Episode 45: Georgia O'Keeffe's Deer's Skull With Pedernal (1936)
A few years ago, I went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, to catch the last weekend of a traveling exhibit of Georgia O’Keeffe, mother of American modernism, patron saint of the Southwest, uneasy muse of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, preeminent painter of vaginas. I’d never really spent much time with her work, and suffice to say, there was a lot to live up to. And this exhibition was daunting: gallery after gallery of her life’s work – she lived to be 98, after all – large canvases of heavy Manhattan skyscrapers, wide open Southwestern skies, magnified, incandescent flower petals. And yet what stopped me, and what held my eye the longest, was a small abstract watercolor from 1979, painted when she was 91 years old, her eyesight already compromised by macular degeneration. It’s a red stroke of paint, and a dot, that’s all. You can see where she began, where the heavier paint is dragged thickly across the canvas, one swoop up and then down around, wavier near the end, the brush bristles more visible as the paint runs out. And then, of course, one juicy dot floating above the crest of the wave, assuredly placed, slightly twisted, a corona from a few errant brush hairs. It’s an artwork that’s barely an artwork, just an exercise of line and form, but it’s so bold, so confident, and, when you know it’s an O’Keeffe, so intensely evocative. It becomes a landscape reduced down to its bare essentials, just the suggestion of mountain, sky, and moon. Or it becomes the menstrual-red, rounded curve of a woman’s breast. In one small painting, it’s encapsulated what I had always thought of as the quintessential O’Keeffe – painterly energy, abstraction, stark landscape, a woman’s body. But this quintessential O’Keeffe, as I came to realize, and as we’ll dive into now, was a composite, over the course of her long life, of many O’Keeffe’s: her husband’s, her critics’, and her own.
As with any larger-than-life icon, it’s always best to start with the life she actually lived. Georgia O’Keeffe was born to two dairy farmers in Wisconsin in 1887. She was interested in art from an early age, proclaimed at 12 that it was her life’s calling, and started down the road of training to be a professional straightaway. Her conventional studies took her from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago to the Art Students’ League of New York, but it wasn’t until she started studying under Arthur Wesley Dow in the early nineteen-teens that she was encouraged to develop her own personal style, that is, the beginnings of abstraction, one of the earliest explorations of abstraction in America at the time. As O’Keeffe said, “[Dow’s] idea was, to put it simply, to fill a space in a beautiful way. And that was a new idea to me.” More specifically, Dow had been strongly influenced by the compositions and philosophies of Japanese art, particularly prints, which, as we discussed in episode 42 on Hokusai’s The Great Wave, emphasized flatness, a compression of fore- and background that forces the viewer to take in all the energy of a moment at once, and this break from perspectival Western reality was a revelation to O’Keeffe. She began freely creating non-representational designs, driven purely by sensory stimulation, investigating the fluid and dynamic relationships between color and form. “Eyes can see shapes,” she wrote, “and it’s as if my mind creates shapes that I don’t know about.”
Her work caught the eye and attractions of Alfred Stieglitz, who was, at the time, an internationally-recognized photographer and the proprietor of a New York gallery known as 291, which was heralded for its revolutionary artistic foresight, one of the earliest American galleries to show works by those European upstarts, Matisse and Picasso. And it should be said that, like with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, this is another example of a workplace romance where the man gave the woman a boost, cast a long shadow during her career, and ended up utterly upstaged in the annals of history. O’Keeffe is by far the better known of the two now, but during their early life together, his influence loomed incredibly large, and, for better and for worse, shaped the course of her career. The for better part was that this was a career that he unequivocally jumpstarted, having encouraged her, invested in her, and given her first solo New York show in 1917. And for worse: she was 24 years his junior, powerfully in love, and no doubt impressionable. She was a master colorist who stopped painting in water colors because he considered them the mark of amateur women artists. And, not maliciously but certainly most egregiously, he imbued her work with an aura of sexualization that she still hasn’t shaken off, today, 34 years after her death, and most likely never will.
And this is when I want to take a beat and subvert all your expectations. Because even though the one thing people across the board know about Georgia O’Keeffe is that she painted flowers that look like vaginas, the actual truth of it is that sometimes a flower is just a damn flower. She never intended to be the preeminent painter of vagina flowers, and never, ever wanted to be. But she was in a relationship with a powerful player in the art world. Stieglitz adored O’Keeffe, both for her talent and her fire, and this passionate adoration – and her dual role as both professional project and muse – meant that when he had a retrospective of his work in 1921, he showed 45 portraits of O’Keeffe, including several beautifully-composed but intimate nudes. It also meant that when she, three years later, was given her own solo show of over 100 abstract flower paintings, her reputation as a sex pot was already solidified. Sometimes you just can’t unsee something, and so no matter how much O’Keeffe doth protested, her work, which was meant to be abstract, was commended as strongly vaginal. And I do mean commended, because, in the eyes of the art world, all these vagina flowers were never seen as a bad thing. If anything they were revolutionary, feminist, beautiful, and welcome destigmatizing of, let’s be honest, a disturbingly stigmatized body part. The feminist art critic Linda Nochlin, whom you might remember from episode 21 as a staunch defender of giving women artists the complexity they deserve, was vocal in her interpretation of O’Keeffe’s “Black Iris” from 1926 as a clear metaphor for a vagina. And looking at it, those folds, those depths, it’s hard to not agree with Nochlin. But this was bitterly ironic for O’Keeffe, who had painted “Black Iris” as an intentional step away from abstracts, towards more photorealistic paintings of the full flowers so as to firmly dispel any misinterpretation of what they really were. The flower is just the damn flower, she insisted again and again; it’s hard enough being taken seriously as a woman artist, a label she never wanted in the first place, without the world using your work as a glorified, sexual Rorschach test. “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings,” O’Keeffe said, “they’re really talking about their own affairs.”
But with all due respect to the artist’s intentions, what’s more ironic, or really just more honest, is that the lush, organic, fragrant, sensual folds of a flower is exactly what drew O’Keeffe to them in the first place. Remember that she’d already been in New York for a few years by the time she started painted them in the early 1920s, producing dense, dark, linear canvases of the Manhattan skyline, paintings that seem as hungry for strips of light and sky as she must have been. The flowers, which lived and died so quickly and completely, became a foil to the manmade permanence of the skyscrapers. And yet, at the same time, they bloomed with slow, languid intention, almost as though they, too, were bringing a Midwestern sensibility to the bustle of the east coast. “Nobody sees a flower, really,” she wrote, “it is so small, we haven’t time, and it takes time. So I said to myself, I’ll paint what I see, what the flower is to me, but I’ll paint it so big…even busy New Yorkers will take time to see what I see of flowers.” And what the flower was to her was a seductive, vibrant, natural beauty, possessing its own inner vitalism, and the way she could magnify it down to its most abstract shapes and create these canvases of both real and imagined images. As she wrote, “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.”
And it’s this emphasis on the natural world, and how differently its pace moved from the manmade, that anticipates the next phase of her career: the clear, wide open skies and sun-bleached animal skulls of the American Southwest. O’Keeffe started visiting New Mexico in 1929, keeping largely to herself in a small adobe hut attached Ghost Ranch, a tourist-heavy dude ranch an hour’s drive from Santa Fe. And through the years, her stays grew longer and longer. This includes the years in the early 1930s when she stopped painting, recovering from a breakdown after finding out about Stieglitz’s infidelity, up until his death in 1946, until she moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949, finally able to redefine herself as an artist on her own terms. She was completely beguiled by the warmth and clarity of the landscape, the arid heat, the strong light, the deep shadows – in her words, its beautiful, untouched loneliness. The perfect place to be a loner. “As soon as I saw it,” she said, “that was my country. I never saw anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. There’s something that’s in the air, it’s just different. The sky is different. The stars are different. The wind is different.”
And we can see how this new world infiltrated her art while still reinforcing elements of her work that already existed. Though the verticals of New York became the horizontals of New Mexico, the sharp contrasts between skyscraper and sky are recast as a sharp line between adobe roofs, the desert light and desert shadow. Her art begins to take on elements of the flat, indigenous Southwestern style – for her, a rebirth of the Japanese design elements that shaped her early work under Arthur Dow. Her iconic trademarks from this period of her work, like with her abstracted flowers, are a tension between the real and the imagined. A tangible, tactile skull against a surreal, impossible sky.
Which brings us to the painting at hand, Deer’s Skull with Pedernal. It’s a painting as sparse at the landscape itself, with only three main components: the deer skull, the sky, and Pedernal, the distinctive, flat-topped mountain, comfortably settled in the bottom of the background, as if supporting the weight of the painting on its shoulders. Pedernal, visible from Ghost Ranch, would have been familiar and stabilizing to O’Keeffe, who painted the mountain over and over again, much like Paul Cezanne painted his Mt. St. Victoire. It’s almost like these mountains, so solid and unchanging, become friends to the artists who capture them, and like Cezanne, O’Keeffe felt a spiritual connection to its presence, writing, “it’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” It’s hard, too, to overlook the similarity between this depiction of Pedernal and the equally iconic form of Mount Fuji, which also supports the scene from below in Hokusai’s famous print of “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” Both are necessary players that are happy to cede the spotlight. Both mountains have iconic, recognizable shapes that both anchor the space and contextualize the viewer, and provide a deeply meaningful backdrop for the locals. And this connection, whether intentional or not, reinforces the Japanese composition to the painting, how in both the painting and the print, the mountain exists in a background, but nothing is mediating it from the foreground. Here and there are flattened, compressed. The stability of the background is inextricable from the energy of the foreground. And while in The Great Wave, this compression of space creates a sense of immediacy, here it gives the scene a sense of unreality, drawing attention to how little vast space we can really take in with our own eyes. “The unexplainable thing that nature makes me feel,” O’Keeffe said, “is that the world is big far beyond my understanding. I understand maybe by trying to put it into form. To find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.”
And this surrealist touch is carried through to the skull in the foreground, painted with such faithful anatomical precision and yet defying reality in the same way that perfect, photorealistic apple hovers in space in Magritte’s Son of Man from episode 32. Because when we look through the eye holes in the skull, instead of seeing what we should be seeing, the tree that the skull hangs from, we see piercing blue sky. It’s a minor visual detail, perhaps, but it still startles our expectations, reinforcing that there’s something deeper going on here than just a still life. Bones were especially meaningful to O’Keeffe, who began collecting them almost as soon as she arrived in New Mexico in 1929, quickly realizing that flowers that were nowhere to be found. And like flowers, bones were symbolic of the lifecycle that shaped the natural world, and made repeated appearances in her work. “Bones,” she wrote, “cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive in the desert.” And they become a metaphor for O’Keeffe herself, so keenly alive in the desert. You can imagine her taking long solo drives into the New Mexican planes in her Ford Model A, stopping frequently to walk around and collect bones, and then returning to her car, swiveling around the driver’s seat to paint in the empty space of the backseat that she had already removed. And again, we feel the tension between the real and the abstract. The empirical reality of this life as she lived it, the sweat and dust and the smell of the oil paint in the hot car, her weary bones, the blue sky, and then the abstraction of that sky, its limitlessness, its luminescence, that can only be accessed and contained through organic, ossified remains of something so temporary. In her words, “I was most interested in the holes in the bones, what I saw through them, particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky, as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world.”
And it makes us realize that this painting, more than any other, might actually be the quintessential O’Keeffe. She had a quirky personal code of putting a star on the back of canvas when she was particularly pleased with how it turned out, and you had better believe that this canvas has one. Because it’s so clearly O’Keeffe on her own terms, a clear step in the evolution of the art she wanted to make as she got older, surreal and succinct and unmistakably vagina-free. It embodies this perfect tension between the world she inhabited and the world she imagined, a tension that continues to echo outside the frame, long after her death in 1986, when this deer’s skull was found among her possessions and her ashes were scatted atop Perdenal, as though reciprocating God’s gift to her. A tension, fundamentally, between the abstract timelessness of her work and a life exuberantly lived: no longer her husband’s, no longer her critics’, and finally, fully, her own.