Archives offer a peek at an artist's life at its most unguarded

“It is an old one I was about to throw away but Dan [Catton] Rich paid to keep it,” writes O’Keeffe of the painting she had found lying around. “I was tempted to use the vacuum cleaner on it but didn’t. I know it is very dusty …”

A vacuum cleaner!

Personal archives rarely disappoint, and these in particular are enlightening, as they focus on a famous cultural figure whose curated public image is all most of us know of her. Here, amid bookshelves and display cases, the engaged visitor can peek at O’Keeffe’s intimate life at its most unguarded — a life of mundane daily routines and inconveniences (and dust), behind garden walls and closed doors and shuttered windows, away from cameras and biographers (and prying reporters).

The archives, founded in 2001, is the only one in the U.S. that is solely dedicated to O’Keeffe, and, along with the library, focus mainly on the artist’s New Mexico years. This speaks not only to the archives’ uniqueness but also to that of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as a whole, a rare single-artist museum whose exhibitions both the archives and library support.

Robinson’s Georgia O’Keeffe — A Life was published in 1989. She conducted part of her research in the late 1980s at the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, which is housed in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

But, she says, “I look forward to spending time at the archives in Santa Fe. My book could have been very different had they been already open then.”

Elizabeth Ehrnst, the head of Research Collections and Services at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the person who oversees the library and archive, says that although part of the library and archives comes from generous donations of materials, the institution continues to acquire new items whenever possible.

“There are definitely materials around that are held privately, and we are aware of them,” Ehrnst says. “Sometimes we purchase materials at auctions, and sometimes we purchase them from individuals.”

Ehrnst can’t wait to move the books from the book room in Abiquiú to the archives and library in Santa Fe by the end of the year, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. “It will allow us to make the books available to the public,” she says. Ehrnst adds that she enjoys finding small objects O’Keeffe left inside books, like feathers or small notes and pressed flowers and clovers.

The way she didn’t mean for the world to see her hidden feathers, O’Keeffe may not have meant for the world to see her 1969 letter to Keck. It was, after all, a short note she sent to her art conservator to request a cleaning of her work. The letter was not a deep meditation on colors or a musing on a life well lived under a gigantic New Mexico sky

Rather, it shows Georgia as she was, a no-nonsense and powerful woman of a certain age who’d had it with the desert dust. We can almost picture her with that old painting of hers that she didn’t seem to care much about (and thank goodness for Dan Rich, who rescued it).

Dust in New Mexico is inescapable, and the old painting must have accumulated quite a bit of it, leading the artist to consider resorting to a vacuum that would have likely damaged the canvas beneath the oil paint, if not the oil paint itself.

If you see the letter on display at the archives, you might laugh, too — or, you might feel horrified, the way Keck must have on receiving O’Keeffe’s letter. ◀

Ania Hull is a Canadian and European journalist and writer based in New Mexico. She writes about book culture, the arts, immigration, and environmental justice.