SANTA FE, N.M. — Georgia O’Keeffe is having an international-art-world moment with a major retrospective at the Tate Modern. Not a single public institution in the U.K. owns an O’Keeffe painting, so this rare opportunity to see New Mexico’s modernist master is proving to be a smash — and not only among the Brits. My friend’s cousin lives and works in Santa Fe but has never visited the O’Keeffe museum there. On his recent trip to London, however, he made sure to take in the Tate. Such is the power of a powerhouse museum.
Your own O’Keeffe moment is much closer to home and promises riches not even a world capital can match. To be fair, the Tate did hire a drone to photograph the Sangre de Cristos. But drone video is a pallid substitute for seeing the works in situ and appreciating first hand the connection between the art and the landscape that inspired it.
With tourist season winding down, now is an especially good time for a Santa Fe road trip. Days are sunny but cool and nights call for burning pinons in the fireplace. Locals are reclaiming city streets and the rituals of daily life again are taking center stage. Although the plaza-jamming festivals are over, the art that is Santa Fe’s most distinctive and compelling feature is still as abundant as the hatch green chiles roasting day and night on the street corners of Cerillos Road.
Home to a dozen museums and more than 250 art galleries, this town of 70,000 is remarkably the country’s third largest art market and the first to be included in UNESCO’s creative city network. Among this treasure trove, the is a standout, the most visited cultural institution in Santa Fe. Its holdings — a collection of 3,000 works including 140 oil paintings and 700 drawings by the artist — are unparalleled. Yet the allure of the person, “the bold, independent woman in the desert,” as the Museum Director of Curatorial Affairs Cody Hartley describes her, is an equally powerful draw.
Already recognized as a progenitor of the modernist art movement when she first visited New Mexico in 1929 at age 41, O’Keeffe was captivated by the landscape and the confluence of Native, Hispanic and Anglo cultures — the pueblos, mission churches and sun-bleached cattle bones. For the next two decades, she alternated between a life in New York with mentor and husband Alfred Stieglitz and one on her own in the land of enchantment. In 1949, three years after Stieglitz died, she settled in Abiquiu and remained there until her own death in 1986 at the age of 98.
In New Mexico, she rendered canyons, rivers, mountains, mesas, stars and clouds, not as detailed depictions of reality but as elemental expressions created with elegant lines, angles, contours and colors. She “made the link between the abstract and the natural world,” Hartley says, producing an American style quite distinct from the Europeans.
“You don’t need a Ph.D. in art history to understand her art,” says cultural historian and O’Keeffe scholar Lois Rudnick. “Yet there’s more than meets the eye. Itap an entree into the beauty, peacefulness, stillness, timelessness” of the place.
Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of a visit to this jewel box museum is how much O’Keeffe there is to discover once you leave it.
To hike into the locales she immortalized, go to Ghost Ranch, her summer retreat. To see how she lived, reserve a ticket to tour her residence in Abiquiu. The 5,000 square foot adobe home is now owned by the museum and maintained exactly as it was when the artist lived there — rock collection, kitchen spices, vegetable garden and all. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is filled with simple yet beautiful things — chairs by Charles Eames and Harry Bertoia, tables by Eero Saarinen, a white paper lantern from her friend, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
Looking out of her huge studio window, a 15-foot expanse of plate glass, seeing exactly the vistas she put on canvas, thatap when you have what Hartley calls the ah-ha moment. Few artists, he says, “show the intentionality and depth of thought that she showed in all aspects of her life — her home, her garden, the direction of her art. How she lived is part of what she produced.”
In London, some reviewers are revisiting debates about the sexual interpretations of O’Keeffe’s flower paintings. Jimson Weed, White Flower No.1 sold for $44 million two years ago and is noted as much for its content as its price tag. Other critics are underwhelmed by iconic images that have found their way to posters and coffee mugs. (Rudnick calls this “British snobbery about anything having to do with this part of the country.”) But all are very much taken with O’Keeffe’s early abstracts, what one writer calls her “purest and most radical” art.
Such works are prominently and exquisitely exhibited in Santa Fe: bold, swirling designs from 1915 when she was teaching in South Carolina that rank among the world’s first and finest abstractions, New York skylines from the 1920s, and of course her unique renderings of New Mexico. And, on special exhibit through the end of October, 28 rarely-displayed water colors from 1916 to 1918, when O’Keeffe was working at West Texas State Normal College and thinking that teaching art would be her life’s work.
Actually, it was.
Meg Moritz is a documentary filmmaker in Boulder who writes about arts, culture and travel. Email: moritzm@colorado.edu.
If you go
The is located at 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe, N.M., 87501. From now until Oct. 18, the museum is open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a 7 p.m. closing on Fridays; thereafter, the museum will open at 10 a.m. daily. General admission is $12 per person.
