Georgia O'Keeffe
American, 1887 - 1986
The nervous breakdown so incapacitated O'Keeffe that she did not pursue her art for almost two years. An essential part of her recovery was travel. She renewed her regular summer trips to Abiquiu, New Mexico but also went to Maine, Bermuda and Hawai'i. These trips took her away from the uncomfortable fact of her husband's ongoing relationship with Norman and introduced her to fresh subject matter. In the late 1930s, more than one critic had written that they were getting tired of her Southwest images.
O'Keeffe's three-month sojourn in Hawai'i was at the invitation of the New York advertising agency N.W. Ayer. Ayer executive Earl Thomas, who had arranged an honorary doctorate for O'Keeffe from William and Mary College in Virginia, sent the artist to Hawai'i on the Matson oceanliner S.S. Lurline. The Ayer company had previously commissioned Charles Sheeler to photograph a Ford plant and Edward Steichen to photograph the oceanliner itself for Matson. Dole Company was the client that underwrote O'Keeffe's expenses in exchange for a painting of a pineapple.
During her stay, O'Keeffe traveled around Oahu, Maui, and Hawai'i. She painted landscapes in the 'Iao Valley, numerous flowers including bella donna, hibiscus, plumeria, ginger and lotus, surreal pictures of fishhooks, and formations of black lava. These paintings were featured in the Academy's 1990 exhibition “Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings in Hawai'i.”
This small exhibition features five of the many paintings completed while she was in Hawai'i including natural bridges of black lava and waterfalls, from the Academy's permanent collection. Significantly, she did not paint a pineapple plant or its fruit. Instead, she sent the Ayer company a painting of a papaya tree, the fruit sold by Dole's competitors. She also sent them paintings of a green and pink heliconia plant and a pink ornamental banana. Exasperated Ayer executives finally air-shipped a pineapple plant to O'Keeffe's New York City penthouse. After two more months of procrastination, O'Keeffe completed the painting of a pineapple bud nestled amidst long green leaves and a painting of a red crab's claw ginger plant, which has been generously loaned for this exhibition from a private collection. Both pictures were featured in advertising campaigns extolling the health benefits to be derived from pineapple juice.
While in Hawai'i, O'Keeffe met many prominent local figures including Atherton Richards and Richard Pritzlaff, Hana Plantation manager Willis Jennings, and painter Robert Lee Eskridge, to whom she gave her paints when leaving the islands.
Photographs of O'Keeffe smiling broadly are evidence of her own assertion that she considered Hawai'i one of the most beautiful and remarkable of places. When the Hawaiian paintings were exhibited at An American Place in 1940, her exhibition statement was no less emphatic:
“If my painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me, I may say that these paintings are what I have to give at present for what three months in Hawaii gave to me.”
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