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VI. Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe's Long Road Home 

When Mabel Dodge invited Georgia O'Keeffe to spend the summer with her in Taos in 1929, O'Keeffe accepted the invitation without first consulting her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, a dominating spouse. She spent the summer there without him anyway, awakening to the possibility she had found a new place that seemed like home.

"She wrote to Henry McBride from Taos in 1929, 'You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here-and finally feeling in the right place again-I feel like myself-and I like it- . . . Out the very large window to rich green alfalfa fields-then the sage brush and beyond-a most perfect mountain-it makes me feel like flying-and I don't care what becomes of art.' - Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters by Jack Cowart and Juan Hamilton


Stieglitz was an aging New Yorker, embedded in the cultural life of the city, and far-away New Mexico was a place best left to his wife. In February of 1930 he exhibited her New Mexico-inspired paintings at An American Place at 509 Madison Avenue, his third and final gallery in New York. The gallery presented O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings every year until the gallery's closing in 1950.

Any artist would have relished O'Keeffe's life - time alone in New Mexico to paint a serious body of work as well as a successful artist-gallerist spouse back in New York to exhibit them on Madison Avenue every year. In addition, the two often enjoyed time at the expansive Stieglitz estate up on Lake George. But...

Enter Radio City Music Hall (1260 Avenue of the Americas), an odd tangent on our Fifth Avenue & The High Road to Taos walk. In the spring of 1932 O'Keeffe accepted a $1500 commission to paint a mural on the walls of the Ladies Powder Room. Wanting to paint something big, she accepted the challenge over her husband's objections. By October, after spending the summer in Canada, she grew frustrated with some technical difficulties with the mural and abandoned the project. In early 1933 she became ill and was admitted to Doctor's Hospital for psychoneurosis, a condition often brought on by acute stress.

Meanwhile, Stieglitz, who was 23 years older than O'Keeffe, had started a relationship with a young married woman, Dorothy Norman, his gallery manager, an artist, arts patron and a proponent of the photographic arts. He started taking photos of her, the same sort of sensational erotic images he made of O'Keeffe early in their marriage. The two spent a lot of time in the darkroom together. All this while his wife is sick. O'Keeffe knew what was going on.

O'Keeffe returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1934, first staying at Ghost Ranch seventy miles west of Taos, and until Stieglitz's death she returned there most every summer. In 1936 she and Stieglitz moved from the Shelton Hotel to a penthouse apartment at 405 East 54th St., a place nearer Stieglitz's gallery. In 1942 they moved to a small apartment at 59 East 54th St., even closer. During the summer of 1945 she bought an adobe house on three acres in Abiquiu. In 1946, Stieglitz, after a massive stroke, died in New York at the age of 82.

After spending a couple of years in New York, consumed with settling the Stieglitz estate, O'Keeffe permanently moved to New Mexico in 1949, dividing her time between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu. She had spent thirty years going back and forth from her home in the west to an apartment in midtown Manhattan, and she didn't have to do that anymore. She died March 6, 1986 in Santa Fe at the age of 98.

I've learned from this story that finding your own ranch buys you an extra 17 years.

Image: interior, New York Marriott Hotel East Side (formerly the Shelton Hotel), 525 Lexington Avenue at 49th St.

VII. Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Georgia O'Keeffe at The Met

I went to the Met on Tuesday to look at Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, but first I had to find them. A couple of museum workers thought they had seen one or two in the Modern Art section, but they also recommended that I check with the woman that runs the tiny shop next to the American Wing on the opposite side of the museum. I hadn't planned on my visit being another athletic adventure, but I nevertheless ended up pounding a couple of miles inside the Met.

Fortunately, I found the O'Keeffe paintings early on. After winding my way through Roman art and through the Michael Rockefeller Oceanic galleries, I made my way through the first rooms of the Modern Art section and could reassure myself I was in the right century. After a turn to the right and then around another corner, I saw paintings by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove. Surely she is near. And, yes, voila!, a room of Georgia O'Keeffes, and more than a couple. Ten.

After spending the week with her story, I was happy to see these particular paintings. While the Met routinely switches out artworks, the O'Keeffe paintings on display on Tuesday included (in chronological order here, not how they were displayed):

Corn, Dark, Number 1 (1924). Painted at Lake George
Grey Tree, Lake George (1925)
Black Iris (1926) The magnified iris, painted in plums and grey pinks, fills and pushes the boundaries of the canvas - a terrific tension of light and dark and the scandalous vulval core imagery that shaped the direction of feminist art in the 1970s.
Clam Shell (1930)
Ranchos Church (1930) O'Keeffe ventured out to Taos to stay at Mabel Dodge's and discovered the Saint Francis of Assissi Mission in the Hispanic community of Ranchos de Taos. Painting the church from the back side, the church takes on the essence of a natural earth formation. I love how the grey sky pushes on the outer surfaces of the structure.
Cow's Skull: Red, White and Blue (1931) See image. O'Keeffe's satire on the search for the Great American painting at the time of the Great Depression and the blossoming of American regional painting. In reaction to the depictions of decrepit buildings in the heartland, O'Keeffe sets a cow's skull, like a crucifix, on top of red, white, and blue, as her homage to American Art.
From the Faraway, Nearby (1937) A turn toward surrealism with the scale of the mountain range dwarfed by the hovering antlered creature that dominates the scene and sky.
Red and Yellow Cliffs (1940) The view of the striated coral and ochre cliffs from Ghost Ranch.
Pelvis II (1944) Highly sculptural and abstract, the blue sky seen through the interior of the bones renders the image a metaphor for mortality. She applies the white paint on the pelvis in strips, maybe with a palette knife, that gives a cracked texture to the bones.
Black Place II (1944) A dark and desolate but beautiful image of a stretch of hills she often liked to paint.

I decided to check to see if there were more O'Keeffe paintings by visiting the American Wing on the other side of the museum, but I knew that several galleries in that wing were closed and that access was tricky. So I spent the next hour, I think, wandering through room and after room of decorative art from various centuries, taking the wrong turn in musical instruments and again in medieval armor and then winding my way back to the main entrance. At that point I was told that the only way to get to the American Wing was from the Temple of Dendur, the expansive room that houses the Nubian temple to the goddess Isis. After passing the entirety of Egyptian civilization to get there, I felt like I was in an old video game.

I walked through many rooms in the American Wing but I didn't see another O'Keeffe. I found the woman who tended the gift shop, and yes, she said, I had seen all of them in Modern. Somewhere in the American Wing, a man approached a security guard and asked him how to get out of there.

VIII. Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: The Art Pilgrimage to the West






O'Keeffe's visit to New Mexico was certainly just one among many. John Sloan, who I've written a lot about here, visited Santa Fe in 1919, the same year as Mabel Dodge made her move, and he bought a house there in 1920. He spent four months of every year in Santa Fe from 1920 to 1950. Sloan learned of the place from his pioneering mentor, Robert Henri, who had visited in 1916 an 1917. It was a craze really, one that also attracted Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Stuart Davis. American modernism, with its taste for the exotic, couldn't do without the New Mexican landscape and its people.

Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, New Mexico continued to attract more artists, many from New York. Some stayed permanently, and others divided their time between the two places. Marfa, Texas has a similar appeal, one made even more enticing by its easy lack of access.

Another group of artists began to make their way to New Mexican outposts in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist artists like Judy Chicago, whose flower paintings were directly inspired by O'Keeffe's core imagery, found the region congenial. Lucy Lippard, one of feminist art's important theorists, makes her home there as well.

The reasons New Mexico continues to lure new residents remain the same as a century ago. After the busy syncopated rhythms of a large metropolis and where skyscrapers block the setting sun, the uninterrupted desert vista, with its warm daytime sun and cool nights, forces a steadier and slower pace. The land and its people seem to belong to the long cycles of human history as opposed to the short ones of the city and the fashionable whims of manufactured fads and consent.

It made sense that galleries and the art business would follow the artistic pilgrimage out west. Santa Fe is the third largest art market in the United States after New York and Los Angeles. Canyon Road, where many of the galleries are located, is always a pleasure to walk.

Images: Landscape panorama by Walking off the Big Green Chili Pepper, and Robert Henri. Gregorita with the Santa Clara Bowl, 1917, oil on canvas, Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University.

Epilogue: Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos

When Mabel Dodge first saw the Taos Pueblo, she felt an intense surge of longing. In Edge of Taos Desert she writes:

"It was as though the Pueblo had an invisible wall around it, separating the Indians from the world we knew–a wall that kept their life safe within it, like a fire that cannot spread. "How self-contained it seems! I thought, and how contented it feels!" I mused to myself. "I wish I belonged in there!"

For many years after my father died, my mother and I traveled almost every summer from our home in Dallas to Santa Fe, staying at the old La Fonda Hotel. Sometimes we drove there, a seemingly endless and boring drive through the Texas Panhandle but an increasingly fascinating journey toward the end. It took us a few days to adjust to the altitude difference, so we would spend the first days keeping close to the main plaza.

On one trip we joined a group traveling to Taos, via the High Road. Toward the end of the day we stopped outside the Taos Pueblo. We got out and walked around for an hour, keeping a respectful distance between our tourist selves and the residents of the pueblo.

When it was time to board the van for the return trip, we could not find my mother anywhere. We waited thirty minutes. Finally, I spotted her walking out of a door in the Pueblo. I remember that she was wearing her typical smart Dallas fashion designer suit, with hose, high heels, and all the appropriate accessories, and I thought how comical she looked in that context.

When she sat down next to me in the van, I asked what she was doing in there. She said that she had struck up a conversation with a nice couple about their children and that they invited her to sit down. She had a great time. When the van pulled away from the Taos Pueblo, she told me she didn't feel like leaving. "I want to go back there," she said. "It's where I belong."

I love New York City, and I plan to stay for a long time. I feel, though, that there's a part of me I'm saving for later, the one that trades in urban canyons for longer memories and a much bigger sky.

See additional related posts for Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.

Images: New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, House on Canyon Road, Santa Fe, and Lexington Avenue near 49th., NY, NY, 2008. You get the picture. Photos by Walking Off the Big Green Chili Pepper.