Hawaii paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) created a series of 20 paintings based on imagery from the Hawaiian Islands during her nine-week visit to the Territory of Hawaii in 1939. O'Keeffe's trip was part of an all-expenses paid commercial art commission from the Philadelphia advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son on behalf of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, later known as Dole. The company arranged for O'Keeffe to paint two works, without any artistic restrictions, for a magazine advertising campaign for pineapple juice. Two of the paintings from this commission, Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii and Pineapple Bud, were used in advertisements that appeared in popular American magazines in 1940.

The exhibition of the complete Hawaii series of paintings, comprising flowers, landscapes, and cultural artifacts, has only been shown together in their entirety once, appearing in O'Keeffe's original showing at An American Place from February 1 to March 17, 1940. The original exhibition led to the sale of one work, Cup of Silver Ginger, which contemporaneously entered the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Subsequent public exhibitions in 1990, 2013, and 2018, have shown only part of the series due to some of the works being held in different private and public museum collections. This series of Hawaii paintings by O'Keeffe is sometimes referred to as her "tropical period".

Background[edit]

It was often rumored that O'Keeffe was the uncredited designer of the logo for Old Dutch Cleanser.[1]

Georgia O'Keeffe was raised on a large, rural dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in the late 19th century. Her exposure to nature during her childhood is said to have contributed to her artistic development, leading her to focus on becoming an artist at a young age. O'Keeffe's mother encouraged all five of her daughters to study art, as women on farms were responsible for decorating their homes. Her mother also helped educate her children. O'Keeffe studied art at a Catholic girls' high school, where at the age of 14, she first began focusing on larger images in her paintings in response to a nun who criticized a drawing of two hands she had made as tiny and out of proportion. After graduating from high school in 1905, she began taking life drawing classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under John Vanderpoel, whose impact as a teacher would stay with her throughout her life. She left the school after she came down with typhoid, forcing her to spend a long time at home recovering.[2]

By 1907, she was well enough to begin studying at the Art Students League in New York with William Merritt Chase, who taught his students to work quickly and to create a new painting each day. She won a scholarship in 1908 for her painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot, but financial problems caused O'Keeffe to leave art school and move to Chicago in late 1908, where she began working as a commercial artist. She took freelance commercial commissions in the fashion advertisement industry and corporate and business commissions in Chicago and New York, drawing lace and embroidery designs for women's clothing advertisements, often for 12 hours at a time, six days a week.[3] Her job required illustrators to quickly produce work for daily newspaper deadlines, and there was no end to job opportunities for those who could keep up. O'Keeffe later credited Chase for teaching her to paint quickly, a skill that was useful in the fast-paced commercial art world. But, according to author Laurie Lisle, O'Keeffe was not happy with commercial art work, as it brought home the "horror of meaningless work".[4]

O'Keeffe came down with the measles in 1910, leaving her vision too weak to continue illustrating advertisements.[5] This forced her to recover with her family, who were now living in Virginia, putting an end to her commercial pursuits. This was also around the time when she stopped painting. Up to this point, her academic art studies in the European style had only taken her so far. O'Keeffe recalled: "I began to realize that a lot of people had done this same kind of painting before I came along. It had been done and I didn't think I could do it any better."[6] After recuperating, she began taking drawing classes at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in 1912. Her sister Anita noticed O'Keeffe was no longer painting, and invited her to take classes from Alon Bement, who was training students to teach art to children. Bement relied on the Dow Method, the artistic approach of his mentor, Arthur Wesley Dow a mostly unknown artist and arts educator innovator. Dow's philosophy of art ("produce original work", "fill a space in a beautiful way") would lead to lasting, profound changes for O'Keeffe as an artist for the rest of her life.[7]

Everything changed for O'Keeffe in 1915. At the age of 28 she made the rash decision to destroy all of her existing art work, concluding it was too derivative.[α] This would take her in an entirely new direction. Putting the color palette aside for several years, O'Keeffe worked simply in black and white, using charcoal to create abstract expressionist works based on original ideas. Sharing her new style with her friend Anita Pollitzer, O'Keeffe told her to keep them private and not to show anyone. Disregarding her wishes, Pollitzer shared them with photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946).[8] At this time, O'Keeffe began teaching art at Columbia College and taking additional courses by Dow. Stieglitz began showing her work at his gallery in 1916, giving O'Keeffe an entire show to herself by 1917. They soon married in 1924. Stieglitz was strictly opposed to commercial art, and his position created friction between the two of them.[9] In 1937, Steuben Glass Works invited O'Keeffe, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, and Salvador Dalí to design crystal works for the company. O'Keeffe took the commission, designing a jimsonweed flower[β] which was etched on a crystal bowl.[10]

Ayer commission[edit]

By the late 1930s, O'Keeffe was highly productive and sought after, and her profile as an artist had reached a crescendo with multiple exhibitions and mixed, yet positive reviews. In April 1936, she and Stieglitz moved into the Arno penthouse at 405 East Fifty-fourth Street. Months later, Elizabeth Arden, then one of the wealthiest women in the world, commissioned O'Keeffe to paint Jimson Weed (1936) for her new Gymnasium Moderne. By February 1938, Life magazine was calling O'Keeffe "America's most famous and successful woman artist". In May of that same year, she received an honorary doctorate from the College of William & Mary, which was arranged by Earl B. Thomas, an old friend of O'Keeffe's who was now working for Philadelphia advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son as an executive.[11] Ayer was commissioning famous artists for their clients, bringing fine art to commercial advertisements. Ayer represented the Hawaiian Pineapple Company account, and Thomas would soon make O'Keeffe an offer to join their campaign. By July, O'Keeffe told friend and fellow artist William Einstein that she was considering taking the commission.[12]

In the 1930s, Ayer art director Charles T. Coiner was partly responsible for the popularity of marketing fine art with commercial products, particularly for clients like DeBeers, Steinway & Sons, and the Container Corporation of America. Coiner hired modern artists to perausde customers of the quality of purchasing products made by Ayer's clients in high-end magazine advertisements.[13] In 1932, Hawaiian Pineapple (later known as Dole) had came close to bankruptcy. To get out of the red, they spent $1.5 million on advertising, using famous artists to generate interest in their product.[14] Coiner took the Dole account in 1933, making changes to their advertising strategy. Before coming to Ayer, Dole focused on the health and nutrition of pineapple. Coiner turned this around and changed the product attention to Hawaii itself. Japanese-American painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi and California Scene painter Millard Sheets were matched with Hawaiian Pineapple Company advertisements. Coiner next invited American artist Isamu Noguchi and modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe to join the campaign. In the summer of 1938, O'Keeffe was offered an all-expenses paid, nine-week trip to the territory of Hawaii as a commercial art commission for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. In exchange, O'Keeffe agreed to produce two paintings without artistic restrictions for a magazine advertising campaign for canned pineapple juice. O'Keeffe was hesitant at first, but Coiner managed to convince her to take the commission.[13]

Voyage to Hawaii[edit]

Before traveling to the Hawaiian Islands, O'Keeffe finished hanging her paintings at Stieglitz's gallery in preparation for her annual exhibition at An American Place. Georgia O'Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils and Pastels ran from January 22 to March 17, 1939, a showing of 22 paintings in her absence.[15] On January 30, 1939, Stieglitz took O'Keeffe to the Grand Central Station in Manhattan, where she departed for the Hawaii Territory.[16] After arriving in San Francisco, O'Keeffe boarded the SS Lurline, a Matson luxury cruise ship that took her to Oahu, finally arriving in Honolulu on February 8.[17] The entire trip, from New York to Hawaii, took her nine days.[16]

Arrival, interisland travel[edit]

O'Keeffe's ship arrived at Honolulu Harbor on February 8, 1939. She was met by a representative from Ayer (thought to be John S. Coonley) who took a tender out to the boat, and Helen Richards, the wife of Atherton Richards, president and manager of Hawaiian Pineapple, who waited for O'Keeffe on the dock. Both Coonley and Richards brought O'Keeffe traditional flower leis as a greeting, which greatly impressed her. She soon checked into the Moana Hotel in Waikīkī. In a radio postal telegraph to Stieglitz soon after arriving, she writes: "Arrived this morning feeling fine. Lovely summer weather here. Hope you are alright."[18]

O'Keeffe spent almost four of the nine weeks on Oahu.[16] She wanted to live and work among the workers on the Dole plantation to best capture the images for her commission. Contrary to her wishes, the pineapple company refused to allow this. Due to the social, racial, and gender norms of the 1930s, the company discriminated against women and segregated the fieldworkers, making O'Keeffe's plan impossible for them to fulfill. The company was also unable to provide adequate samples of the crops for her to model. "O'Keeffe insisted on staying in the village where the pineapple workers lived, to avoid making the long round-trip drive there every day", writes art historian Michele H. Bogart. "Taken aback, the representative tried to explain that local custom would not permit such a close association between an upper-class white woman and native workers."[19] Angered by this treatment, the story goes, O'Keeffe was unable to paint a pineapple in Hawaii until she returned home.[20] Research by Honolulu Museum of Art curator Theresa Papanikolas indicates that this established narrative may not be entirely accurate. Papanikolas believes that letters written home by O'Keeffe indicate she tried to paint a pineapple while still in Hawaii.[21][γ]

On February 23, she visited Kauai, spending two days on the island, visiting with artist Reuben Tam (1916–1991) in Kapaʻa. During her stay, she was hosted by Robert Allerton and John Gregg Allerton at the former Hawaiian Royal tropical estate, now known as the Allerton Garden.[16] After flying back to Oahu and spending additional time there, O'Keeffe visited Maui on March 10, where she was a guest of Willis Jennings, the manager of the Kaeleku Sugar Company plantation. His daughter, Patricia Jennings, took O'Keeffe on a guided tour of Hana, Iao Valley, and Haleakalā crater.[23]

On March 28, she left Maui for the Big Island on an interisland steamboat that arrived in Hilo the next day. She was met by her hosts, the Shipman family, who took her on a tour of a black sand beach, and later Kīlauea, where she stayed at the Volcano House. The next day, she traveled to Kona, and spent the remainder of her time there on the west side. She returned to Honolulu on April 10 to prepare for her departure to the mainland.[23]

Departure and return[edit]

O'Keeffe left Hawaii on April 19, 1939, on the ocean liner SS Matsonia. Her first stop was in Los Angeles, followed by San Francisco, where she took a train back to New York. Upon her return to New York, she began to get back into her routine through the month of May, but she began to experience serious health problems.[23]

Sometime in May, O'Keeffe began suffering from what she described as exhaustion. In a letter to art critic Henry McBride (1867–1962) dated July 22, 1939, she writes that she had been seeing a physician three times a week and had remained mostly bedridden for six weeks prior to the letter.[24] She experienced "stomach problems, headaches, and weight loss".[25] Meanwhile, the commission for Dole loomed large. She began painting, and by June or July, O'Keeffe completed Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii, an image of a lobster claw heliconia, and Papaw Tree, Īao Valley, Maui, an image of a papaya tree. Both were submitted to Ayer to fulfill the commission for the canned pineapple juice ads.[25] She did not go to New Mexico that year and she stopped painting entirely until October.[26]

O'Keeffe often spoke about returning to Hawaii. In 1958, she wrote a letter to Ansel Adams, telling him that her two best experiences were going to Yosemite with him in 1938 and visiting Hawaii in 1939.[27] She eventually returned to Maui in May 1982, visiting the island with Juan Hamilton and his family.[28]

Advertisements[edit]

Although it was never demanded or specified that O'Keeffe would produce a painting featuring a pineapple, her two submissions featuring a heliconia flower and a papaya tree caused some confusion. Ayer art director Charles T. Coiner recalled that O'Keeffe "came back with all kinds of beautiful paintings but nothing to do with pineapple...I said, 'I wonder if you couldn't paint the pineapple flower.'"[29] O'Keeffe explained to Coiner what had happened and how she was prevented from painting the pineapple by Dole and how she was provided with a terrible specimen unfit for painting. Coiner quickly made arrangements to send her a viable plant.[29] In less than two days, Coiner had a new pineapple plant shipped by plane from Hawaii to New York for O'Keeffe to paint. Sometime between June and July, O'Keeffe eventually completed her commission, producing Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii and Pineapple Bud for Dole to use in their advertisements.[23] Her previous submission candidate,Papaw Tree, Īao Valley, Maui, a painting of a papaya tree, was rejected by Dole because their direct competitor at the time produced papaya juice.[30]

Two separate print advertisements for Dole Pineapple Juice used two different paintings to accompany the ads. Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii was the first to be published, appearing in The Saturday Evening Post in April 1940 and a year later in Vogue in February 1941. Pineapple Bud was the second advertisement used, first appearing in Ladies' Home Journal in October 1940,[δ] followed by its subsequent use in Woman's Home Companion in November of that same year.[31] Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii shows an image of a red heliconia in close view with the ocean in the background along the bottom; an island can be seen along the horizon with low-lying clouds. The text accompanying the ad using Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii reads in part: "Hospitable Hawaii cannot send you its abundance of flowers or its sunshine. But it sends you something reminiscent of both—golden, fragrant Dole Pineapple Juice."[23] The ad for Pineapple Bud shows a framed painting of a close-up of a small, newly formed pineapple surrounded by its leaves. The ad presents this image in the context of art as a "First Showing: A Dole Pineapple Bud from Hawaii". The text at the bottom of the ad reads in part: "Perhaps you have never seen a pineapple bud—and words cannot describe the glowing crater of color which on the Dole plantations grows and ripens into a luscious big pineapple...Perhaps you have never tasted Dole Pineapple Juice—and there is no other way to discover the fragrant, zestful goodness of this pure juice."[32]

Paintings[edit]

O'Keeffe's ad hoc digital catalogue raisonné indicates that she completed a total of 44 works in 1939, of which 23 were drawings and 21 were oil paintings, 20 of which are part of the Hawaii painting series.[33] Of those 20, there are eleven paintings of flowers, seven showing Hawaii landscapes, and two depicting cultural artifacts.[34] Although Hawaii is known for its native plant species, none of the flowers or plants depicted in O'Keeffe's paintings are endemic to Hawaii.[35] The plants and flowers O'Keeffe painted represent introduced species that had been brought to the Hawaiian Islands, initially by Polynesian voyagers, and much later, Europeans, over a combined period of 1500 years.[ε] It is not entirely clear which paintings were completed in Hawaii and which were finished on the mainland in New York, but O'Keeffe acknowledged this distinction in her original 1940 exhibition statement.[ζ] Previously, art historians like Lisa Messinger have dismissed O'Keeffe's Hawaii paintings as "very beautiful", but of "secondary importance" because they were perceived as formulaic and lacking innovation. Messinger considers O'Keeffe's Maui paintings as some of her best of the Hawaii period, with Bella Donna as her crowning achievement in the series.[37]

Flowers[edit]

Crab's Claw Ginger Hawaii was owned by Dole Company from 1940 to 1976. After that time, the work passed through 10 separate owners, finally settling with Laila and Thurston Twigg-Smith in 1988, where it remained for 33 years. In 2021, it was sold by their descendant Sharon Twigg-Smith at Phillips for more than $7.7 million.[38]

Landscapes[edit]

On Maui, it is believed that O'Keeffe painted Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast, No. I in Hana and her waterfall series at the Iao Valley.[39] O'Keffee painted for three days in late March at Iao Valley and talked about the experience in letters to Stieglitz and Ettie Stettheimer. Her guide on Maui, the young Patricia Jennings, witnessed O'Keeffe painting the waterfall series at Iao Valley and wrote about it, a somewhat rare event as O'Keeffe did not normally let people watch her paint.[40]

Cultural artifacts[edit]

Fishhook From Hawaii, No. 1 was bequested to the Brooklyn Museum in 1987 after O'Keeffe's death. The Brooklyn Museum held a special place for O'Keeffe as that was where she held her first retrospective museum exhibition in 1927. Fishhook From Hawaii, No. 2 was gifted to the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1987, also after her death.

Exhibitions[edit]

O'Keeffe's Hawaii paintings have been exhibited together, in whole or in part, four times, initially by O'Keeffe herself in 1940. Fifty years later, curator Jennifer Saville organized an exhibition in 1990, followed by two separate exhibitions curated by Theresa Papanikolas in 2013 and later in 2018.[41]

O'Keeffe's original exhibition of the Hawaii series was shown at her annual exhibition at An American Place from February 1 to March 17, 1940. It was well received by the public and critics alike, and led to the sale of Cup of Silver Ginger to the Baltimore Museum of Art.[42] Time magazine published a positive review of the exhibition.[30]

In the intervening five decades, many of the paintings appeared by themselves at exhibitions, but were not all exhibited together as they existed in disparate public and private collections throughout the United States. Saville was able to gather 18 of the 20 Hawaii paintings for the Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings of Hawaiʻi exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts from March 22 through May 6, 1990, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the original showing at An American Place.[43]

In 2013, Papanikolas organized 12 of the 20 works from the series along with a joint showing of Ansel Adams' work in Hawaii at the Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaiʻi Pictures exhibition, also at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, from July 18, 2013, until January 12, 2014. The exhibition traveled to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum from February 7 to September 14, 2014.[44] In 2018, Papanikolas also curated the Georgia O'Keeffe: Visions of Hawaiʻi exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, along with a horticultural exhibition of Hawaiian plants and flowers from the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. 17 of the 20 works in the Hawaii series were shown.[45]

Works[edit]

External image
image icon Georgia O'Keeffe in Hawaii, 1939, photographs, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Notes and references[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot escaped O'Keeffe's destruction of all of her early work in 1915 only because it was held by the Art Students League.[2]
  2. ^ See Steuben Glass Bowl with Jimson Weed Image, 1938. Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. CR 947
  3. ^ Much later, in 1980, Stieglitz's niece, artist Georgia Engelhard (1906–1986), would tell biographer Sarah Whitaker Peters (1924–2019) about O'Keeffe's process which often involved initially painting small objects from a model to get the motif in place, "working from realism to abstraction", and later finishing the work from memory based on their impressions.[22]
  4. ^ "First Showing: A Dole Pineapple Bud from Hawaii". Ladies' Home Journal. 57 (10): 61. October 1940.
  5. ^ Haupt Conservatory. "Likely unknown to the artist, many of the plants she encountered–and ultimately painted–were not native to the Hawaiian Islands, but had been introduced over the course of human habitation beginning approximately 1,500 years ago. Her depictions of hibiscus, plumeria, bird-of-paradise, and even banana–an ornamental variety–provide a snapshot of the tourist’s Hawai'i, and serve as a record of her initial exploration of her new surroundings."
  6. ^ "Some of them were painted in Hawaii, some were painted here in New York from drawings or memories of things brought home."[36]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Drohojowska-Philp 2005, pp. 72-74, 76; Lisle 1997, p. 53.
  2. ^ a b Wright 1996, pp. 4-7.
  3. ^ Lisle 1997, p. 52-53; Wright 1996, pp. 4-7.
  4. ^ Lisle 1997, p. 52-53.
  5. ^ Lisle 1997, p. 53.
  6. ^ Kuh 1962, p. 189.
  7. ^ Wright 1996, p. 7; Kuh 1962, p. 189.
  8. ^ Riley 1995, p. 168.
  9. ^ Saville 1990, pp. 15-16.
  10. ^ Robinson 1999, p. 427.
  11. ^ Drohojowska-Philp 2005, pp. 363-376.
  12. ^ Cowart et al. 1987, pp. 224-226; Saville 1990, pp. 11-12.
  13. ^ a b Saville 1990, pp. 11-13.
  14. ^ Bogart 1995, pp. 157-170.
  15. ^ Drohojowska-Philp 2005, pp. 379-380; 1938 Annual Exhibition catalog notes.
  16. ^ a b c d Saville 2011, pp. 7-8.
  17. ^ Saville 1990, p. 13.
  18. ^ Saville 2012, pp. 88-91, 123.
  19. ^ Bogart 1995, pp. 165-166.
  20. ^ Saville 1990, p. 13; Scott 2020, pp. 30-31.
  21. ^ Papanikolas 2013, pp. 13, 19; O'Connell 2013.
  22. ^ Peters 2006 p. 16.
  23. ^ a b c d e Saville 2011, p. 19-20.
  24. ^ Cowart et al. 1987, pp. 228, 286.
  25. ^ a b Saville 2011, p. 20.
  26. ^ Cowart et al. 1987, p. 293.
  27. ^ Saville 1990, p. 20, 64.
  28. ^ Drohojowska-Philp 2005, p. 537.
  29. ^ a b Cass 1989.
  30. ^ a b Time 1940, p. 42.
  31. ^ Saville 1990, p. 64.
  32. ^ Saville 2011, pp. 27, 98.
  33. ^ Georgia O'Keeffe Museum 2024.
  34. ^ Saville 1990, pp. 21-61.
  35. ^ Katz 2018
  36. ^ Saville 1990, p. 17.
  37. ^ Messinger 2001, p. 121.
  38. ^ Phillips 2021.
  39. ^ Drohojowska-Philp 2005, pp. 381-382.
  40. ^ Saville 2011, pp. 12-18.
  41. ^ Papanikolas 2013, pp. 8, 15; Papanikolas 2018.
  42. ^ Saville 1990, pp. 18-19.
  43. ^ Saville 1990, p. 7.
  44. ^ Papanikolas 2013, p. 107.
  45. ^ Hamilton 2018, p. C13.

Bibliography[edit]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hawaii_paintings_by_Georgia_O%27Keeffe&oldid=1225034223"