia the irrigation ditch so she could have a garden and this far from grocery stores having a garden especially during the warriors was a really important thing and O'Keefe was a huge gardener and I'll show you a map in a moment but just to tell you we've reestablished the garden the museum has and we have an intern program and the interns and their families take vegetables and fruits away all summer long and still we're able to contribute 400 pounds of produce and it's just amazing how fertile this land is she even has a fig tree looks like a fig bush but at 7,000 feet there thinks growing up there it's an incredible garden we wait all summer for those figs they don't then you can't eat them until September so this was important to her but it was also an aesthetic choice and she writes about it she interviews you'll hear many different kinds of quotes when I first saw the abiquiu house she said it was a ruin with an adobe wall around the garden broken in a couple of places by falling trees as I climbed and walked about in the ruin I found a patio it was a good sized patio with the long wall with a door on one side that wall with the door was something I had to have it took me ten years to get it three million more years to fix the house so I could live in it and after that the wall with the door was painted many times so this is actually her picture of the door and it's a little three by five snapshot and she sent it out to friends and we have one in the collection with the note on the back and it has something similar to the quote I just read you so she was so happy to rebuild this house and the other picture here on the lower right is the formal entryway into the patio and the whole house surrounds and looks into the patio now this is the door and really what you're looking at is the facing on about three feet of Adobe and this creates a wonderful change in where and how you view the door and so painting it many times is really a surprising activity because the shape of the door changes from where you are so coming out into the patio and being at different angles and for instance this just is strange right it it looks like it's a window with something open well what we're really looking at is the shadow play and the shadow would end here on the vertical wall but play across the patio floor and we're looking again at the facing the interfacing of that door so the shadow here you have the mark of it but eventually she just leaves behind that and it's up to you to find out what you're looking at there might be a window it might be a door and then when you look at something this abstract it's just so pleasing and then my first time in the patio I was just astonished how specific it is about the stepping stones that are cross in front of the door the size of the door the shadow on patio and so all of these images of that door are similar to her fascination with the paternal so now her view is inward toward the wall so when she was working on this that wall with the door in it was something that would know the door on the wall was something she had to have she continued to paint in the first decade she lived in the house it was the subject of eighteen of her paintings in 1952 she wrote to her dealer Edith Halpert I hope it's my last door you can call the light one my last door but it wasn't her last door she painted twelve more after that one over the next eight years before she gave it up and took up another subject so this is it this I paint what is around and she tells us that and that seems like as a simplification but it's really who she is it's watching it's looking it's absorbing so here is the first map of the house and this is a map from Maria Shabo her assistant who was living in Abiquiu and overseeing the building of the house and she's a character in an ohm right and and helped she was a writer and she helped wealthy people make their dreams come true and she's in lots of biographies different by Agra someday someone will write her biography she's pretty interesting so she stayed and managed the rebuilding of this house so this map was sent to O'Keefe in March of 1946 with the description of how she now has looked at it and figured out how they can rebuild it so this is a similar plan of course there is no plan of the house but Beverly Spears again came and took this over and measured things and this is to scale where this is just cubes and so I'm sorry they're upside down to each other so you're just gonna have to I don't know do something but I tried to make some circles to understand and this is how important this is this is the well this is the well right in the middle of the patio and so that's how important it is it's on that first map so the door that she had to have is the store here and it's here and this was the door to a formal greeting area called a Selita and in Spanish culture this the oldest part of the house dates back to the 18th century so it was a very formal traditional home and you greet people but they don't come into your home they don't come into your domestic spaces so that really wasn't gonna work it was a good-sized space but it wasn't gonna work as a living room so Shabo decided these two rooms if we take out the wall could make a great living room O'Keefe called out her sitting room and that's here and now you can see why here's the dining room and it didn't work quite right because the blocks didn't line up so they just cut a door at an egg see the kitchen so this is the kitchen the dining room and the sitting room and so now there's this lovely domestic space where she could entertain people but this is that foundational idea of that wall and that door but then to just continue to orient you and I'll look at some other will look at the plan again and look at some things but out on the edge of the Mesa was a completely falling down buggy house and pens for horses and Corral's and that's this space here and so Shabo suggest they rebuild that space and that should become will keep studio so what you see here are walls not not walls to a house this is all open these are two patios also so this is the outer area of the house here and the villages right here there are houses all along here she has neighbors from from the driveway door you can see many other houses so she lived right in the middle of the village and still people imagine that she lived alone on a Mesa no not at all she lived in the middle of a village so that's your orientation so if you're good we'll go on from there and I'll show you how she inhabited this house so what's interesting about this is that this is a house that was built to achieve specifications so this is not refurbishing a house built for a family of four so it really reflects all of these needs and so this idea of putting the studio out on the edge of the Mesa was completely shambo's idea and and the letters going back and forth O'Keeffe equivocates it's expensive to put plate glass in there and and so she's she's hesitant she's also hesitant about being on the edge of the cliff so the letters go back and forth and finally she says yes let's let's do that but she immediately bonds to the question would you like your bedroom to have corner windows as your ghost ranch house does the answer to that was yes absolutely so she was quick to take up that offer but this is the gift of it these are pictures of our studio and now with digital photography I can read the titles of the books I'm looking at your curator here it's so wonderful because we can reinvent the house and wonderful ways and you see just as her house was in the ghost ranch she has her supplies out and every artist who looks at these pictures with me such she's so organized so there's nothing that's not in a box so as a curator that's interesting but when I put things in the museum I put brushes out and our charcoal or pastels or watercolors then I want to put things in an angle I don't want a grid of things everything's in a box so trying to figure that out it's like what's going on and then it was an artist he pointed hit the wrong thing again an artist pointed out and she writes on the end of the boxes we were looking at this picture she says look how organized she is and and this will say something like charcoal or paint oil paint but not just any oil paint she'll say a color so she can just slide the box out and everything she wants is right there so she's a very organized very organized artist so Shabo wrote to O'Keeffe following the first plan and the suggestion she says to O'Keeffe I'm not discouraged about your studio the logical thing is plate-glass out there on the cliff edge Georgia none of the other rooms matter they will all close you in but the studio is going to let you out so this is a woman who has lived through all of the changes to that north wall and she knows what O'Keeffe wants and O'Keeffe finally says yes to that and we have an oral history from the man who was living at the time and he had driven that plate-glass up from Espanola which is quite a drive today but that was on a dirt road he said it took him all day to get that plate glass up the hill to Abiquiu and is still the same glass that's the glass that was installed in 1946 so the fun of it is then she writes to a friend she writes a year after she had moved into the house she writes praising the attributes of this new studio I've done over an old house and abiquiu have a huge white studio is so large it's like being outdoors so she completely embraced it and now she says I have redone not my assistant but she owns it so while we're here with these I just want to show you a bit more again this is the north wall here's the picture window here's the east wall of the house and there's her easel and every picture has her easel there and so here is this rebuilding of what she's already tried out at the Ghost Ranch house and this is the door that goes through a bathroom and then into a dressing room and her bedrooms on the opposite side of this wall here so this is a space it's her dream it's completely enclosed the doors can close and nobody else can get in so it's just extraordinary how deliberate she is in making all of this happen but it speaks to her practice of needing to be in a space where she can get up and work or work late I have no idea she left us no record about why the bedroom was important just that it's always adjacent like that so this is actually the window that probably inspired if you think about it this is going in and 46 the other window went in sometime before 1957 so we think when she had this in her studio that was it that was the inspiration to go back to the Ghost Ranch and open that wall one more time and have a picture window there but to return to the idea of the solitude I do this I go away from my notes I've got notes here so I'll remember to tell you everything so this was extraordinarily important now to have the bedroom and her studio together and a door that locks on the outside and the domestic space remember is across that patio so there's nobody who's going to be anywhere near her when they're staying with her and people were always staying with her she she lived alone but that she had many guests so a friend of hers in 1960 describes this situation and she says miss O'Keeffe studios plural so she's clearly been to both miss O'Keeffe studios are forbidden territory a guest who intrudes there is never asked to be a guest again and I found a letter before I found that quote I found a letter from her sister Claudia who was a an annual visitor as she was a younger sister and the letter from O'Keefe to Claudia addresses something that I think is exactly this transgression she doesn't say what but she says if you ever do that again you won't be invited back ever so this is an important part of understanding that she's out on the land and she loves the space but when she's working she's enclosed and she wants the comfort of her bedroom and she wants the expansive view but all in one package so there it is and this is what we get from that view and there are 25 cottonwood paintings and they're not as famous seven of them are in the collection of the Georgia O'Keeffe museum and it's extraordinary because in this is the single color photograph from when she was living there so to look out of that window you can see that line of green trees that's the Chama River so the cottonwoods grow up around the river about and it looks like she's in that on that Plateau but in fact she's out of cliffs edge and it's down in a way there's another picture where you can really see the height and then she can see as far as the Haman's mountains so it's true nowhere else in the house does she have any view at all they all everything looks in on that patio so thank goodness Maria Shabo was there but these paintings also tell the story of a migration between the two houses so I've given the title of cottonwood tree in spring but you can see there are fall cottonwoods more spring cottonwoods and even this winter cottonwood but there are no summer cottonwoods because O'Keeffe was always at both strands during the summer so the summer cottonwoods are not recorded in any painting that we have this is the bedroom now here you can see this corner this is how the corner looks at her Ghost Ranch - so this is what she agreed to right away and from here you can see this is the cliff edge where there's a fence and you can see that that's not far away it's far away and down below and this is her view from this bed looking out this window she looks across at this Mesa so this is her life and again what she sees on a daily basis becomes very important to her so she writes to a friend about this house and the bedroom two walls of my room in the Abiquiu house are glass and from one window I see the road toward Espanola Santa Fe and the world so that's what we're looking at here as we look over that chair so that becomes a series of paintings too so this is her picture on the left and here you can see right away there's the drop off and how the road wines around so the direct view Mesa and Road East the Sun rises right across that Mesa so she's looking directly east there and so that's every morning she sees a sunrise there and she has a door in that bedroom as well so she can be out on the land looking at the color and the changes but it became the road that became interesting to her and from this space this road which winds around here this is a map of that road what it does and so she starts in 1952 in a 1963 this is the last of the series and it's an oil painting and that black calligraphic map of the road just wanders across the flat white space into a complete abstraction and yet it's the exact track of the road at the same time so this is how she works this is how we know her art and how the influence of her house comes to play in that artwork now back to that first picture so as she sits there at the south end of her sitting room she would look back this is what she would see so this is both ends of the house and so when we're looking into that space I've been talking about how she worked in the house how she modified the house for her art practice and and what all that has to do with the construction of the house but she also paid very close attention and and made specific changes in the domestic spaces too they were just as carefully considered by her and sparsely furnished she entertained there and you can't quite make it out I've tried the picture the resolution isn't good enough she has speakers embedded in the wall up here great big speakers speakers see a few baby boomer men here I know you had those speakers they're about this tall about that wide she's got him embedded in the Adobe it's just terrific so this house was for entertaining it was also for her pleasure to sit in this room and listen to music so she says of that space so part sparsely furnished I can't live my life any other way my house in a Baku is pretty empty only what I need is in it so this is exactly how her studio operates and our conservator says of her paintings she only uses as much paint as she needs there's no expressive laying on paint right as soon as she has something that's it she's done so photographs of her house over time gave me another record about something that we heard from people who work for her which is that she displayed her own art in the living room the dining room in the studio and it rotates because she felt as if she left something she would stop seeing it so she would consider different paintings so that's also wonderful to know that her paintings migrate through the house and then out to the galleries and on into the world she also had works of art from other friends including the Calder mobile but she had paintings by John Marin and Marsden Hartley and some few objects from Alfred Stieglitz collection an African mask yeah it's visible here but the the majority of the wall space is taken up by her own works and this is a great opportunity with these two these are painted late in her life and Helen Frankenthaler has taught everybody how to soak canvas with paint without priming it these canvases are primed and there are charcoal drawings under them but look how improvisational they look they look like she just thought of it and painted it so she still has this very careful practice of art of drawing but she understands the world is moving on she's now been living in Santa Fe in sari living in abiquiu a long time but she knows exactly what's going on in New York and so these are the things that she brings to her home the things that she knows from that cosmopolitan life so there was one last picture window and you can see in this picture this is how big a window there is and you know in this climate and an Adobe it keeps you warm in the winter and keeps the heat out in the summer so only a fool would put a picture window in so I can't imagine that if she had one guy who would keep coming back or she had to talk somebody new into it every time because you just would not have seen that now of course with construction materials and different things you see gorgeous adobe houses with these kinds of windows but she was pioneering that form right here so this is the end this is where she's sitting in this Kristopher spring Minh picture and this is her garden so when you were looking out here we're looking into that garden space so it brings more light in and we know again we don't know exactly when this was done but it was done sometime between 1962 we have a picture with with the old window and 62 and the first time the picture window shows up is in 1965 and this is as she's aging and she's not painting as much she's going on those rafting trips I'm serious in 1965 and and so I think it's a move away from spending so much time in the studio that she thinks about having that same kind of light coming inside it also may be a response to her eyesight she had macular degeneration and I think seeing became very important in her living room in this picture in fact you can see it this is a photo lamp it's a really high intensity lamp and she often read here and I think the light was significant as she wasn't going to the studio every day so it was brought into the social spaces this is the furniture she put in her house so I want to call out whose furniture this is because it's significant because this is the continuation of the aesthetic this is the group of artists who brought modern furniture to the United States so starting with the black chair and the upper left Harry but oIA's bird lounge chair from 1952 aerial Saarinen's wound chair from 1946 and I'm giving you these dates because we can see him now that the licenses are still good and I want you to know the years they were designed Charles and Ray Eames molded plywood lounge chairs she had three of those in both colors 1946 an aerial Saarinen's tulip chair and pedestal from nineteen and pedestal table from 1956 so all of this furniture was made between 46 and 56 and it was my heart's desire to find this document this bill of sale that she brought all this when she moved into the house she bought a truckload in the nineteen 1960s and she bought the lot of it for about $1,200 I know isn't that great and when we found the receipt it was exciting and fun and disappointing all at the same time but if your your keeping track again I think it's at the moment that she moves into the house and is there more often so the chairs and and the further furniture because she bought all of it at one time and now of course an ottoman to one of those chairs would cost you $1,200 so so here she is using that furniture and this is the continuation of this photographic project people were still coming to her house photographing her her houses were pictured in Architectural Digest and Look magazine she was well known as an artist but she came to be a kind of icon of the desert and I Wanda even refers to her as the nun of the desert you know the black costume and there there are wonderful humorous painters who paint her as the nun of the desert in Santa Fe to lovingly so I mean it's she's she's beloved in New Mexico there's no question about that so this is what we have this is how we know what we know and these chairs move around there are more those rocks move around and and this is how we know what we know about her house and I have told you when we have record I've shown you a few records you can see this is a project that took time but it was a great experience and I I want to now show you outside of that hard work what else went on in the house it was a lot of fun to be at Georgia O'Keeffe's house yeah and and I think this is the part that comes as a surprise to people and whenever I'm doing interiors of her house I always pull out this kind of photography and we have many photographs of her eating meals this is Toni Vacarro the photographer in the striped t-shirt here he was from Look magazine and he showed up one day unannounced and his assignment was to get a color picture of her look around you'll see it and you'll say oh that's the one Toni took and she's out in front of the Red Cliffs and in front of a red painting and it's a beautiful color picture because most of the pictures of her are black and white so he came to the door said he was from look thought that would be important enough and she didn't want him to come in but he's Tony Vacarro he's Italian and he's from New York and he talked his way in telling her he could make her dinner and and he stayed for five days and and and because of that we have the most beautiful photographs and and he got her doing daily things in the garden and these are young men from the village and I don't know them well enough but one of those young men went to college on acusa philanthropy she funded another young woman and I'm telling you this because it's it's just this image of her people think she lived alone and lived on a mountain no she live have been the middle of lots of activity and and there was a young woman she paid for her to go to college she said but I'm gonna make a deal with you you I'm gonna pay for your college but you have to do something for me and so the woman as an older woman she tells the tale is so beautiful she says you have to write me one letter a year to tell me how school is so this is an extraordinary life that's hardly ever shown Lucille and Tod Webb are having dinner with her here that's Maurice grosser he's an artist on the motorcycle he stayed two summers that Ghost Ranch and clearly she had a good time that that gorgeous young man taking her for a motorcycle ride out into the desert right and and the young woman and the child there are sort of adopted family and they appear in many pictures and people are shocked O'Keefe is holding a baby well of course she's a human being so while that house was designed to support her artistic life and the money to create that change was creative from her artistic practice her house was also filled with joy and visitors and their beautiful stories I'd just people are still giving us oral histories of her entertaining in that house so I want to leave you with that and just one last slide here this is Todd Webb and he was a young protege of Alfred Stieglitz and they became good friends individually after the death of Stieglitz and he had a Guggenheim and came across country one time photographing and he stayed in the house and we have his beautiful letters he writes home to his wife Lucille oh my gosh Georgia has this huge house and then they continue to visit over the years so his photographs so he's a well-known landscape photographer many of you may know his photography but here he is taking snapshots so we're back to that door that's the door right and it's so beautiful that they're playing in that door and in that frame and I think this is an important aspect that I hope you take away not only that she's an abstract painter but she had a sense of humor she had friends she cooked in her house and she played in front of that black door you

Channel: Wichita Art Museum

Views: 95,813

Keywords: Wichita Art Museum, WAM, Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keefe, O'Keeffe, O'Keefe, flower painter, painter, New Mexico, Abiqui, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Carolyn Kastner, Murdock Society, Murdock Mixology, Santa Fe

Id: wb3Do4KrOBk

Length: 81min 54sec (4914 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019