GEORGIA O'KEEFFE'S Triumphant Vision

...The latest painting in the current exhibition, done in 1970, is a black rock which nearly fills the canvas, resting on a white ground against a soft blue background...

...I've never had any artist friends except a few in the Stieglitz group when I lived in New York," she said...

...the lines are hard and the clouds too uniform...

...Each one showed the influence of someone else— a past teacher...

...It seems to me that even for those who are unfamiliar with O'Keeffe's life her painting is an affirmation...

...Schools and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to...

...Although O'Keeffe told her that the charcoal and watercolor sketches were sent with the "express condition that they were not to be shown to anyone," her friend was excited by what she saw and took them to Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 gallery was a center of artistic ferment...

...She returned to Virginia, where her family had moved to Charlottesville...

...I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way—things that I had no words for...

...She will not talk much about her art...

...So these paintings and drawings happened and many others that are not here...

...But some of her other views from planes, such as one in blue and green on white depicting rivers, belong with her best work...

...When I don't have anything in my head, I don't work...

...Recognition first came to her unsought in 1916, after she had sent a roll of abstract drawings from Texas to her friend Anita Pollitzer in New York...

...In the interim, art fashions have waxed and waned with the regularity—if not the frequency—of women's fashions, but O'Keeffe has continued "to do her own thing" and once more, in a big retrospective exhibition—at age eighty-three—is being heralded as one of the nation's great painters...

...She was, and is, disturbed that critics have made Freudian associations with the vulviform and phallic shapes in these pictures, and has written: "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't...

...In an interview in Chicago, O'Keeffe expressed surprise that she saw so many young people attending the exhibition in New York...

...I paint when I feel like it...

...She ordered the pictures taken down, but Stieglitz convinced her to permit them to stay...

...In recent years, since she has been traveling by plane, O'Keeffe has been fascinated by what she sees from the air and has done a series of paintings on this theme...

...It was the following April that Stieglitz presented O'Keeffe in her first one-artist show...

...It was in the autumn of 1915, while teaching at a small college in South Carolina, that O'Keeffe determined to follow the independent course which has created art history...

...and here, I believe, lies its appeal...

...I've done what interested me, what I've wanted to do, what I had in my head...

...I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself —that was nobody's business but my own...

...That is what she has been doing ever since...

...The cloud pictures are too primitive in style...

...Her pictures still express a joy of life and of living...

...One of her sisters persuaded her, in the summer of 1912, to visit an art class at the University of Virginia...

...During this time, she visited the 291 Fifth Avenue gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, to see an exhibition of the work of Rodin...

...But she did elaborate a bit...

...The first of O'Keeffe's magnified flower paintings, the most popular of her work, was done in 1924...

...It's that simple...

...O'Keeffe's vision has remained clear—and triumphant/' A dozen years after her first visit to New Mexico, O'Keeffe returned there in the summer of 1929 and from this time on spent summers there, for the most part, and the remainder of the year with Stieglitz in New York and at Lake George...

...This period of her life can be seen in a series of water-colors she did to record the sunrise over the vast Texas distance, simplified to a few burning forms...

...Finally a woman on paper," he remarked...

...In the catalogue for the 1943 retrospective, which included sixty-one works, Daniel Catton Rich, then director of fine arts at the Art Institute, wrote, "In the fifth decade of her life she is still at work with intense energy and what the next years will bring forth no one (not even herself) can foresee...

...And she receives only one art magazine, the gift of a friend...

...No frail octogenarian, O'Keeffe helped to install the exhibition in Chicago and selected the spots where the pictures should hang to be seen to best advantage...

...The pictures created a stir, and news of the display reached O'Keeffe, who came in the summer to study further at Columbia...

...and inspired by the seemingly endless arid plains, she began again to paint...

...Stieglitz was excited also...

...It is a view above the clouds—little pools of white on a medium blue ground—extending toward a soft pink and blue horizon...

...She became so interested that she enrolled, and was invited to teach at the university the following summer...

...She was to write of this experience in the catalogue of her show presented by Stieglitz at Anderson Galleries in New York in 1923: "I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago I found myself saying to myself, I can't live where I want to—I can't go where I want to—I can't do what I want to—I can't even say what I want to...

...Rather than submerge her individuality to this kind of exercise, O'Keeffe decided to give up painting...

...At once abstract and realistic, it is one of the most beautiful paintings in the show...

...I wouldn't trade with anybody...

...She is small in stature but still looks, and obviously is, strong...

...I didn't really want to have a show...

...As though there could be any question about it, she said, "I like my life...

...That her painting, which makes no social statement or criticism, attracts the young is high tribute to her achievement as an artist...

...Most of her life is lived behind the wall which surrounds the house and its grounds, which are spacious enough to include a vegetable garden and fruit trees O'Keeffe cultivates to provide food for herself...

...With the forthright impertinence granted to octogenarians, she replied, "I don't answer questions like that...

...She replied, "Go downstairs and have a look at it and write about what you see...

...That was my country—terrible winds and a wonderful emptiness...

...Born November 15, 1887, on a 600-acre farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, she was the second of seven children and received her early education at a country school and in Madison, finishing at an Episcopal school at Chatham, Virginia, where the family had moved...

...Among them was an abstract drawing of two irregular vertical blue lines done with a Japanese brush, which is the earliest picture in the current retrospective...

...She conducted classes for four summers...

...Originating at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York last autumn, the show attracted the second largest crowd in that museum's history...

...After talking with her for a while about life in Abiquiu, I asked if we might talk a little about her work...

...The unerring hand and eye of O'Keeffe have turned these hackneyed subjects into fine art...

...She moved to New Mexico for good three years after Stieglitz's death...

...Tending to her own business has meant tending to her own particular art...

...Nearly three decades later, art is richer yet...

...American painting of our day is infinitely richer for her triumphant vision...

...She returned to Virginia and destroyed all of her student work...

...The city has even less appeal for her now than in her younger years...

...I realized that I had a lot of things in my head that others didn't have...

...I lead a good life...

...I can't wait to get home," she said, as we sat talking in the board room of the Art Institute...

...Her dark skin is deeply lined, her gray hair done up to form a cap at the back of her head...

...Less well known, but equally great achievements, are the abstractions she has done over her long career...

...She placed all her pictures around her room, locked the door, and studied them...

...One of them is eight-by-twenty-four feet—and she stretched the canvas herself...

...It is the only place I have ever felt that I really belonged—that I felt at home...

...Then, faced with the necessity of earning a living, O'Keeffe went back to Chicago and worked as a commercial artist, drawing lace and embroidery, until measles and the strain on her eyes forced her to stop...

...These are no ordinary studies of skeletal parts, however...

...O'Keeffe's greatest fame comes from her renditions of single flowers that fill an entire canvas, her desertscapes, and her paintings of the bleached bones of cattle and deer and other animals which have died in the desert country around Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she has lived for about four decades...

...I like where I live...

...Pressing gently, I told her I had already done that, and asked, "Do you paint every day...

...I thought because of what's happening in the world they wouldn't be interested in my work...

...Meantime, she accepted a position as supervisor of public school art instruction in Amarillo, Texas, a pivotal event in her career, for it was here that she first saw and became interested in the wide open spaces of the Southwest, after having lived her life in the green Midwest and South...

...Both of her houses have around them animal bones from the desert, which she first began painting in 1931...

...In 1919, she wrote, "I lived on the plains of North Texas for four years...

...What could not be foreseen is now visible in a retrospective show twice as large as that one...

...Whatever results, the place of Georgia O'Keeffe is secure," he added...

...From there it traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, where O'Keeffe's first full-scale retrospective exhibition was mounted in 1943, and its final appearance will be at the San Francisco Museum of Art this spring...

...The paintings are vibrant, with the clear desert sky stretching beyond the white bones in the foreground, or a skull juxtaposed incongruously with calico roses...

...And, after studying the pictures for a few months, he put some of them on display in May, 1916...

...As the years have passed, O'Keeffe's vision has remained clear—and triumphant...

...This was the beginning of a personal and professional association that continued the rest of Stieglitz's life...

...She and Anita Pollitzer had worked together at Columbia and exchanged drawings for criticism...

...She decided at age ten, when she copied pansies and roses, that she would be an artist, and she was given private weekly art lessons until she started receiving regular instruction at a convent in Madison and in high school...

...Stieglitz later was to show her work publicly for the first time—and to become her husband in 1924...

...Only the Andrew Wyeth exhibition has attracted more visitors...

...Isolated and on her own in Texas, CHARLES-GENE AAcDANIEL is a Chicago-based writer...

...In New York, as in Chicago, O'Keeffe was assigned imitative work —painting in the style of artists who had been successful...

...She has spoken of this unfriendly environment with its wide skies, its winds, its freezing winters, and its lack of vegetation...

...Do you write every day...

...I thought the young people who have been interested in so many things would come and throw cabbages and onions at it," she said...

...Her "unfriendly dogs" discourage unwelcome guests...

...I made up my mind to put down what was in my head...

...But I belonged...

...These subjects have inspired other artists, amateur and professional, but the results most often have looked like the trite exercises of Sunday painters...

...She has never forsaken her unique vision of the world to work in a faddish medium or style, and this integrity in itself should, and does, evoke admiration...

...Her house in Abiquiu contains hundreds of stones she has collected...

...She studied at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-06, then went back to Virginia, where she had typhoid fever and remained to recuperate until 1907, when she enrolled in the Art Students League in New York...

...This small town is populated almost entirely by Americans of Spanish and Indian descent, and O'Keeffe told me that she is still considered an outsider in the village...

...It is an affirmation that painting as an art is still very much alive, and it is an affirmation of life itself in her celebration of things of beauty, even those which, like bleached bones, have their origins in death...

...The ranch house is too remote for winter living, so in 1945 she bought a one-story adobe house, built around a patio, in the village of Abiquiu, which until recent years had not even a paved road reaching it...

...She has written of this work: "I am attempting to express what I saw in a flower which apparently others failed to see...

...Her eyes have the faraway look of one accustomed to the endless horizons of the desert...

...Her four years in the Panhandle were but a prelude to four decades in New Mexico...

...I always tend to my own business...