Georgia O'Keeffe's West - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Peter H. Hassrick

This ardent, mystical place drew O'Keeffe to seek an adventure in personal and creative independence. The West became her special place into which even her friends and associates ventured only by invitation. There she could be free of Stieglitz's aura and could develop her own vision away from male expectations and the constraints of eastern life.

In all, O'Keeffe's vast body of work created in Texas and New Mexico provides a spiritual anthem to the region. Like the contours and folds of her landscape views she became intertwined with her subject. As her friend Doris Bry observed, O'Keeffe became part of the West and the West a part of her.(15)

1 "A Note on Georgia O'Keeffe," Contemporary Arts of the South and Southwest, vol. 1 (November/December 1932), p. 7.

2 Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe (Penguin, New York, 1977), opp. Pl. 6.

3 Quoted in Jack Cowart et al., Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1987), p. 157.

4 Quoted in Sharyn Udall, Spud Johnson & Laughing Horse (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1994), p. 401.

5 Quoted in Cowart et al., Georgia O'Keeffe p. 203. See also Patricia Trenton and Patrick T. Houlihan, Native Americans: Five Centuries of Changing Images (Abrams, New York, 1989), pp. 276-278.

6 O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe, opp. Pl. 64.

7 Patterson Sims, Georgia O'Keeffe: A Concentration of Works from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1981), p. 25.

8 John Marin, The Selected Writings of John Marin, ed. Dorothy Norman (Pellegrini and Cudahy, New York, 1949), p. 127.

9 "O'Keeffe's Originality," in The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, ed. Peter H. Hassrick (Abrams, New, York, 1997), p. 100.

10 O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe, opp. Pl. 84.

11 Ibid., opp. Pl. 74.

12 New York Sun, January 15, 1994.

13 Cowart et al., Georgia O'Keeffe, p. 2.

14 American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Knopf, New York, 1997), p. 395.

15 Georgia O'Keeffe in the West, ed. Doris Bry and Nicholas Callaway (Knopf, New York, 1989), p. 104.

PETER H. HASSRICK was the founding director of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico.