There is a Garden in her Face: The Georgic O’Keeffe

Abstract

“The cooking has been done for you in the garden; it’s merely finished in the kitchen,” the English biodynamic gardener Alan Chadwick used to say. These were ideas that Georgia O’Keeffe, the American modernist painter, already had in mind when she decided to devote large attention to the creation of vegetable and fruit gardens in her houses in New Mexico between the 1930s and 1940s. When Chadwick, “the gardener of the souls,” started using his Biodynamic Method of organic gardening and farming in North America in the late 1960s, Miss O’Keeffe was already deeply engaged in an agricultural project that had seen her teaching, prodding, cajoling, and strictly guiding her many assistants and guests in New Mexico. Through her idea of hard work applied in any creative context, O’Keeffe anticipated, following the studies of Adelle Davis, an ecology of food instead of an economy. A strong believer in the energy coming from the patient and enduring cultivation of the earth, in its reproductive power comparable to the work and labor of childbirth, O’Keeffe used her adobe gardens, kitchens and cooking habits as a sort of mystical places where labor turned into blessing, giving birth to beauty. Through the reading of O’Keeffe’s letters and books inspired by her life and work, this article intends to analyze the beginning of an ecological, though aesthetically refined, politics of gardening and food in the hands and mind of the modernist artist. O’Keeffe nimbly moved from the stylish urban class-conscious foods and flats of New York City, in the first decades of the century, to the revolutionary culture of local production in the Southwest. In her garden cultivation and food rituals, O’Keeffe reproduced the spiritual landscape that nourished the body and the soul of men and women, both engaged in the prodigious creative project. In addition, her strong relationship with the Indigenous allowed her to rediscover the organic bases of civilization, the “sober reality” (Norman Brown) that helped her fulfill the meaning of her work: giving birth to beauty.

KEYWORDS: :

• food ecology
• organic
• politics
• beauty
• garden life

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Alan Chadwick, John Jeavons, and Stephen J. Crimi, Performance in the Garden: A Collection of Talks on Biodynamic French Intensive Horticulture, Logosophia, 2008.

2 “A personal experience may be relevant here. In the autumn of 1971, I attended a function at Bryn Mawr College, at which the late Hannah Arendt and Georgia O’Keeffe were honored as outstanding women. Arendt delivered an extraordinary speech, but O’Keeffe said nothing (the President of the college explained that that had been her wish) While seated on the stage. O’Keeffe seemed to exude a radiance, an air of imperturbability, which I thought affected others as deeply as me. The hall was jammed, and as the crowd filed out a bottleneck, developed O’Keeffe, unable to move, stood next to me for about five minutes. I thought of telling her that I liked her paintings. Then realized that such a statement would be superfluous. Later, I realized that never before had I attended a function where the honoree neither spoke a word nor (as far as I could see) had a word spoken to her” (Davidson, 57)

3 Norman Brown, “My Georgics,” Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, University of California Press, 1991, p. 25.

4 Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, The Viking Press Penguin Books, New York, unpaginated.

5 Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, The Viking Press Penguin Books, New York, unpaginated.

6 In 1921, Paul Rosenfeld declared about O’Keeffe’s art: “Her art is gloriously female” (Dial, December 1921). The following year he added that “there is no stroke laid by her brush, whatever it is she may paint, that is not curiously, arrestingly female in quality. Essence of very womanhood permeates her pictures” (Vanity Fair, October 1922).

7 Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, Viking Press Penguin New York, 1976, unpaginated.

8 Georgia O’Keeffe writes to Maria Chabot in April 1943, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of Arizona Press, 2005, p. 150.

9 Margaret Wood, A Painter’s Kitchen, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 1997, p. 58.

10 Dorothy Seiberling, “Horizons of a Pioneer,” Life, March 1 1968, p. 45.

11 Christine Taylor Patten and Alvaro Cardona-Hine, Miss O’Keeffe, University of New Mexico Press, 2013, p. 135.

12 Maria Chabot to Georgia O’Keeffe, January 25, 1946, from Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, Maria Chabot, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

13 Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, Maria Chabot, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

14 Norman Brown, “My Georgics,” Apocalypse and/or Metamor­phosis, University of California Press, 1991, p. 28.

15 Georgia O’Keeffe to Maria Chabot, letter 22, March 8, 1947, from Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, Maria Chabot, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press, 2003 p. 402–403.

16 Georgia O’Keeffe’s letter to Chabot in January 1946 from Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, Maria Chabot, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

17 Georgia O’Keeffe’s letter to Chabot in January 1946 from Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, Maria Chabot, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

18 http://www.alan-chadwick.org/html%20pages/quotes.html.

19 Georgia O’Keeffe’s letter to Alfred Stieglitz in November 1943.

20 Georgia O’Keeffe, Barbara Buhler Lynes, Ann Paden, Maria Chabot, Maria Chabot – Georgia O’Keeffe Correspondence 1941-1949, University of New Mexico Press, 2003

21 This late 7th or early 8th century Visigothic prayer book written before the Moorish invasion is the only surviving Visigothic manuscript containing figural decoration. The manuscript has 127 folios that measure 330 mm by 260 mm.The text was written in Visigothic minuscule. A marginal gloss indicated that the manuscript was produced in Tarragona, at the church of Saint Fructuosus.

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Cristiana Pagliarusco

Cristiana Pagliarusco received her PhD degree in Humanities from the University of Trento, Italy. Her research focuses on the intersections between the visual and the verbal media with the aim to highlight the importance of affiliative and affective relationships among artists and intellectuals in modern and contemporary age, and global contexts. She is tenured teacher of English in a High School focusing on Sciences and Humanities in Vicenza, Italy. She is adjunct professor at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, where she teaches English for Specific Purposes at the Computer Science Department. She is the author of Georgia O’Keeffe in Poetry: Offspring of an Icon (Peter Lang 2018), and other volumes. She is currently working on the poet Sylvia Plath and her reverse ekphrasis. [email protected]