Full Bloom by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Author:Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393343090
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

Despite her high hopes, O’Keeffe found Taos less amusing than the previous year. Initially, she stayed at the Luhans and took her meals in town, but she soon moved to the historic Sagebrush Inn. The Strands, Marin, and Ansel Adams came to stay at Los Gallos. O’Keeffe joined them on drives to Santa Fe, stopping along the way to shoot at tin cans. Adams said he found O’Keeffe “not as frigid as last year.”16

Dodge Luhan was insulted that O’Keeffe wouldn’t stay at Los Gallos, so the artist agreed to visit on the evenings that she was not too tired from painting. The first night that she expressed interest, however, Dodge Luhan said, “You can’t come. Tony’s invited the peyote singers here and we have too many people.” When Luhan came in the Cadillac to pick her up, O’Keeffe informed him that she had been uninvited by Mabel. Luhan was loyal to O’Keeffe. He retorted, “‘I go to lot of trouble, get peyote singers. She no invite my friend, I not go.’ He sat there all evening, rocking in the corner.”17 Fifty years later, O’Keeffe recalled this incident with obvious relish.

O’Keeffe later chuckled, “I enjoyed worrying her, I must admit. One of my favorite ways to worry her would be to leave her house after a party and pretend I’d forgotten to say goodbye to Tony, and then come back and say good bye to Tony.”18

Dodge Luhan loved a good argument. O’Keeffe stayed above the fray, but Dodge Luhan squabbled incessantly with her friends Brett and Frieda. After D. H. Lawrence died in 1930, Frieda returned to Taos with her husband’s ashes. She was so worried that either Dodge Luhan or Brett would steal them that she had them mixed with cement and built a memorial to Lawrence that still stands at Kiowa Ranch. Furious about her decision, Dodge Luhan and Brett boycotted the memorial service.

By the end of summer, O’Keeffe concluded that Taos society was too incestuous for her taste. She described the town as “so beautiful—and so poisonous—the only way to live in it is to strictly mind your own business . . . most of the human side of it isn’t worth thinking about.”19

The landscape was captivating. She returned to the Ranchos Church and completed two more paintings of the rear wall as well one of the front, with church towers and white crosses, Ranchos Church, Front. She painted Church Steeple, a white cross on a bell tower against an ultramarine sky. Abstraction, a painting of silvery angles, perhaps the edges of seaweed or agave plants, was sold to the Boston heiress Mary Wheelwright, who owned a ranch in New Mexico.

Around Taos, O’Keeffe made drawings of the pine-covered mountains, which she translated into paintings. Taos Mountain, New Mexico is hatched with planes of slate, sage, and pink, with mesquite scrub in the foreground, while Hills Before Taos is blanketed in soft green. But these paintings’ color schemes may have been too reminiscent of Lake George, and O’Keeffe drove

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