Georgia O'Keeffe is famous in the United States for ... of flowers, bones, and the beauty of nature.

But 40 years after her death, there is very little of her art in European collections, and she is not well known.

Georgia O'Keeffe.

What kind of name is this?

I have never he... Today's the first time!

Yeah.

I'm not really familiar, but I've heard about her paintings and her art.

And I actually do like her flower paintings.

I hadn't really heard about her that much beforehand.

I like how much thought she puts into really basic objects, I guess, in a way, it's kind of playful.

I like the composition of the colors, so many differ colors.

And then getting colors into - like this.

I like it a lot.

I was excited when I heard it's here.

In 1915, she started with the charcoals.

And, I was like, she was so confident at that age.

We are fortunate to have them.

We were talking about the organic forms the round forms, which we both prefer.

It reminds us to be a part of nature.

And I think she lives her heart.

We have a German expression that means “folge deinem Herzen”: “follow your heart.” Probably she did.

There's an energy between me and her, and just the first feeling I got when I look at it, within seconds and I can't really explain it.

But I think that's the truth.

And I felt she felt okay with her life.

It's following your heart, and when you do, you can't fail.

I mean, I think that O'Keeffe, without a doubt, occupies a central place in the history of modernism.

She starts with her own impressions of the world, and she turns that into art.

Her work is generative.

The fact that it continues to generate response.

I think she was really driven, you know.

Passionate about creating her world.

claiming an equal right to the imagination.

It was in her core to be open to difference.

She felt different and she loved it.

She would rather be different and interesting.

Boring was her enemy.

No doubt, but she did something astounding as a female artist in the early part of the 20th century.

O'Keeffe has become almost more important for the symbol that she is than her actual work.

Time will continue to tell what significance her work has visually.

But her example and her life, I think is as relevant and meaningful to artists and the general public now as ever.

Well, I think she was fearless.

I admire her courage, and her willingness to take risks and the willingness to live on a kind of knife edge.

That kind of life required a kind of responsibility and commitment that O'Keeffe exemplified.

And it's very exciting and it's very American.

The degree of vitality and the energy that she captures in her work, which makes us aware of ourselves and of the fluids that run through us, and of the forces that keep us alive.

I think that will always be appealing.

I don't think she ever imagined that she would have achieved what she has achieved and how important she is right now.

Very important right now.

My first memory is of the brightness of light.

Light all around.

I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground.

Very large white pillows.

The quilt was a cotton patchwork of two different kinds of material.

White with very small red stars spotted over it, quite close together, and black with a red and white flower on it.

I was probably 8 or 9 months old.

Years later, I told my mother that I could remember something that I saw before I could walk.

She laughed and said it was impossible.

So I described that scene.

She was much surprised and finally, a bit unwillingly, acknowledged that I must be right.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on the prairie on this farm near the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, on November 15, 1887.

From the time I was a little girl, if my sisters wore their hair braided, I wouldn't wear mine braided.

If they wore ribbons, I wouldn't.

I had a sense of power.

I always had it.

Georgia's mother, Ida Totto, was the reserved daughter of an aristocratic Hungarian immigrant.

She married Frank O'Keeffe, the energetic son of Irish immigrants who lived next door.

The combined properties made up one of the largest and most prosperous farms in the area.

Frank designed the idiosyncratic farmhouse himself.

The O'Keeffe's had seven children, two boys and five girls.

Georgia was the second child and the oldest daughter.

Well, I grew up in farm country, so I'm very conscious of what the earth looks like, what it feels like.

I had a sense of why O'Keeffe needed open space, because if you grow up with it, you never forget that, and other places just feel cramped.

And also this sense of self-reliance and the sense of commitment to a life of hard work and industry.

There was a sense of pleasure and obligation.

Obligation to hard work.

February 8th, 1901, a couple of Sun Prairie farmers pin their laundry on an clothesline.

This is the earliest known drawing by Georgia O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe took drawing lessons from Sister Angelique at a Catholic school in nearby Madison, Wisconsin.

And she sometimes attended her father's Catholic church in Sun Prairie.

But her mother was Episcopalian.

And the family also attended a nearby Congregational church.

Well, I suppose I'm a religious person without a religion.

I grew up in a household where there were three religions.

And there was very little talk about it, but a child knows anyway that there are differences of opinion, and it started me thinking about it when I was very young.

So that I would have been, I could have been made a very good Catholic if they had worked on me a little, but I wasn't worked on.

By the turn of the century, Frank O'Keeffe's father and three brothers had died of tuberculosis.

Blaming the harsh Sun Prairie winters, Frank moved the family to Williamsburg, Virginia, and purchased a 17 room homestead called "Wheatland."

And Georgia, now 15, was sent off to Chatham Episcopal Institute, a boarding school for girls.

You know, it's a school photograph that we have here, and there they are all lined up.

They all have long-sleeved white dresses.

Their hair is pompadour style, way high-rise hair.

The bows are huge.

They look like big birds or butterflies on the girls hair.

And then you finally find Miss O'Keeffe.

And there she is in the most pared-down dress.

Her hair is not at all "pouffed up."

It is pulled back in a plait, a single braid.

And we know from her classmates that she was a very plain dresser.

In fact, one of them left a nice statement.

She said she quickly learned that O'Keeffe was not going to change for anyone.

O'Keeffe created illustrations for the yearbook and watercolors typical of what women painted in those days.

When so few people ever think at all, isn't it all right for me to think for them and get them to do what I want?

I'm going to live a different life from the rest of you girls.

I am going to give up everything for my art.

That fall, she began classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, where human figure drawing was her favorite course.

She ranked first in the class.

In 1907, O'Keeffe continued her studies in New York City at the Art Students League.

This student party featured boys in wigs and dresses, girls in suits and ties.

Georgia's hair had fallen out from typhoid fever, so she wore it short and curly.

She took a class with the famous William Merritt Chase, who gave the award for Best Still Life of the Year to “Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot” by Georgia O'Keeffe.

The prize was $100 and three weeks at an artist's retreat on Lake George in upstate New York.

One night, a boy and I rode across the lake.

He was furious with me because I wanted to let another boy go with us.

He was cross all the way across the lake and crosser still when we found after we finished shopping that our boat was gone and we had to walk back around the end of the lake.

On the way I stood a moment, looking out across the marshes.

In the darkness, it all looked just like I felt - wet and swampy and gloomy.

Very gloomy.

In the morning I painted it.

My memory of it is that it was probably my best painting that summer.

Unfortunately, Georgia gave the painting to a friend and it has been lost.

In school I was taught to paint things as I saw them, but it seemed so stupid.

If one could only reproduce nature and always with less beauty then the original, why paint at all?

I had wanted to be an artist, but now I decided to give it up.

I put away my paints and brushes.

Georgia O'Keeffe did not pick up a brush to paint for the next four years.

I was taught to paint like other people, and I knew that Id never paint as well as the person that I was taught to paint like.

There was no reason why I should attempt to do it any better.

I hadn't been taught any way of my own.

Perhaps there was some truth to this explanation.

But there was another reason why O'Keeffe didn't return to school and continue painting.

Her family had run out of money.

Frank's business efforts, including a real estate partnership and a feed store, had failed.

So he purchased a machine to fabricate bricks from oyster shells.

Georgia and her family moved into a new house built to show off Frank's new construction technology.

But it became known as the ugliest house in Williamsburg, and the business failed.

To make money, Georgia moved to Chicago and worked as an illustrator of ladies clothing advertisements, until a case of the measles forced her to return to Virginia.

On top of the financial problems, her mother, Ida, contracted tuberculosis, the disease they had fled Sun Prairie to avoid.

So the struggling O'Keeffe's left Williamsburg for the higher elevation town of Charlottesville.

They opened a boarding house for students just one block from the University of Virginia.

By the summer of 1912, Georgia was still not painting.

So her sister urged her to sign up for an art class with an eccentric professor named Alon Bement, who taught the radical art-making theories of a man named Arthur Wesley Dow.

She said she was sure I'd be interested, and I said I was sure that I wouldnt, No, she was sure I'd be.

Anyway, I went.

My sisters had persuaded me to visit Bement's class at the University in the summer of 1912.

By this time I had a technique for handling oil and watercolor easily.

Dow gave me something to do with it.

I hadn't been painting for several years, but he had an idea that interested me.

The idea of filling a space in a beautiful way.

Georgia O'Keeffe began, again, to paint.

She filled a loose leaf notebook with watercolors of the buildings and gardens she passed on her way to class.

It was as if someone had opened a door for her.

She calls it the new idea that got me started "arting" again.

And she fell into this like a famished person on a feast, and became immediately caught up in this approach to art, which was very, very gratifying and nurturing for her.

It is this idea that she is going on a voyage of discovery.

She is going to pursue something new.

Arthur Wesley Dow has a very special place for so many young artists and what he wanted them to understand was that there were more ways of making a picture than the old fashioned, realist, illusionistic way.

He had this idea which he gleaned, mostly from the study of Asian art, Japanese prints, for instance, were very important to him.

Calligraphy was very important.

You could look at textiles and patterns.

From textiles, you could look at pottery.

He was much more about design principles.

And she had never heard this notion that really, it's you, the artis and the way you design the picture that creates an aesthetic response in the viewer.

That idea was dividing space and filling it in a beautiful way.

And that art is not description.

It starts from a point of abstraction.

So immediately the student or the artist is given agency and asked to create beauty herself.

And beyond that, she had synthesized it.

She had synthesized it into a practice.

Dow's ideas were not just about art, but about the teaching of art.

They inspired Georgia to pursue a new career, as a high school art teacher, a professional woman on her own in Amarillo, Texas.

Two years later, in 1914, she moved back to New York to strengthen her credentials in classes with Arthur Wesley Dow himself at Columbia Teachers College.

The college was a Progressive Era institution with a commitment to the education of immigrants, the poor, and women.

It was a good fit for Dow's belief that art and beauty were important in the everyday lives of all people.

Alon Bement made a film to promote that idea.

Georgia O'Keeffe, now 27 years old, was seeing art in a new way.

and she was not alone.

The 1913 Armory Show of Modern Art had been wildly popular, as was 291, an art gallery at 29 Avenue owned by Alfred Stieglitz Stieglitz was already revered as one of America's most important photographers and was leading a movement to establish photography as a fine art.

By 1915, the gallery, along with the magazine called 291, was the beating heart of the modern art movement in New York.

Two of 291's biggest fans were Anita Politzer, a vivacious art lover and suffrage activist from Charleston, South Carolina, and her part-Irish girlfriend, whom she called Patsy, Georgia OKeeffe.

For the summer of 1915, Georgia returned to the University of Virginia to teach art as an assistant to Alon Bement.

Dear little Politzer.

So far, the event of the summer has been weekend camping trips, and long walks and a very good friend.

The good friend is professor of political science here.

And he's even very much interested in new art.

A great find.

Dear Pat, your letter was "dreadful nice."

The most exciting thing was about your friend, the professor [unintelligible] Very interesting.

Did you get the Number Four 291 with the Marin cover?

Tell me, because I wrote to Mr.

Stieglitz and asked him to send it to you.

Dear Anita, 291 came and I was so crazy about it that I sent for number two and three.

Anita, I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something than anyone else.

If I ever make anything that satisfies me, I am going to show it to him.

October, 1915: Dear Pat, tomorrow is the suffrage parade.

25,000 women and 10,000 men will march.

It really will be a tremendous affair.

At the end of the summer, O'Keeffe took a teaching job at Columbia College, a small girls' school in South Carolina.

November, 1915: Dear Anita, I'm so glad about something that I'm afraid I'm going to die.

Arthur is coming down to spend Thanksgiving with me.

On the Thanksgiving visit, Arthur rigged up his camera with a string.

to take a 1915 "selfie."

We had a wonderful time.

Anita, today I feel stunned.

And the world looks all new to me.

Then in December, after MacMahon has come down and they've had a rhapsodic lover's four days Thanksgiving visit filled with this kind of energy this emotional turbulence and excitement she addresses her work.

And she pulls out all the work she's been doing for the last few months spreads it all out, recognizes each one as being derivative of somebody elses work, and sweeps them all away.

She's sitting in her studio, darkened room, she darkens the room.

And she's just got charcoal and paper.

And she starts obsessively doing the same motions.

She's kind of building muscle memory, or letting the muscles start dictating what she's doing.

She has this very broad sweep of the arm.

Almost like automatic writing.

And that you can see this kind of physical extention that is laying down shapes on the paper.

December, 1915: Dear Anita.

Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side of the wall wouldn't be big enough to say it on, and then sit down on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?

I've been crawling around on the floor till I've cramps in my feet.

Maybe the fault is with what I'm trying to say.

I don't seem to be able to find words for it.

I hope you love me a little tonight.

She wanted to find a means of expression that was personal to her.

It's about something in her head that's relating to nature, but she imbues it with this physical force of her own passion.

She likened it to a body breathing in and out, and the idea that the movement of the line would be something living and could in fact, engender something in the viewer.

And of course, O'Keeffe, with abstraction, would only know this if she could receive some kind of response from the beholder.

The charcoal drawings were messages.

And so those messages to Arthur have to do about her feeling of love for him.

So they're abstractions, but they come from intense feelings within her.

Over Christmas break, Georgia completed the charcoals.

She rolled up these drawings with this incredibly free and kind of reckless attitude, rolls up the drawings and sends them off to her friend Anita Politzer And Anita, without being asked and without asking permission, takes those drawings to Alfred Stieglitz.

It's quiet, it's holiday.

And she says, there's something I want to show you.

And he says, bring them into the back room.

And she unrolls these drawings, which are so powerful, so beautiful, so highly accomplished.

They were some of the most innovative things in American art at the time, and they overwhelmed Stieglitz when he saw them.

I mean, he was absolutely taken with them.

And he says, "These are the finest, purest, most sincere drawings Ive ever seen.

And you say they're by a woman."

It was something that he thought had the potential of being the realization of his idea of a woman expressing herself, and also of a woman being in a position to create art that was on a par with what men had created.

He really believed, he was really alone among his colleagues at the time in believing that a woman had the potential of doing that.

It's stunning that she could undertake drawings that are so ambitious and so authoritative.

And these are really really the O'Keeffe that we have come to understand is a new voice in American art.

No one has seen work like this before.

There she is.

This is Georgia O'Keeffe.

Early in 1916, Georgia quit the job in South Carolina and went back to New York to continue her studies with Arthur Dow at Columbia.

One of her fellow students told her about a three person show at 291.

I was up at Columbia and one day a girl said to me, "Is your name Virginia O'Keeffe?"

I said, "No, its Georgia.

Well, she said, "Virginia O'Keeffe is having a show of drawings down at Stieglitz's Gallery."

Hmmm, Virginia O'Keeffe, well that must be me.

So I went...I was furious.

I really was incensed that he should hang up my drawings, and I not know anything about it.

Well, we had a little argument and the drawings stayed up.

Why did they stay up?

Listen, you try arguing with him and see where you get.

291 sends you greetings.

Letters released after O'Keeffe's death make it clear that she must have known that Stieglitz was planning to show the charcoals ...I would have written or phoned to tell you why your drawings were not yet up on the walls.

I didn't want them up... But the incident made for a great story and suggested a deeper truth.

...If you put my things up, let me know.

I might like to see them first.

And again, I might not.

I don't know... Georgia would always feel extremely ambivalent about showing her work because she felt it exposed to the public her innermost thoughts and feelings.

Last weekend I climbed another mountain.

I slept on the rocks, just bare rocks that seemed to be the top of the world.

Everyone else went lower down where it would be warm, but I liked it cold, in the wind the rocks so very bare and hard.

And so much sky.

That summer of 1916, Georgia's mother Ida died.

Her father would die two years later.

In the fall, Georgia took a teaching position at West Texas Normal College in Canyon, Texas as head of the art department.

And as the oldest of the girls in the O'Keeffe family, she took responsibility for her youngest sister, Claudia, who joined her in Canyon.

Once O'Keeffe gets to Canyon and she discovers that amazing landscape, Stieglitz is the person that she expresses that joy and that exuberance to.

She talks about the weather.

She says the sunset tonight was extraordinary, because that's her experience.

That's...and he responds on that level.

They're intimate letters.

They're observant letters.

Theyre poetic.

The way that she tells a story in those letters is magical.

So passionate, so exuberant, so unfiltered.

So they are talking to each other as artists.

O'Keeffe did not construct normal sentences, you know, with a subject, verb and object.

She doesn't even use punctuation, rarely.

Its usually what I call... I don't know, it's not a tilde...but it's this swoop.

Her writing is really much more stream of consciousness.

And sometimes she carries that swoop down the page, like hmmm, I don't know what else to say, so I'm just going to draw.

So they really become these amazing objects.

The letters are also works of art.

Sometimes she makes the visual page into something that itself is an image.

Her ability to express herself in a very idiosyncratic way - with, I have to say, often very poor spelling - I think Stieglitz found incredibly, not just charming, but mesmorizing.

And so Stieglitz's letters often became 30 and 40 pages in length And O'Keeffe responded to these letters by saying that, "letters with so much humanness have never come to me before."

So you really see in those letters, you see them falling in love.

I'd like to write you with letters about two feet high.

This morning, blistering cold, I started for the canyon.

It was all rough, but it was great.

And that darned wind and the cold.

It's all so big.

Such big washes, big hills, thick trunks, scrubby cedars, hardy, old, strong, often broken, or the soil all washed from several feet of the roots.

But they don't mind.

They're still green.

I love it, I love it.

I wish I could be with it now.

I want it all.

The reality of it makes me almost crazy.

I feel rough and wild like the wind tonight.

I'd like to take hold of you and handle you rather roughly.

Because I like you.

Inspired by the Panhandle landscape, O'Keeffe began a series of watercolors that were abstract but not quite so non-objective as the South Carolina charcoals.

They're linked to something she's seeing in the world.

And she was inspired by Venus, which in that big open sky is that bright star that follows when the sun goes down, you see it.

But none of the paintings look like what she was seeing.

It's how she felt about that.

And then she plays through these gem-like watercolors.

And it's this almost like a spiral.

So I think somehow she got on that kind of spiral form.

And then you find these wonderful blossoms, plumes of watercolors.

One of them looks like a heart in this, its... oh my gosh, they're just magical to discover.

But that was one of her first, like, ongoing series of something that you can't find in the world.

You can't go so it.

But it was linked.

It was a feeling of the way the sky moved or looked or did something.

But it's definitely related to the plains, the big sky, and that star.

Last night I loved the starlight, the dark, the wind, and the miles and miles of the thin strip of dark that is land.

It was wonderfully big and dark and starlight and night moving.

It is tremendously free.

I wish you had been by me.

In early April of 1917, Georgia O'Keeffe's first one woman show opened at 291.

And her first artwork was sold - a charcoal called Train at Night in the Desert for $400.

In late May, the show closed and Stieglitz took the paintings down.

But just a day or two later, Stieglitz happily rehung the entire show.

because Georgia, without telling Alfred, had taken the train from Texas and showed up at 291.

Thrilled to see her, Stieglitz photographed O'Keeffe posed in front of her paintings.

Back in Canyon, Georgia shared a room in a house with her sister, Claudia.

The photos are so interesting.

You have to understand that this is a craftsman house and they would open up the dormer windows and go out on the roof all the time, doing snapshots of each other.

Oh, and the pockets.

Okay, so that's another thing.

She writes about how several young men, who were students at the college, were fascinated with the fact that she sewed pockets into her own dresses.

They're practical.

Like, you put stuff in there, you put your art tools, whatever But no, no, their mothers didn't have pockets.

So one of them asked, can I feel your pockets?

You know, and then she writes to Stieglitz, "He sounded the depths of my pockets."

Just the boldness and the sexiness of these letters.

My head has ached all day.

Didn't go to dinner or supper.

This afternoon, I've worked.

I wish you were here.

I'd like to show you right now.

You would laugh at my room, perfectly bare, floor and all.

You would laugh, too, at what I've been doing.

I don't know whether to tell you or not.

I couldn't get what I wanted any other way, so I've been painting myself.

No clothes.

Today I wanted to paint nakedness.

It makes me laugh.

I had such a good time, headache and all.

And when I tell you about it, I feel like such a funny little girl.

I want you to take me in your arms and let me hide my face down in a corner somewhere.

I don't know that they feel any more like nakedness than a landscape I've been working on does.

There seem to be wheels in my head.

I see and think of so many things.

Generally they're pink.

And I think she talks at length about her body as pink, but then also the landscape pink, redness and pinkness being something that she felt had like passion and life to it.

Tonight I'd like to paint the world with a broom, and I think I'd like great buckets of color, lots of red, vermillion and I don't want to be careful of the floor.

I just want to splash.

I had an older brother who was always read to about the West, and I always had to listen.

So I was read to about Texas, and this part of the world.

And when I had a chance to come out here, I went to the Panhandle and I liked the Panhandle very much.

It was like the ocean, only it was land.

There just were no trees.

It was just wide, wide country.

She lived in a lot of different spaces, but she would always find something that inspired her in each one.

What did she discover in West Texas or in the Panhandle?

And it was the American West.

I really think that that is the thing that she then returned to in New Mexico.

But yeah, she fell in love with the West in Texas.

In February of 1918, O'Keeffe came down with a serious case of the flu.

and took leave from her position at the University.

Stieglitz urged her to come to New York, promising a place to stay in his niece's apartment and financial financial support so that she could paint full time.

She arrived on June 9th, 1918.

Georgia was 30 years old.

Alfred was 54 and married.

Immediately he began taking a series of remarkable photographs.

I see half open lips, a glimpse of tiny teeth peeping through them, the arches of those lips subtly expressive of beauteous desire.

I see arms and hands stretched out into the skies.

Seeking to hold all of love.

Firmly.

Passionately.

Wildly.

Ecstatically.

Deliriously.

I see breasts awaiting, a throat, too, and neck.

I see eyes hardly open.

Soft, firm lids closing wondrous eyes, and brows made to stroke.

Silken hair, dark and wild.

Pulled back from the forehead.

A face so strong.

So soft.

It was in the summer of 1918 that Stieglitz really started to photograph O'Keeffe, to explore this idea of a portrait that would extend over a long period of time that would depict, as he once said, all the many selves that a person has.

And they start off to be sort of quite traditional pictures of O'Keeffe fully clothed, often posed in front of her own artwork.

But very quickly they become much more intimate.

And Stieglitz starts making just an extraordinary series of nude photographs of O'Keeffe, unlike anything, really, that had ever been done in the history of photography.

Not just capturing pictures of O'Keeffe's head, but other parts of her body to push the understanding of what a portrait could be.

Once Stieglitz moved out of the house that he shared with Emmy in New York and he moved into the studio with O'Keeffe, they were apparently sharing a bed, but with a curtain literally down the middle of it, because the studio was a very small space.

So the erotic tension in those letters is really high.

I've been lying here listening for you in the dark, wanting you with such an all over ache, feeling all the parts of my body touched and kissed.

Conscious of you.

A volcano is nothing to it.

No words I know say the hotness, consuming-ness of it.

Feeling it growing.

I seem to feel that the moment will come when I can't control myself.

When I'll be blind and mad.

You will have to think for me when I cannot think for myself.

The woman you are making seems to have gone far beyond me.

New York City, June 14th.

We know the absolute date when O'Keeffe, as Stieglitz said, “lost her virginity,” which wasn't until August of 1918.

The most intense, the most intimate, the most erotic portraits are made before "virginity day," when Stieglitz and O'Keeffe are living together but they haven't yet consummated their relationship.

Once in New York, O'Keeffe began to paint more in oil, but she continued to pursue abstraction, reading the words of artist and theorist Wassily Kandinsky.

A painter who finds no satisfaction in mere representation in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music achieves this end.

I think she almost felt instinctively, and that is music was a great solace to her.

She listened to music a lot, because music and art speak a universal language, and to be able to connect an emotion with a specific color and to be able to express an emotion through color.

So I think it was a component of late 19th, early 20th century thinking that crystallized in Kandinsky's writings and something that greatly appealed to her.

She's one of the very, very small number of people on the planet who are embracing abstraction, pure abstraction.

O'Keeffe is in the first generation of abstract artists, and she does that in the early teens, not living in Paris, not living in New York, but in places like South Carolina and Virginia and Texas.

Every painting becomes a portrait.

It's a portrait of an experience.

It's a portrait of a person.

It's a portrait of a sensation.

She actually labeled some watercolors as portraits.

There are these early watercolors of Paul Strand, which she calls portraits.

I can't see that portrait.

So these are portraits.

I think it's impossible for us to recover, for the most part, what they're portraits of.

But I don't think O'Keeffe cares that much.

In creating the work, it's out there.

She's spoken.

She's done her job.

In 1921, Stieglitz presented a large retrospective of his photographs, including many of the O'Keeffe nudes, giving a great boost to his career.

But the effect on O'Keeffe, even though she had posed willing, was problematic.

In 1923, her exhibit of 100 paintings opened and included several abstractions that were wide open to interpretation, The show attracted lots of talk and huge crowds because Georgia was already famous as Alfred's model and girlfriend.

Certainly showing nude photographs of her before her work was widely known is a very problematic situation.

If she was perfectly comfortable with it, if she was shocked by it, I dont know.

But she must have been shocked by the response.

O'Keeffe painted this horizontal view of reflections in Lake George but for the 1923 show it was hung prominently as a vertical.

Her art is gloriously female.

Her great, painful and ecstatic climaxes make us at last to know something the man has always wanted to know.

These are a woman's great and painful and terrible orgasms.

And you think, oh my God!

So it is, it's the men having a field day looking at womens art.

And men's art through the centuries is full of phallic objects and phallic imagery, and it's considered normal.

As soon as a woman paints things that are not phallic, that are rounded and refer to women's forms, everyone has to talk about the sexual nature of it.

And also Freud was very much a part of the ruling Zeitgeist.

And it was all sex.

Sex was everywhere.

She was the naked artist.

And you can't look at her own work without having the knowledge of what her body looks like.

And that's really unfair to do to an artist.

In the wake of the controversy, Georgia was physically ill.

Tormented by the sexual interpretation of her abstract art, she chose for the future a more realistic approach.

And made sure that the nude photos would not be shown.

But the most troubling aspect of all of this was that the loudest voice pushing the Freudian interpreation of her work was that of her lover, Alfred Stieglitz.

In 1920, the 19th amendment, giving women the vote had passed in congress and was ratified by a single vote in the Tennessee legislature.

The man who cast the deciding vote was lobbied at the last minute by Georgia's friend, Anita Politzer.

Both Anita and Georgia were members of the National Womans Party.

Anita was one of the leaders and Georgia was a speaker at one of their dinners.

I always resented being told there are things I cannot do because I am a woman.

Georgia O'Keeffe was never a political activist like Anita, but she embodied the feminist values of self-expression and professional achievement.

The quirky kid from the Midwest found a new identity in New York as a modern artist and a modern woman.

In the 1920s, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz split their year between various apartments in New York City and the Stieglitz family house at Lake George in upstate New York.

Much of Georgia's art making, including the subjects and the work of painting them, was associated with Lake George.

I think they were very happy there, certainly in the beginning, she writes in 1919, I think it says, "We are very happy here.

I was never so happy in my life."

And surprisingly enough, Hedvig, the mother of the Stieglitz clan is not at all bothered by the fact that he's bringing this young woman to the family compound.

And his wife is in New York, and daughter, too!

His family was very large.

It was very volatile, much more urban then hers.

There was no sense of we must dig the garden, we must plant the field.

It was kind of, what should we do today?

Let's argue.

It's just a very different atmosphere.

But one of the most powerful elements of her character was the fact that she took responsibility for being happy herself.

So she finds a shed that she takes over.it.

She roofs it.

They were putting shingles on the roof so that she could work in there.

And she used the shanty I think mostly in the summer months when the family was there.

That's when she sought refuge.

I work better alone.

People disturb me very much.

I'm like a muddy puddle when there are a lot of people around And if I'm alone, the puddle comes clear.

I know more of what I want to do.

But I can't, I can't work unless I'm alone.

That's her typical approach to things.

She sees this crumbling little shack and she says, that's my studio.

And Stieglitz says, I'll move in with you.

No.

No!

You have to go get your own shack.

And he does.

So then he has his own photographic studio.

She has her place and then she has nature all around her.

Now, she has got to be a much happier person when she has nature all around her.

Both of them are immensely productive, feeding on, responding to each other and to each other's art.

I can imagine them coming in at the end of the day, and he's showing her what he's done, and she shows him what shes done.

It would be very, very exciting for both of them.

A stream of friends visited O'Keeffe and Stieglitz at the lake, including writer Waldo Frank, photographer Paul Strand, artist Beck Strand, and Georgia's sister, Ida O'Keeffe.

There's this real joy that permeates their time at Lake George in the early 1920s.

There's this sense of playfulness.

I once referred to it as the Lake George Dada moment.

I mean, because there's this sort of silliness that comes out in Stieglitz's pictures from that time that just shows what an extraordinary moment it was for both of them.

Donald Davidson appears in another photograph.

I think she and Davidson were kindred spirits.

They shared an interest in gardening.

So you see her working alongside Donald Davidson, pruning the apple trees and then what happens after they prune them in 1920?

Abundant harvests of apples.

So apples become the subject of 25 canvases.

And she finds subjects in that landscape that draw out some of her best work.

The jack-in-the-pulpit series.

Those are wonderful paintings, very, very powerful, very important for her.

And in a series of paintings, she usually worked from one component of an image to another such as the jack-in-the-pulpit series, where she moves from a very specific rendering of the image to something that's highly abstract and a very, very simple curving form.

The corn that we know she grew on the Stieglitz property.

The leaf pictures.

And the lake itself.

So her years at Lake George, she produces about 200 paintings.

And I think for O'Keeffe, it was about coming to terms with a place and making it her own.

It's not a landscape that gave her the sense of freedom that the west did.

But it was a natural landscape, and she always responded to natural landscapes.

She liked hiking, she liked rowing.

What is giving her that experience is the way a light is entering into a space.

or the way she hears the sound of water.

She apprehends it through her body, through her senses.

So these pictures are meant to do something, to ignite something.

And she loved the lake.

She loved the lake because the lake held light.

So what are we getting, thinking about Lake George?

Finding where the land meets the water.

Seeing the mountain against the sky.

The way in which weather could shift that view.

So that shimmering, radiant presence was a big part of that place for her.

Trees grew in abundance on the Stieglitz property, and some of the trees were landmarks, especially the old chestnut tree, which in the 1920s was dying because of the chestnut blight.

And you do see Stieglitz photographing trees in the light of specific people.

He talks quite at length about the chestnut tree as an image of his father an image of decay, and so on.

The chestnut tree, which she does, and he does almost the same image.

So, already you have Georgia O'Keeffe saying, this is the way I see that tree.

It's surrounded by radiant light and color.

And he says, it's black and white.

This is a black and white image.

One of the differences is O'Keeffe sees trees always as energy.

and she uses trees not as these signs of age or resistance, but as active, strong forces within her paintings.

If only people were trees, I might like them better.

O'Keeffe often encoded the presence of people into the paingting.

So this beautiful forest scene from Lake George.

That one was about Jean Toomer.

Jean Toomer, of course, is the famous author of “Cane.” Toomer was of mixed race and his “Cane”, published in 1923, is considered the first great book of the Harlem Renaissance.

Toomer's book made his career, and yet he was struggling.

So what she's remembering in that painting is about the fact that his writing has become more spiritually inclined.

So this is really a whole quest.

He has an out-of-body experience once for two weeks.

So Jean Toomer is somebody she's noticing.

The tree motif is something that stays with O'Keeffe, both from Lake George and New Mexico.

It's one of the few motifs that survives that transition.

But then I realized that she is compared to a tree.

Waldo Frank wrote a piece about O'Keeffe for The New Yorker.

So he says, "O'Keeffe is very like a tree.

When a tree thinks, it thinks not with a brain, but with every part of it.

So O'Keeffe.

If a tree speaks or smiles, it is with all its body.

So O'Keeffe, whose paintings are about the leaves and flowers of herself.

Now, one of the things about that quote, it is fundamentally gendered language.

She doesn't think, she simply feels, which is not true of OKeeffe.

But the truth of that statement is that O'Keeffe is planted like a tree.

She's strong like a tree.

She even moves like a tree.

She's responding to the wind.

And, you know, and in a funny kind of way, you listen to trees and you hear them as the wind blows through them.

And that's in a sense a wonderful metaphor for O'Keeffe's translation of her inner experience into a painting is the wind blowing through her.

And then we hear her.

In the fall of 1924, Stieglitz's divorce was finalized.

And on December 11th, he and O'Keeffe were married by a Justice of the Peace in New Jersey.

There was no reception.

Returning to the Manhattan ferry, the automobile carrying the newlyweds crashed into a telephone pole.

And O'Keeffe remarked that she felt like she had lost a leg, but it wasn't because of the accident, it was because of becoming married.

She really didn't want to get married.

She loved her independence.

It was his insistence that they marry.

She never took his name.

The one aspect of a traditional marriage that might have appealed to OKeeffe, was the prospect of having children, and it's likely that she expressed that interest to Stieglitz.

She was a young woman in her early 30s, a time when a lot of women feel a strong desire to have children and Stieglitz was very much against it.

For two reasons, or maybe more than two reasons.

One was that he felt that it would dilute her progress as an artist that she really had great talent, and it would really divert her from something very important.

And secondly he'd had a bad experience of his own with his own daughter who had become alienated from him when he took up with OKeeffe And then after she had a child, she experienced postpartum depression and never got over it.

Was institutionalized for the rest of her life.

So he was terrified of O'Keeffe having a child and very much against it.

And so she didn't.

Several times in the 1920s, O'Keeffe traveled without Stieglitz to York Beach, Maine.

I just went to York Beach this summer.

And then realizing how the ocean looked at that place.

The crashing of the waves and the sounds of the water, and the extent of the sand and she must have really enjoyed that.

Even though it is low tide the beach is perfectly shiny and smooth and clean looking and there is a wonderful sea rolling in - great long white waves breaking through.

I walked up the beach for about two miles and a half towards a lighthouse.

And suddenly the light seemed so queer.

There was something terrifying about it.

And I realized that part of the booming noise was thunder.

I began hurrying home, walking into a most wonderful purplish, gray-yellow, gray-pink storm cloud with lightning streaking through it.

It was marvelous.

The beach gave Georgia time to paint, and a feeling she could only experience if she was away from Alfred.

A feeling of quiet, of being a whole person all by myself that I seem to rather like.

I seem to be only a very small fraction of a person when you are around and I believe I like to be a whole one all by myself.

By contrast, in May of 1923, Georgia wrote to Alfred from the beach, I am on my back, wanting to be spread wide apart, waiting for you.

the kisses, the hotness, the wetness, all melting together.

The being held so tight that it hurts.

The strangle and struggle.

The release that moans and groans and the quickly drawn breath.

The reaching of something in the whole body for the center of heaven.

1918 to the late 20s, it was a very good and very active sex life.

And it was one of the things that I think kept them so close.

By the mid-1920s, Georgia and Alfred were the “it" couple of the New York art scene.

He was famous for wearing a black cape.

Now, she wore a matching cape.

Over the next two decades, Stieglitz would present an O'Keeffe exhibition every year.

When the Great Depression struck America, the income from O'Keeffe's paintings supported Stieglitz, the outrageous impresario who disdained the commercialization of art.

Georgia O'Keeffe was, by today's standards, a millionaire.

In 1925, Stieglitz presented a group show featuring the seven modern artists known as the Stieglitz Circle.

They included: Arthur Dove Marsden Hartley John Marin Charles Demuth Paul Strand Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe.

In his review of the show, the critic Edmund Wilson observed that O'Keeffe outblazes the men in part, because of her new, shocking interpretation of an old, familiar subject: flowers.

In 1924, she planted beds of petunias and they became the subject of her first enlarged flower painting, Petunia Number Two.

She enlarged the figures because Stieglitz, of course, is enlarging images when he prints his photographs of her.

O'Keeffe is very intently looking at Stieglitzs photographs, looking at Strand's photographs, figuring out what she can borrow from the language of photography and incorporating it into her own work.

So she gets the idea of enlarging and she'll always say, just to make people look at the flower.

I thought I'll make them like the huge buildings going up.

People will be startled.

They'll have to look at them.

I dont think photography had a thing to do with it.

Painting flowers for her is also a way of telling her audience that the abstractions are not about this psycho-analytic interpretation that everybody has to read something into it.

Her work is often about the reproductive organs of flowers, and so it's hard not to see those as having a sexual presence.

We have the bee's-eye view, right into the center.

And this again will start to shock people because - hunhhh - it's not about the flower, it's about, you know, women's erotic feelings!

So I always feel uncomfortable reading comments that say O'Keeffe was painting sexual organs.

I don't think that's what she was intending.

That being said.

She is a sensualist.

So she doesn't segregate sex out as a separate thing from her general sensual field of experience.

As Gaston Bachelard says, “every rounded form invites a caress.” That's different from saying all of these images are of genitalia.

O'Keeffe was very conscious of occupying a singular position as a woman in the male-dominated art world.

She did not want to be prohibited from doing what excited her.

And to claim that she has an equal right, as a woman, to play around with this, just like what she would say, “the men” were doing.

Right?

And, you know, think about it.

Men have been playing with sexuality for eons, right?

Why shouldn't she be able to do it?

I like to paint what I see and make it look as it feels to me.

And that is more than what you see.

Cause you can make it feel small or make it feel big.

I like to make it feel big.

Stieglitz called his 1925 show “The Seven Americans” to promote the notion that their art was uniquely American.

Artists at that particular moment were convinced that it was possible that you could create a modern painting that you would know was done by an American.

Because there was a deep concern that American art was basically second rate European art.

And that all we were doing, perhaps, was creating a lot of little Picasso's and Matisse's running around.

When you look at a Marin, you sometimes think Picasso.

With O'Keeffe, you really think about O'Keeffe.

The thing that makes her most distinctively an American artist is that she develops her work free of European influence.

Europeans are in a place, one place.

Americans move from place to place, America is about motion.

So the fact that O'Keeffe moves from place to place, not just the places, it's the fact that she moves, is part of her Americanness.

The other part of her Americanness is that she finds her strength in herself.

She doesn't find her strength in her community.

And she certainly is part of a community, but she finds her strength in herself.

And that's one thing that the critics always noticed.

What she's creating wasn't there before.

When you look at her painting, she's added something new to how we see.

The men would quarrel and quibble about the "Great American Thing,” the paintings, the poems, the great novels they were going to write, the great plays they were going to write.

All these great American things they were going to do.

But I thought they didn't really know much about America, because they hardly ever went across the Hudson, if they went at all.

And I'd been clear across the country many times.

And I knew pretty much what it was about.

I knew it was pretty rich and pretty fine.

O'Keeffe talks about it.

She says, I think I've given this country something of its own, done something for this country that no one has done before.

And she may not use the word “invention,” but it is her artistic invention that she is referring to.

And I think the idea of it being American is connected to the idea of invention.

The American artist invents.

The American invents.

These inventions - Edison's light bulb.

I would say O'Keeffe brought the idea of of this new communication of light and color to American audiences and to the world.

She is the Edison of art!

"Manhatta" was a landmark documentary film, co-directed by photographer Paul Strand, that celebrated the vibrancy of New York City in the 1920s - a compelling subject, also, for writers and artists.

The question of her generation is, “Who will paint New York?” John Marin, right away, had set a tone, the busy-ness of commerce and energy was something a man might very well take on.

And O'Keeffe is not going to leave herself out of that conversation And Stieglitz said to her, “Better to stick with the flowers.” She's going to want to not only achieve but to exceed her peers.

So the first of these is called “New York with Moon.” She wanted to show it in the 1925 Seven Americans show and Stieglitz wouldn't let her do it.

And he did hang a Marin instead as the entryway to the gallery.

This made O'Keeffe furious.

And she sells that painting, by the way.

So then Stieglitz says, “Oh, well yeah, I guess maybe the architecture of New York and a woman doing it is not such a terrible idea after all.” So she is not going to retreat from the question - “who is going to paint New York?

She is gonna paint New York.

So where does she live?

She lives in a skyscraper.

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived in the brand new Shelton Hotel, just below the squash courts, in this corner apartment on the 30th floor, the highest floor in the tallest residential building in the world.

It gave Stieglitz views uptown to the north and east toward the river.

The Shelton was marketed as a luxurious “club hotel,” with an open-air terrace high above the city, and a swimming pool in the basement.

Great things that any woman will respond to about their life at The Shelton is she didn't have to cook.

I'm serious!

There was a dining room there.

So Stieglitz could invite anybody to come back and have dinner with him.

And she could work in her studio all day long without thinking, “Oh, I have to go out and get onions.” From her studio, you get a sense of soaring in those aerial views.

looking out and over the river.

The windows themselves cutting the space.

Now think of the New York street.

Think about her holding her head back, looking up.

And she's going to see these tall buildings cut the sky.

And make a kind of chevron shape.

It's a kind of dizzying experience in those canyons of skyscrapers.

She's not describing a certain neighborhood.

You don't get people on the street.

What you have is space.

Another great painting is the Radiator Building, in which she literally puts Alfred Stieglitz's name in lights.

Its so charming that she's saying, “Alfred Stieglitz lights up New York CIty.” The same year that Georgia presented the Radiator Building tribute to her husband, 1927, Stieglitz was introduced to a young woman at his gallery named Dorothy Norman, who had recently delivered her first child.

The 63-year-old man touched the breast of the 22-year-old woman, asking if she had sufficient milk for the baby.

Dorothy Norman enters the gallery wide-eyed.

She's a rich, beautiful younger woman.

Who wants to learn more about art.

Throws herself at his feet, says I can volunteer, I can come work at your gallery.

And Stieglitz is very, very drawn to her and... He's like a sitting duck for the enchantment of a beautiful young woman with big brown eyes, who looks at him adoringly, hangs on his every word Who is going to come in and be in O'Keeffe's husbands workspace.

Stieglitz starts photographing her in bed.

And he thinks he's young all over again, just like he thought he was young when O'Keeffe became the woman that he so adored.

O'Keeffe is humiliated professionally, publicly, sexually.

She didn't feel she had a place to go anymore.

And then she needed another life for herself.

What was she going to do?

In 1929, an emotionally spent O'Keeffe accepted an invitation to spend the summer with Mabel Dodge, once the doyenne of the Greenwich Village arts scene, who now reigned over a similar scene in Taos, New Mexico.

Mabel married Tony Luhan, a Tewa man from the Taos pueblo.

The visiting glitterati included Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Leopold Stokowski, and Willa Cather.

And, in the spring of 1929, Paul Strand's wife Beck Strand arriving with Georgia O'Keeffe.

New Mexico, May 2, 1929 Dearest: This really isn't like anything you ever saw.

That feeling that I had the first year I was West — it is just the same again.

Only maybe I enjoy it even more because I think I understand it a little better.

Well, it is all like an unimaginable dream.

The drive up here — seventy-five miles — was wonderful.

We are to have a house, and I a grand studio besides.

The most beautiful mountain out the big window.

As I write the room filled up with people all talking.

It is bedtime and I am not a bit sleepy.

I'll go to bed in a little, and kiss you goodnight.

It all seems so unbelievable.

May 20 Yesterday morning I was in the studio all morning — a pastel - very silly.

May 22 Things go on in me that are rather difficult to tell about - a curious sort of rearranging myself.

I sometimes wonder what our being apart will do to us.

May 29 I was up and at it before eight again this morning painting the back of an old church.

It is the queerest shape you ever saw.

I feel full to bursting for work, and I feel it is going to be good.

At any rate I enjoy it.

May 30 I was up at 6:30 this morning.

I had breakfast at seven and then started across the sage brush to look at the early morning light on the cross.

The walking was so good.

The mountains and the scrubby cedar were so rich and warm colored, they seemed to come right up to me and touch my skin.

It all has a glitter — the whole landscape.

I seem to be hunting for something of myself out there.

Something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this.

A symbol for the sense of life I get out here.

I wonder if you would like me here.

I don't know.

July 2 I must tell you something else I have done that I havent mentioned to you before.

Tony took me on the back road and proceeded to teach me to drive Mabels Ford.

It is something I wanted to do.

And now I have done it.

July 6 We got in late last night after a wonderful day.

Those Indians with their drums, like a heartbeat from the center of the earth.

And sometimes they sing wonderful things.

Their presence something very alert and silent.

It was a very beautiful day.

July 6 You said that I no longer cared for you.

You had grown older and I cared for younger ones.

Georgia, Georgia, have you any idea how cruel these remarks?

The fact is you really do not need me anymore.

Do you know this is the first time in thirty-seven years that I have not a woman near me to care a bit for me.

July 9, 1929 I chose coming away because here at least I feel good.

And it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside and very still.

Maybe you will not love me for it, but for me it seems to be the best thing I can do for you.

I have not wanted to be anything but kind to you.

But there is nothing to be kind to you if I cannot be me.

And me is something that reaches very far out into the world and all around And kisses you.

A very warm, cool, loving kiss.

Among the artists who visited Mabel was the author D.H.

Lawrence and his wife, Frieda.

They lived at Kiowa Ranch in the mountains north of Taos.

But by 1929, when O'Keeffe arrived, they had left for Mexico.

July 29, Kiowa Ranch We brought up a tent and sleeping bags.

You would have laughed to see the procession climbing the hill.

We slept up there by the big pine tree.

A stormy sky.

Then the moon and stars.

I am glad we came up.

It has been so quiet.

And the painting is such a queer one.

It sort of knocks my own head off.

Like most of the thought involved in all these art movements, and the reason people are into the esoteric, is because theyre looking to transcend.

They're trying to get beyond their little hang-ups and imbibe the biggest picture they can.

And so D.H.

Lawrence seemed to have that.

He's really, I guess, a transcendentalist, I guess you could call it nature mysticism.

But O'Keeffe is certainly looking to Lawrence for his way of rising up out of the everyday and getting into touch with the oneness of everything.

And that not just being a label, but actually experiencing it.

And you see that really clearly in the Lawrence Tree, meditating on this tree a la Lawrence, because it's a practice.

She lies at the bottom of the the tree and looks up.

And that painting is an amazing rush.

You know, you just rise right out of yourself.

And so you can feel that this is what she got out of Lawrence.

We can look at that painting and we can also explode out of our everyday separateness and go right up into the sky, right into the cosmos, into the beyond.

After her visit in 1929, Georgia returned here almost every year, dividing her time between New York and New Mexico, between Alfred's needs and her own.

When I was out here in ‘29, I drove around through the country [unintelligible] There were practically no flowers because it was midsummer.

And when I had to go home in the fall, I thought to myself, Well what can I take home that I can keep on working with?

Because it was this country that I wanted to paint.

And I had picked up a lot of bones in driving around and I thought well I'll take those bones home with me and I can keep on painting bones.

And I took home a barrel of bones to Lake George.

And I really started painting the bones up there because I still wanted to be painting this country and I was at Lake George.

So I started painting the bones to paint this country.

And first I painted the horse's head.

And then I got the cow's head.

And I had the cow's head painted against the blue.

And I thought, well I had to do something else about that.

So I thought I'll make my picture a red, white and blue.

I'll make it an American painting.

I put a red stripe down either side.

Entertained me but I don't think anybody else caught on to it for quite a while.

The skulls and antlers would become some of O'Keeffe's most famous paintings.

The bones do not symbolize death to me.

They are shapes that I enjoy.

Never occurs to me that they have anything to do with death.

They're very lively.

In 1932, Stieglitz obsessively photographed the construction of a new building, Radio City Music Hall, rising in mid-town Manhattan.

O'Keeffe was also following its progress, nervously, because the construction was behind schedule and she had agreed to paint a mural of gigantic flowers in the ladies lounge.

Georgia had signed the contract without consulting Alfred.

Stieglitz is furious at her because now she is betraying him.

He says I am your dealer, all these things must go through me.

And shes saying, I am the artist, this is a commission that I am asked for, I choose to do it, and you are not in a position to tell me I'm not.

So she agrees to do it and it's going to be huge floating flowers.

The construction of the building falls behind, which is always the case.

So O'Keeffe keeps being told that the building is not ready yet, its not ready yet.

And finally the day it's ready, she goes in to start work and the canvas is peeling off the wall in one corner.

So she can't start then either.

And this is kind of the last straw for her.

So she does go into a psychological spiral.

She has hallucinations.

She thinks when she goes out on the street that the buildings are going to collapse on top of her.

She has a fear of water.

And when she's in the hospital, her response when Stieglitz comes in is so powerful that the doctors forbid him from visiting.

So it is clearly related to Stieglitz and it manifests itself in physical terms, So it's extremely serious.

O'Keeffe was in the hospital for seven weeks with a diagnosis of psychoneurosis.

what today might be described as a nervous breakdown.

By December of 1933, she was alone at Lake George.

She had painted nothing in more than a year.

But then, an old friend, who also needed to heal, came to visit.

She invites Jean Toomer to come up and stay with her at Lake George.

And they're there during the winter.

The lake is all white.

She doesn't leave the house for days and days.

She's just in this tightly protected shell.

And you have a sense of this wounded creature, who is trying to recover her own beating heart, and the functioning of her life.

Toomer lost his wife only a couple of years before.

So he can connect with her on the level of, we both are trying our best to cope with life, and the terrible things that life has brought to us.

He definitely had a spiritual quality and I think that was part of the comfort, that feeling of calm, sort of inner strength.

Clearly he's got some way that he connects with her.

We have to keep in mind that Toomer was a psychologist and a therapist.

And Toomer is a very quiet, self-sufficient person.

I knew him, actually, and he was a very sort of quiet but powerful presence.

He was a ladies man.

He was exceptionally good-looking.

So the assumption is that when Toomer and O'Keeffe are together, there's no doubt that there's going to be some kind of romantic involvement.

But they didn't really get involved, let's say, consummation.

But there was obviously some kind of extreme closeness.

We talked long last night.

And we ended the evening between 11 and 12 with his digging out the jazz records.

It was very funny.

You know I originally asked him for two weeks, but everything seems to go very well so I asked him yesterday to stay longer if he wants to.

We're going to have roast beef for dinner.

It smells good.

And early January, Toomer leaves.

And she starts writing letters to Jean.

And she reminisces that he's wearing a red scarf around his neck and she loves the thought that he's wearing a red scarf that she gave him around the Christmas holidays or whatever.

And that she thinks he may have brought her back to being more like herself.

And she makes a first drawing around January 4th or so.

But they are talking about things that are really - ways of trying to heal.

In 1934, after nearly three years away, O'Keeffe returned to northern New Mexico and discovered a dramatic landscape near the town of Abiquiu.

In 1936, she rented an adobe house there.

And in 1940, she bought that house, located at a remote dude ranch called Ghost Ranch.

I have bought this house - paid $3,000 for it.

I would rather come here than any place I know.

It is a way for me to live very comfortably at the tail end of the earth, so far away that hardly anyone will ever come to see me and I like it.

I fixed a room for myself — put in a big window so it is very light, It's the most wonderful place you can imagine.

It's so beautiful, it's ridiculous.

You have finally achieved a dream of yours — maybe your chief dream.

A dream you have had ever since I have known you.

You have a house you can call your own.

I feel more or less like a reed blown about by the winds of my habits.

my affections, the things that I am.

Moving it seems, more and more toward a kind of aloneness.

Not because I wish it but because there seems no other way.

So here are these beautiful forms that the earth is taking and she is reveling in that and saying, look what we're given.

Look what the landscape presents to us.

That sense of bare earth, which does suggest a connection to a human form.

She encourages you to think of that connection between earth and the body.

Which is very exciting and mysterious.

It's mysterious but you connect to it.

You have this intuitive feeling that you know why she's done this, you know what this connection is.

So on every level, this was a place that was home for OKeeffe.

As a farmer's daughter, as a painter, this was a place for her.

And in 1940 I bought this house that I live in, though I'd lived in it two or three years before, But I had to have a place to put my rocks and my bones and, you know, my precious things.

I couldn't take them east with me, I had to put them somewhere.

So they're here.

For O'Keeffe, as for the Spanish and indigenous people of northern New Mexico, the crowning feature of the landscape around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu was the mountain called the Pedernal.

And I have this mountain — the Pedernal.

God told me that if painted it often enough, he would give it to me.

I do believe she sees it with great reverence.

And, you know she's often been misinterpreted when she said that “if I painted it enough times the mountain would be mine.” I think she meant by that, not real estate or ownership, but rather that she could embody or connect with that shape.

And her reverence for the great mountain, all of that was a part of the experience.

And I don't know that she ever really believed she had completely mastered that experience, in conveying that experience.

O'Keeffe painted the Pedernal twenty-eight times.

Just a few miles from Ghost Ranch, near the town of Abiquiu, is the White Place, a striking landscape feature that O'Keeffe often visited and painted.

We were all packed and got off to the White Place.

It is a very beautiful drive over there.

And when we got there, there it was in the light of the low setting sun.

A vast area like something dead but startlingly alive in its beauty.

It is really an amazingly beautiful place.

The White Place was a fifteen minute drive from Ghost Ranch.

But O'Keeffe was also drawn to another striking landscape, several hours to the west, that she called the Black Place.

The Black Place is about one hundred and fifty miles from Ghost Ranch.

When you get into the hills you find that all the surfaces are evenly crackled.

so walking and climbing are easy.

And as you come to it over a hill, it looks like a mile of elephants, grey hills all about the same size with almost white sand at their feet.

We had to sweep the snow off the frozen ground to put down our sleeping bags.

and we had a very uncomfortable night.

I was up before the sun and out early to work.

It was a fine morning, sunny and clear, but soon the wind began to blow and it blew hard all day.

It became one of my favorite places to work.

Such a beautiful, untouched, lonely feeling place.

Part of what I call the Far Away.

O'Keeffe usually visited the Black Place with Maria Chabot, a close friend of Georgia's who also worked for her.

Many people have speculated that Maria and Georgia were lovers.

I think Maria Chabot was probably gay, was interested in O'Keeffe as a romantic partner, but I don't think that O'Keeffe responded.

We know that Frida Kahlo had relationships with other women.

But there's no evidence that Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe ever actually had a physically intimate relationship.

I think she was somebody who was independent.

She was independent socially and sexually.

And if she had been inclined to have a relationship with a woman I'm sure she would have.

I just didn't find any evidence that she had.

For years, O'Keeffe had been widely known for her paintings of skulls and antlers.

But in 1943, she began a new series based on the pelvis bone.

I had a whole pile of them in the patio, and then one day I just happened to hold one up and there was the sky through the hole.

At first these paintings were all blue and white.

Finally, I tried red and yellow.

They made a pretty exhibition.

I'm one of the few artists, maybe the only one today, who is willing to talk about my work as pretty.

I don't mind it being pretty.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, O'Keeffe's life and art was focused on New Mexico.

But she wrote letters daily to Stieglitz.

And she still spent half the year in New York doing her work and caring for Alfred.

And he continued to show her work every year in his small gallery.

In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art honored O'Keeffe with her first New York City retrospective.

Stieglitz resented the power of the large museums.

But Georgia, on her own, had agreed to the MOMA show and Alfred was mollified by the ecstatic critical response.

On July 13, 1946, two months after the opening of the show, Alfred Stieglitz died at the age of 82.

For the next three years, Georgia O'Keeffe painted hardly anything, overwhelmed with the task of settling his estate, including the assignment of 850 works of art.

Many went to high profile institutions - the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

But many went to a less obvious destination - the art gallery at Fiske Univers the historically Black universit in Nashville, Tennessee.

Knowing that their contact with art was often limited to so-called “Jim Crow Days” at an art museum, O'Keeffe made a gift to enrich the lives of generations of Black students.

With O'Keeffe's settlement of the Stieglitz estate, one of the great artistic partnerships in American history was at an end.

I think the two of them shared a period of time in which he was being fueled by her creativity and she was be... But Stieglitz was a narcissist.

He needed to be adored.

And O'Keeffe filled that need for a long time.

But then Dorothy Norman stepped into the scenery.

And she was willing to adore Stieglitz.

And O'Keeffe needed her artistic and emotional freedom.

After she got to New Mexico and got her bearings, and things sort of settled down, I think she was kind of grateful to have Dorothy Norman, because Dorothy Norman took care of him while she was away.

And he was a complete hypochondriac.

But I think their fundamental love for one another was profound.

And she accepted the problems that he had as a human being, the weaknesses.

And he was committed to her as an artist, he never moved away from that.

Her relationship with Stieglitz was filled with negatives and positives.

But I think the positives outweighed the negatives.

If I were to die today, my last word would be - Georgia.

And I'm sure that whatever may happen — to me or to you — I know that will be my final thought and word - Georgia.

And the meaning of this I only know.

And it will be kept mine.

Not as a possession, but as a sacred vision — beautiful.

So you see what you have done for me - Georgia.

Following Alfred's death, he was cremated.

And Georgia scattered his ashes under the trees along the shore of Lake George.

When O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico, she moved into a new house located in the small town of Abiquiu But she kept the Ghost Ranch house which she loved, staying there mainly in the spring and summer and in Abiquiu in the fall and winter.

For most of the next thirty-seven years of her life, she traveled often, back and forth, the fourteen miles between the two.

The Abiquiu house had been in ruins for years, so Maria Chabot directed the extensive remodeling of the adobe hacienda.

Georgia was still in New York settling the Stieglitz estate.

The houses are made with adobe and that means they're made with human hands.

By the time your house is plastered, a woman's hands has gone all over the surface of it to finish it.

And as they plaster, the man mixes the mud and brings it to the woman and the woman puts it on.

The women always say that the men “pig it,” but the men cant plaster.

The house was a pigpen, full of big old mother pigs and baby pigs and pigs of all sizes.

I got the idea that I wanted it because it had this long wall with a door in it that to me seemed very attractive.

I don't know why I had to have that house, because it had that wall.

If it hadn't had that wall, I probably wouldn't have bothered.

But that wall was mine.

It's a very simple idea, isn't it?

Take the rectangle of the page and draw a door.

It was an exercise in Dow's book, it's an exercise O'Keeffe often used with her students.

And yet it becomes a vehicle for transcendence.

Dealing with doors, or apertures, or openings.

It's part of her abstract language that repeats and repeats through her works.

There's Lake George Window.

And also the bones have that quality in the sense of the holes through the bones.

In relation to the changing of the light, in relation to the changing of the seasons.

It functions like a sundial.

Sometimes with snow.

Patio Door with Snow is one of my favorite paintings.

Sometimes with a green leaf floating down.

And completely dynamic.

You experience a kind of visual snap.

Well and there's also the curiosity of what lies behind the door.

So there's a mystery to it too.

And a kind of haunting mystery to the idea of a door.

And she's endlessly fascinated by it, and its meaning in relation to the world.

The universe.

But I always asked Maria, “Why didn't you ask her why that door was so important to her?” But the point is, nobody knows why she was so attracted to that door.

but it meant a great deal to her.

When I went there the first time, it was famously modernist.

So I was expecting what we now know as modernism, which is all hard edges, sharp planes.

And it's not like that at all.

The general feeling of the house is one of softness and kind of comfort.

As some people have said, it's one of her great works of a that house.

So her idea of putting up a modern house was to take the indigenous, take the local, and then import what she was so good at, which was picture windows.

And she put in bigger windows than probably anybody in that neighborhood had ever seen.

Continuously was punching out walls and putting in yet one more picture window in one of her homes.

She used modern pieces of furniture that she was buying from Charles Eames, or Marcel Breuer, or Saarinen.

She had lovely single pieces by these great modern furniture designers Food mattered a great deal to O'Keeffe.

So gardening was important to her.

Fruit trees, vegetables, and lettuces, and beautiful things that would make for a delicious salad.

It was important to her to eat as fresh a vegetable as she could find.

And she would be very much at home in today's foodie culture.

Simple meals were really what she was good at, but of the freshest elements.

And you can go to her kitchen today and people are so appreciative of the way she's lined up her jars with her spices and her cuttings.

She was dogged about what she felt strongly about.

And this was true of her dress.

She didn't spend that much time on dress, but by golly it had to be a certain way of being in the world.

She had to look the way she was comfortable in, and she wanted to be seen as with a very simple wardrobe.

And watch her travel.

She would go off for a week and just bring a couple of dresses in a fabric bag.

And they'd be the same dress but they'd be in different colors.

I came to really appreciate, if you will, her lifestyle as well as her painting style.

But it was learning how she made time to get to the studio and could still have the satisfaction of having a beautiful home, a beautiful meal, a beautiful garden, even beautiful pets in her late life, which were very important to her.

It was almost a matter of mental health that she lived in beautiful surroundings.

The house at Abiquiu had one other feature that very few people have ever seen.

Keenly aware of the testing of atomic weapons less than an hour aways at Los Alamos, O'Keeffe built a bomb shelter beneath her new home.

In the 1950s, with commercial flights more available, Georgia O'Keeffe began to travel.

To Europe for the first time.

And to South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Far East.

Very few of the places she visited became subject matter for her paintings.

But she was inspired by the experience of the flights themselves.

Such things as I have seen out this window I have never dreamed.

though it is more like my dreams than anything I have ever seen.

All sorts of queer mottled shapes.

I really can't tell of it but it makes me believe in my dreams more than I ever have.

The airplane views brought O'Keeffe back to the approach that had defined her work in the early 1920s - abstraction.

Abstraction has always been the focus of her work.

But also, some of her abstract work - there's a photograph by, I think it's Todd Webb, in which theres a stick So it looks like rivers from the air, but it's really that particular stick in its form.

But I think that captures the essence of her desire to abstract from nature and to boil things down to really the essence of things, she's always talking about that.

But it's fascinating to me that at the end of her career, she sees abstract forms from the air that are very much like the shapes and forms that she was deriving from the natural world early on in her career.

The next time I flew, the sky below was completely full of little oval white clouds, all more or less alike.

Perhaps influenced by younger, contemporary artists who were painting huge canvases, O'Keeffe painted a version of the clouds twenty-four feet wide in her garage at Ghost Ranch.

At mid-century, abstract expressionism swept through the contemporary art world, drawing the attention of critics and the public.

For the entire decade of the 1950s, O'Keeffe had only three one woman shows and only one of those presented new work.

In 1967, O'Keeffe's old friend Anita Pollitzer sent Georgia the manuscript of a book she had written about the artist.

Georgia had worked on it with Anita over the years.

But now, she rejected it.

To call this my biography when it has so little to do with me is impossible and I cannot have my name exploited to further it.

I cannot approve it.

Georgia abruptly ended her fifty-year friendship with Anita The incident was an echo of O'Keeffe's sensitivity around her public image.

Over the years, she often cut out and burned artwork with which she was dissatisfied.

In November of 1952, for example, she burned forty of her paintings.

O'Keeffe did not hesitate to destroy paintings, or friendships, that did not meet her standards In 1972, the year she turned 85, Georgia O'Keeffe was forced to stop painting because she was virtually blind.

Due to macular degeneration, she had lost her central vision.

O'Keeffe completed her final unassisted oil painting entitled “The Beyond.” But over those years, a surprising thing happened.

Just as her identity as an artist seemed to wane, a new identity emerged.

Georgia O'Keeffe became an American icon.

It began with a lead story, cover story, in Life magazine, where she was dressed in black, seated on the rooftop, with the broad desert setting beyond the house.

And it was really a story introducing Life readers - millions and millions of Americans at that particular time.

That was in ‘68.

O'Keeffe's a very unusual artist because she was also a model for many, many photographers.

It starts with Stieglitz, and in fact Stieglitz had a kind monopoly on her.

He didn't let other photographers in, if you will, with an exception or two.

Carl Van Vechten took a picture or two, including Ansel Adams, who was one of the earliest.

And then, when she started her post-Stieglitz life, if you will in New Mexico, then many artists photographed her.

She became the most photographed American artist of the 20th Cent One thing Stieglitz insisted on was - you don't smile for the camera.

And we have endless stories of photographers that go out to photograph OKeeffe where she'll say to them, “No teeth.” We also know that she learned, in dressing for Stieglitzs camera that she really looked good in black and white, and particularly she looked good with one of her signature collars, which was a v-neck, She loved v-necks, which gave her a very long beautiful neck line.

It's also important to realize that O'Keeffe did not adorn herself with jewelry.

But the piece of jewelry that you see her wearing all the time when photographers come calling, is her pin by Alexander Calder.

It was pounded brass.

The O is a beautiful spiral and a keen design element in both her clothing and her art.

And then the K, and the two come together as a kind of pun on her name.

So, as she got older and her hair turned grey, she found a silversmith on one of her trips to India who was willing to bang out a silver version of her brass pin.

She's never casually dressed for a photographer.

Take note.

She knew she looked good serious, pensive, even looked kind of spiritual.

So there's a dialogue obviously between model and photographer.

John Loengard, who did the cover photographs inside that 1968 Life article, he asked her for suggestions.

And she said, “Let's go to the roof top.

And she knew just exactly where to sit.

And just fell into a pensive, sort of Whistler's Mother type pose.

And he got his shot in no time whatsoever.

He called her a pro.

In 1970, two years later, Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum, gave her a retrospective.

She hadn't had a retrospective since 1946 in New York.

I myself first saw O'Keeffe in any depth at that exhibition.

I was startled that we had a female artist of such incredible accomplishment.

And I was not the only one having that revelation.

I was electrified.

I had just - I could not believe what I was seeing.

It was astonishing.

Who had created this?

And of course this is just at the time when the women's liberation movement had occurred in New York, 1970.

And young women like myself were looking for - we were looking for other kinds of inspiring stories.

You know, who were the famous women artists?

Who were the famous women writers that we needed to know about.

Well, here I was, standing in the middle of this gallery.

This was one of them.

In the 1970s, there was a group of women who were artists who looked to O'Keeffe and saw her as a pioneer.

They, of course, were looking for role models.

The more I studied, the more I realized there was this huge body of information an enormous amount of richness in women's heritage.

And that not only I, but most people knew nothing about it.

Artist Judy Chicago and a group of over 400 women set out to create The Dinner Party, a large art installation designed to re-discover and honor women of achievement throughout the century.

In creating the 39 place settings, Chicago was inspired by the art of Georgia O'Keeffe.

And the plate at the head of the table was reserved for O'Keeffe, the only honoree who was still alive.

And there's this amazing hand-written, four-page letter that Judy Chicago writes to O'Keeffe at the time.

And she says, “Your work is where I find some achievement whereby I can measure myself.

For when I look at your work, I see myself, my experience, my sense of what form is, and shape is.

I've held on to you, and to your success, in the pit of me.

I appreciate you and your work, more than I can ever express.” Judy Chicago asked to meet O'Keeffe, hoping that she would give her blessing to The Dinner Party.

But O'Keeffe said “no.” You can imagine this artist that these women revere as their foremother, tells them, you know, “I don't want you.

I don't want your attention.

Go away!

And don't you dare talk about me like that.” You know, they're crushed.

But the primary reason behind it is because they have different views of feminism and different views of gender.

They're sick and tired of women being denigrated, of women's art being denigrated, of women's bodies being denigrated and sexualized.

And of course, O'Keeffe did a similar thing, but the issue is that O'Keeffe is formed in a moment of feminism and modernism and this kind of value on individualism, on individual self expression.

That was like the credo of being a modernist artist.

It clashes with the 1970s women artists because they see themselves as part of a collectivity of women.

Yeah, she didn't want to be part of any collectivity.

They were gendering O'Keeffe female, right?

At precisely the moment at which O'Keeffe wants to claim for herself that she is gender transcendent.

She's a great artist.

She's not a great woman artist.

And to her, that's a feminist triumph.

With O'Keeffe becoming more and more famous in the 1970s, she agreed to the publication of a remarkably successful image-and-text autobiography.

And in the filming of a public television documentary.

That's what we mean when we say somebody has become iconic.

The LIFE Magazine, the Whitney show, and the book of 1977 on the eve of her 90th birthday - those made her into what you might call a household name.

And it wasn't just feminists, but it was also women of all types and places who felt as if she was a woman who had followed her own drummer successful in leading the life she wanted to lead.

And that inspired women, to write her letters!

Because she had done something they wished they had been able to accomplish with their own lives.

July, 1968.

Dear Miss O'Keeffe.

I have wanted to tell you how much enjoyment I have gotten from a magazine reproduction of your painting which appeared in a woman's publication.

I framed it and hung it at the foot of my bed, so that it is the first thing I see when I open my eyes every morning.

It has been like a morning hymn of praise for me all these years I have been half-blind since the age of 10, and can't even find my glasses without my glasses.

But your lovely flower, so full of faith and tenacity and hope and courage, this I can see.

So thank you.

By 1973, O'Keeffe had become a celebrity.

But she had no one to help her meet the demands of her new found status.

On top of that, she could barely see.

But on Labor Day weekend of that year, a young man, a ceramics artist, appeared at O'Keeffe's back door.

So I came to the door, the back screen door of the kitchen here.

And I asked her if she had any work.

And she said, “Work... So I started to turn around and walk away and she said, “Wait a minute.

Can you pack a shipping crate?” And I said that I thought I could.

So I came the next morning and began working.

And I ended up being with her for fourteen and a half years.

The 86-year-old Georgia and the 28-year-old Juan Hamilton became inseparable.

Without the eyesight to paint, O'Keeffe took an interest in creating pottery.

They shared a teasing sense of humor.

And although the gossip about a sexual relationship was baseless Georgia was deeply attracted to Juan.

His responsibilities expanded from running errands and typing letters to holding power of attorney over her financial affairs and representing her artwork as the exclusive agent.

To give Hamilton full control, O'Keeffe fired Doris Bry, the New York-based art agent who had represented her since Stieglitzs death, resulting in an ugly legal dispute.

And when one of her closest friends, Frances O'Brien, joked about Hamilton being a gigolo, O'Keeffe destroyed the friendship.

Don't break your leg or anything like that, Juan...(uniteligible) It's very complex how a person that, from the outside, might be distasteful to other people and I certainly was distasteful to many of O'Keeffe's friends and associates, can fulfill something for them.

And I may not have been the ideal facilitator to other people, but she loved me very much.

And I loved her very much.

And then there's just nothing anybody can do about that.

The greatest controversy about Georgia's relationship with Juan involved the scores of paintings worth millions of dollars, O'Keeffe had never sold over her lifetime.

Some of them she kept in a storeroom behind the legendary patio door.

Her will, signed in 1979, left many of these paintings to eight prominent art museums.

But in 1984, when she was 96 years old, O'Keeffe signed a codicil to the will leaving them to Juan Hamilton.

Members of her family quickly challenged the codicil after Georgias death.

Hamilton eventually withdrew from the terms of the codicil and the paintings were given to art museums all over America.

And much of her estate was entrusted to a foundation, and eventually to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

Today, the Museum in Santa Fe maintains a large collection of her art, historical materials, and her homes in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch.

On March 6, 1986, Georgia O'Keeffe died at the age of 98.

Her ashes were scattered over the Pedernal.

Every Monday morning, the Abiquiu acequia is tapped and Georgia O'Keeffe's garden is irrigated.

For three generations, beginning with O'Keeffe's original gardener, members of the Lopez family have cared for the garden, for the two houses, and for Ms.

OKeeffe.

Definitely, I think we were extremely privileged to have gotten the opportunity to know her as a person, not just someone that you see in a magazine cover or a book cover or from a distance at an exhibition.

We got to know Georgia O'Keeffe as a real person.

Still today, Pita Lopez and her family maintain the Abiquiu and share it with the public on behalf of the Museum.

We like people seeing her home as if she could come into the door at any time.

where people get that experience of feeling her within her own home.

Lunch was her main meal.

And that would consist of salad, and all the vegetables would come from the garden, right?

And of course in New Mexico, she enjoyed her green chiles.

Her sitting room is very serene.

She loved to sit on a corner cushion that looks out into the window, And it's just so contemplative.

And she liked that quiet.

And then after supper, we might read a book to her.

And you'd read to her probably till about 7 - 7:30.

And then she'd prepare for bed.

And she'd go to bed.

And then we'd read a little bit more.

Till finally she was sort of asleep.

You could hear her breathing was really soft and slow.

And you would just walk out.

But then she was an early riser.

The next morning she'd be really early.

And after she washed her hair, she would sit and dry her hair naturally with her back to the morning sun.