Viewing page 13 of 23

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]

"That door is what made me buy this house," O'Keeffe says of the black double door in the patio wall. She has painted it many times.

round the corner, into the vegetable garden, which is quite large. "I walk in the winter in my garden," she says. The round stones, the narrow paths, give it a Japanese feeling, like so many things in O'Keeffe's home. But it is not that formal. "Her is a fig tree that keeps coming up, and I keep cutting it down. I should cut back around it and let it grow," she says.

"I used to do all the work myself," she continues, waling along the precarious-looking path, "and I enjoyed it, although it was hard work. Look over here. These are snow peas. We let pole beans climb up a tree. These are cabbages, these are tomatoes. We just picked a one-pound tomato last week. My sister Claudia grew a two-pound tomato last year. Over here are carrots, tomatoes, peppers ... on the left are two different kinds of lettuce; two different kinds of squash." She stops at a large weed, growing underneath a tree. It is a familiar weed, one I have removed many times from my own garden. "I like this weed," she says. "It is lambsquarter. Very good to eat. We ate it in Wisconsin. I grew up in Wisconsin, on a farm."

We talk about the country, about travel, about seeing new worlds. She went to Japan in 1960, although her work long before that was thought to reflect the influence of oriental art. (She is particularly fond of Chinese painting.) "Japan did not seem new to me," she said. "It was as if I'd known it before. The first time I saw Fuji, it was white, over water. It was glorious.

"I went to the Greek islands, too. I loved Greece. You could look down in the clear water and see columns they haven't dug up yet. Crete, though, was like a photograph of a painting. The restoration was too obvious. But I loved to see the island, with the mountains sticking up out of the fog.

"On the boat, you can be very warm, but I did have my coat. The island women, knowing the travelers would be chilly, had their handmade sweaters spread out on the shore to sell. They were lovely, knit of loose, very sharp wool. In the little museum behind the Parthenon, I saw those same weaves, on the early statues of women, worn halfway down to their knees, below that drapery. That same sharp wool. What a discovery! I had my coat, though, so I didn't have to buy one. I was so pleased with that discovery-to see those same patterns over the centuries, but I didn't tell anyone. If you travel alone, with a group-you don't talk about things with anyone.

"That was before Juan came to me. Now we travel together and we talk about everything. I love to travel, to see anything. I've been here this year, though, working.

"I flew around the world. I was very interested in everything, particularly in drawing what I saw around the world. I made little one-and-a-half-inch drawings-no, look up and see the size-only this big, and I came home and made charcoal drawings from them, and from those I began painting. I've lost the drawings, but I saw the charcoals recently.... They looked pretty good to me. There were a few pencil drawings I'd made in Bermuda, of trees. The trees were so beautiful there. Twisty shapes. Odd shapes."

She talks again about this country: "I have driven all across the United States, almost everywhere. I haven't been over northern Wyoming, nor the northern part of California, nor the very deep South yet," she says, "but I have been almost everywhere else. I learned a lot about the country. I've driven from one coast to the other. I'd leave home in an open car, with paint and canvases. I'd take out the back seat. When I had some paintings, I'd come back with them in the back."

We walk back through the patio into another room. The windows have been covered with black plastic, for photography. There is a stack of Georgia O'Keeffe photographs, one by Karsh, another one by Hamilton, of her holding a crystal ball that was given to her by Alfred Stieglitz. "She can see into the future," Juan teases. "That's where her pictures come from."

"My pictures come from inside my head!" she says emphatically. We talk about photography, and about a famous Ansel Adams photograph of O'Keeffe on a camping trip. "That was the wrangler I was smiling at," she explains. "Some people thought it was my husband, but no, it was the wrangler." Most photographs of O'Keeffe are serious, unsmiling. She prefers those. "Anyway, Ansel says that when Georgia O'Keeffe smiles, the whole world cracks open," she says. "I met Ansel and his wife on their honeymoon in 1929. I have seen their place in San Francisco. It has a magnificent view. Was that two years ago? I don't know where the time goes."

Malcolm Varon and his assistant, Ruth Katz, have set up cameras in the darkened room, ready to photograph O'Keeffe's new paintings for a book that will accompany a proposed exhibition of her abstract paintings at the Guggenheim next year.

Hamilton introduces me. "And this," he says, indicating O'Keeffe to the photographer, who well knows that her husband was a giant in his own field, "is Mrs. Stieglitz."

O'Keeffe gasps, but her green-blue eyes are twinkling. "What a nerve! What a nerve!" she says, and chases Hamilton around the room with her cane, laughing.

The blue and gray paintings, like the ones in her studio, are titled "From a Day with Juan." They are her first oil paintings in four years.

"I spent a day in Washington, D.C., with Juan," she says. "It was Columbus Day, last year, a beautiful blue day for Washington. We walked to all the museums and galleries, and to the Lincoln Memorial, and walked up the steps to the statue. I could just touch his knees." She grins. "I don't think Mr. Lincoln would have been sitting there. He would have been standing, not sitting with one knee up.

"We walked to the Washington Monument and we looked up at the sky." The blue-gray abstractions suddenly take on a shape. They could be portions of a tall obelisk.

O'Keeffe examines her painting on the wall facing the camera. "This picture has a hard life," she says. "The values are not so pronounced. The gray does not have any blue. The blue does not have any gray."

"We spent a month in a vault in New York, photographing for her book," Varon says. The book, Georgia O'Keeffe, with color pictures and her own text, was published by Viking last year, at $75, and sold out in three weeks. A slightly smaller, paperbound edition, at $14.95, and a new, smaller, hardcover at $35 came out this fall and were oversold to booksellers before publication.

"I'd never thought of doing a book,"

From a Day with Juan No. III was inspired by sightseeing in Washington, D.C.

38
ARTnews