Poet of The Desert

By Stefan Kanfer

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE: A LIFE by Roxana Robinson

Harper & Row; 639 pages; $25

One of her earliest memories was of "the light -- light all around." Georgia O'Keeffe spent her life trying to recapture that elemental radiance on paper and canvas. The quest began obscurely on the loam of Sun Prairie, Wis., and ended famously in the desert of Abiquiu, N. Mex. O'Keeffe was the daughter of an Irish-American farmer and a Hungarian American of aristocratic descent. As art historian Roxana Robinson discloses in this romantic but insightful biography, both strains were apparent from the beginning. The child had six siblings, and she could be highly social and convivial. But it took great effort, and she once admitted, "I don't take easily to being with people."

The person who caused her the greatest unease was photographer Alfred Stieglitz. His relationship began with a passionate interest in O'Keeffe's drawings; it progressed to a passionate interest in O'Keeffe. Twenty-three years separated them. She was on leave from a teaching job in Texas; he was tied to Manhattan. She was single and unknown; he was married and prominent.

After Stieglitz abandoned his family, he and O'Keeffe took up residence in upstate New York. There, before company, he would rise and lead her up the stairs. "We'd say we were going to have a nap," recalled O'Keeffe. "Then we'd make love. Afterwards he would take photographs of me." Stieglitz shot some 300 of those pictures, and they constitute a statement far beyond the pleasure principle. From every angle, the long melancholy face radiates an unconventional beauty; the nude torso takes on the authority and bulk of sculpture. Before the onlooker, the model is gradually transformed into a work of art.

In 1919 O'Keeffe exhibited the bold flower paintings that further inflamed her reputation. They have since become the staple of a prolific calendar and poster industry. But when the overripe irises and hollyhocks first appeared, the critics were intrigued, the public scandalized, the artist discomfited. When an interviewer remarked that the blossoms resembled female genitalia, O'Keeffe ordered her to turn off the microphone and refused to speak about "such rubbish."

Stieglitz finally married his mistress in 1924. But several years later, he became infatuated with a younger woman. A series of domestic and professional skirmishes followed; O'Keeffe suffered a breakdown and stopped painting. It was two years before she saw a way out: "If I can keep my courage and leave Stieglitz," she told a friend, "I plan to go West."

She kept her courage and took long sojourns in New Mexico. But she never made a complete break. Shortly before his death at 82 in 1946, Stieglitz attended a Museum of Modern Art show and sent a love letter: "Incredible Georgia -- and how beautiful your pictures are . . . Oh Georgia -- we are a team." And so they remain in the public imagination.

Still, it is the later artist who has won a more valid celebrity. This is the solitary poet of the desert, interpreter of bleached bone and sand and light -- light all around. O'Keeffe lived to be 98 and became the '60s and '70s apotheosis of feminine independence. But she was never quite so leathery as she appeared. Robinson's final chapters suggest a Tennessee Williams scenario, with an old woman smitten and exploited by her handsome protege, ceramist Juan Hamilton. Over the family's protests, Hamilton manipulated the painter's affairs until her death in 1986. He was eventually awarded 24 paintings and her house.

Yet the work outlives the folly and redeems the sadness. Throughout the artist's long career, that was always the case. Every biography of O'Keeffe -- including this massive one -- is really an elaboration of the message she sent a student back in 1924: "Making your unknown known is the important thing -- and keeping the unknown always beyond you. Catching, crystalizing your simpler clearer vision of life -- only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead -- that you must always keep working to grasp."