There is a Garden in her Face: The Georgic O’Keeffe

Abstract

“The cooking has been done for you in the garden; it’s merely finished in the kitchen,” the English biodynamic gardener Alan Chadwick used to say. These were ideas that Georgia O’Keeffe, the American modernist painter, already had in mind when she decided to devote large attention to the creation of vegetable and fruit gardens in her houses in New Mexico between the 1930s and 1940s. When Chadwick, “the gardener of the souls,” started using his Biodynamic Method of organic gardening and farming in North America in the late 1960s, Miss O’Keeffe was already deeply engaged in an agricultural project that had seen her teaching, prodding, cajoling, and strictly guiding her many assistants and guests in New Mexico. Through her idea of hard work applied in any creative context, O’Keeffe anticipated, following the studies of Adelle Davis, an ecology of food instead of an economy. A strong believer in the energy coming from the patient and enduring cultivation of the earth, in its reproductive power comparable to the work and labor of childbirth, O’Keeffe used her adobe gardens, kitchens and cooking habits as a sort of mystical places where labor turned into blessing, giving birth to beauty. Through the reading of O’Keeffe’s letters and books inspired by her life and work, this article intends to analyze the beginning of an ecological, though aesthetically refined, politics of gardening and food in the hands and mind of the modernist artist. O’Keeffe nimbly moved from the stylish urban class-conscious foods and flats of New York City, in the first decades of the century, to the revolutionary culture of local production in the Southwest. In her garden cultivation and food rituals, O’Keeffe reproduced the spiritual landscape that nourished the body and the soul of men and women, both engaged in the prodigious creative project. In addition, her strong relationship with the Indigenous allowed her to rediscover the organic bases of civilization, the “sober reality” (Norman Brown) that helped her fulfill the meaning of her work: giving birth to beauty.