Uncommon grace

 

We've got Oriental Poppies in the powder room. Hasn't always been there, of course--we've only been in the house for nine years. But we've had it--well, a print of the famous Georgia O'Keeffe painting--for quite a few decades of our married lives.

Bought it in Santa Fe, as I remember, where we spent a memorably passionate anniversary years and years ago, in what seems another age (and it was). Georgia O'Keeffe's life changed when an American artist named Albert Stieglitz, a man twenty years her senior spotted her work and featured it in his gallery. Stieglitz was a wonderful photographer, probably the most powerful "arteest" of his day. Being featured in his gallery was something a young teacher at West Texas State University could not have dreamed.

But it happened, and when it did, Georgia O'Keeffe's life changed dramatically. In the late years of the 19th century, Stieglitz was a leader among those who believed that the new technologies (well, the photograph) was surely as much an art form as anything done with an easel on canvas, as his photographs testified--like this one, "Weary."

Stieglitz was twenty years O'Keefe's senior, but he found the young, Texas art teacher impossible to forget, both her work and herself. And thus, as you can imagine, an affair began, Stieglitz being married with children. For a time, until his marriage ended, the young O'Keeffe became his mistress. During that crucial time--and longer, I suppose--Stieglitz could not let his lover alone. She must not have minded his camera because he took at least 300 pictures of her, pictures that, yet today, are memorably beautiful only because they speak volumes of his deep infatuation. Pictures like this

and this.

When Stieglitz dallied with another woman in New York, Georgia O'Keeffe decided to leave for New Mexico. The favor her husband once showed her when he featured his work in his gallery was an immense blessing for her work; but a far greater moment in her artistic life occurred when Georgia O'Keeffe's moved to New Mexico, where what she put on her canvas blossomed in the indescribable colors of the desert Southwest. New Mexico's breathtaking landscape loved Georgia O'Keeffe, and that passion was clearly mutual. Our Oriental Poppies is just one of those paintings.

Here's another. 

Georgia O'Keeffe had never seen anything like the world she now lived in and adored. She told her friends this was her country and stayed. She and Stieglitz had stormy moments thereafter, but she rarely withheld her favors and was, I suppose we'd say today, quite openly bisexual. Just as he hadn't, she didn't stay within what people call "the bounds of marriage." 

Meanwhile, she kept painting.

There's something almost eerily human about her New Mexico landscapes. They greet the eyes and heart somehow, in part because they don't seem at all inanimate. New Mexico fundamentally changed Georgia O'Keeffe in ways Alfred Stieglitz never did or could. 

I don't know if the Dordt College of the mid- to late-Sixties ever formulated it as a behavioral objective of its curriculum back then, but one of the most liberating truths I learned as an undergraduate at a college in the staid Calvinistic/Reformed tradition was, well, common grace--to be specific in this case, how a woman like Georgia O'Keefe, despite breaking every moral dictum that came with "the Christian life" as I heard that phrase used in my boyhood, how a Georgia O'Keeffe was a wonderful gift to all of us because the beauty she could render on a canvas was something that clearly and evidently glorified the Creator. 

We've got a Georgia O'Keefe print, have had it for years. Bought it, I believe, in Santa Fe, at the Georgia O'Keefe museum. That whole story I just outlined isn't the reason why we bought it or why it still hangs in our house. The reason it does is because, my word, it's just plain beautiful. 

Yesterday was her birthday. Reason enough for morning thanks.