Georgia O'Keeffe: By Myself imagine...

The White Place.

The artist Georgia O'Keeffe

was filmed in New Mexico near the end of her life.

Wouldn't you?

Wouldn't you climb if you were here?

I walked all along the top.

I've worked out here in the wind when the wind blew so

that if I got off my chair, it would blow away.

I don't know how I kept my picture on the easel.

Well, of course it was hot.

And sometimes the Indians would be there.

There's a bunch of trees down there.

The Indians would be under the trees.

And there wasn't any place for me to be in the shade, but under the car.

I thought someone could tell me how to paint a landscape.

But I never found that person.

I had to just settle down and try.

I thought someone could tell me how, but I found nobody could.

They could tell you how they painted their landscape.

But they couldn't tell me to paint mine.

In 1929, on the brink of the Depression, Georgia O'Keeffe,

America's first great Modernist painter, was heading west.

Much of the work for which she is best known lay ahead.

In the bright light of the American desert,

she forged an independent life

and found the solitude she needed for her stunning new art.

Her obsessive sexual relationship with her older lover,

the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, scandalised the public.

It fenced her in, but fed her art.

Her flower forms were seen as a shocking and vibrant

expression of femininity.

It's as if my mind creates shapes that I don't know about.

I can't say it any other way.

I can see shapes.

Her work is often abstract, but always emotional and deeply human.

It has defined the century she lived through.

Now, 30 years after her death,

100 years after her first show in New York,

Tate Modern is holding a major retrospective of Georgia O'Keeffe.

Perhaps the most inspiring woman artist ever.

Georgia O'Keeffe was born here in 1887.

This was pioneer country.

The American Midwest.

People came here from all over.

Her family was Irish and Hungarian.

She doesn't talk much about Wisconsin.

It's open, rolling landscape and the soil is black.

She grew up under a big sky.

It was something she'd be looking for all her life.

Mother would say, "Georgia was the boss."

-She was the oldest of the five sisters.

-Mm-hm.

So she took advantage of her seniority, I think.

Georgia talks about her mother always reading to her.

And her mother had a lovely voice.

She...

would go off more by herself, was happier by herself.

But she would play with this doll family under a tree, by herself,

not with the rest of these children.

Very happy by herself.

I had it in my head when I was, well, I couldn't have been 12,

that I wanted to be a painter, I was going to be a painter.

I remember talking with a little girl and I even re-member her

name, Lena Bucholz.

And I said, "Lena, what are you going to do when you grow up?"

Well, she didn't know. I said, "I'm going to be a painter."

And I remember, as we talked, walking over to the window,

looking out and seeing the children around the schoolyard.

She could have been one of the children in this 19th-century painting.

It was a tradition she was going to blow out of the water.

When she was 19, Georgia got a place at art college in New York.

Very unusual for a farm girl from Wisconsin.

Something happened here that stuck with her for life.

'Eugene Speicher was one of the older students at the league.

'He often stopped me and wanted me to pose for him.

'But I wanted to work myself.

'"It doesn't matter what you do," he said,

'"I'm going to be a great painter.

'"You'll probably end up teaching painting in some girls school."'

So, Speicher gets to paint her. And there it is.

And of course the irony is that she goes on to have an amazing career.

Very few people have the same knowledge of Eugene Speicher.

'I walked up Riverside Drive

'one clear night with three other students. We sat down.

'I studied the outlines of the trees carefully.

'The unevenness of the edges, the mass of the trees, dark,

'solid, very alive.

'I tried to paint it.

'A student told me that my trees should be painted with

'spots of red and blue and green, like the Impressionists.

'I said I hadn't seen anything like that in my trees.

'And he took my painting to show me.

'He painted on my trees, the very part that I thought was so good.

'I worked on it again.

'I couldn't get it to be like the beautiful night that I had seen.

'But I kept it for years.

'It represented an effort towards something that had meaning to me.

'Much more than the work at school.'

You wouldn't think, "Oh, this is a Georgia O'Keeffe."

This looks very much like

the type of work that William Merritt Chase was creating

at the beginning of the 20th century.

This is a still life that he had set up in the class for the students.

-And this is one of Chase's pictures?

-Absolutely.

She's been influenced by Chase, really.

Yeah, she's highly influenced by what Chase is doing.

As you are when you're a student,

you're learning skills of painting, different methods of painting.

Yeah, she's looking to Chase as a model for how to paint.

'Who wants to spend their life painting rabbits and copper bowls?'

She won a prize for her rabbit, a visit to Lake George,

200 miles north of New York City, to an artist's retreat there.

'I went to a summer school for scholarship students.

'We had a sailboat with a red sail.

'The daisies were blooming, the mountains were blue beyond the lake.

'But it just didn't seem to be anything I wanted to paint.

'One night, I stood a moment, looking out across the marshes.

'Then the woods with a few birch trees shining white on beyond.

'It all looked just like I felt.

'Wet and gloomy, very gloomy.

'So I painted it.

'My memory of it is that it was my best painting that summer.

'It was something I had to say.'

I was taught to paint like other people, and I knew that I'd

never paint as well as the person that I was taught to paint like.

There was no reason why I should attempt to do it any better.

I hadn't been taught any way of my own.

Discouraged, she worked as a commercial illustrator for a while,

and even resolved to give up painting.

But ironically, it was the teaching

to which Speicher thought she was doomed that was to save her.

I was offered this job in Texas, and I knew no more about

teaching in a public school than I do about going to the moon.

'The drawing work will be

'under the supervision of Miss Georgia O'Keeffe,

'who has the highest degree known to her profession.

'The children in Amarillo

'will have the best talent that can be secured.'

It was land like the ocean, all the way round.

Hardly anybody liked it, but I loved it.

The wind blew too hard and the dust flew.

We had heavy dust storms and I've come in many times when I

wouldn't have known myself, except I could tell the shape of my clothes.

I'd be the colour of the road.

One of her students remembered how oddly she dressed for the time.

"She dressed like a man, suits and Oxfords that were square toed

"and a man's type felt hat."

We would drive away from the town at night.

You could drive right out into space,

you didn't have to drive on the road.

And when the sunset was gone, you turned around and went back,

you were lighted back by the light of the town.

And sometimes the town would be out of sight.

And then you'd see it again. It was that level.

As we learn from her many wonderfully frank letters,

she was fired up by the open landscape.

And by falling in love.

With a young man called Arthur.

She made the first move.

'Games don't interest me like they do most women.

'I want to write to you, so I will.'

Boldly, they go on a four-day hiking trip together.

She writes to her friend, Anita Pollitzer.

"I feel stunned, I don't seem to be able to collect my wits.

"The world looks all new to me."

Now she knew what she wanted to say.

I'd put up a lot of pictures that I'd done during the year.

I could say, "Well, I painted that to please so and so,

"and I painted that to please so and so."

Go around the room, there wasn't anything to please myself.

And I thought that was pretty dull.

So I put it all away and started over again.

And I decided I was going to begin to make drawings.

I thought, "Well,

"I have a few things in my head that I never thought of putting down.

"That nobody else taught me."

And I was going to begin with charcoal,

and I wasn't going to use any colour until I couldn't do what I wanted

to do with charcoal or black paint.

And went on from there.

To Anita, she writes...

"Did you ever have something to say and feel as if the whole side

"of the wall wouldn't be big enough to say it on, and then sit down

"on the floor and try to get it onto a sheet of charcoal paper?

"I've been crawling around on the floor

"until I have cramps in my feet."

-To Arthur, she writes...

-"I have said something to you in charcoal."

She starts doing the work that reveals Georgia O'Keeffe,

one of the greatest artists we have.

And she does abstractions that draw on her own emotional life,

they draw on the natural world.

So she does these beautiful biomorphic forms.

Unfurling ferns, fronds...

..rushing waters, rock shapes.

But she makes them abstract.

She is saying, "This is not the world you know.

"But this is the world you feel you know."

Amazingly, these first drawings got picked up and promoted by the

greatest modern art impresario of the age. This is how it happened.

She did these ravishingly beautiful,

completely radical and unique pictures,

and rolled them up and stuffed them into a mailing tube

and put a two cents stamp on them and sent them to Anita.

THEY LAUGH

Anita got the pictures and without getting permission from Georgia,

she took the drawings to Stieglitz.

Alfred Stieglitz, who is a great art impresario,

a great devotee of art.

He was a great photographer himself.

And he also had the appalling temerity to claim that

photography itself was an art form.

When Georgia was studying at the Art Students League,

she and her student friends went to see Stieglitz's gallery.

They were seeing the cutting edge,

they were seeing the avant-garde, the completely bohemian aspect

of the new art that was being brought in from Europe.

At that time, Stieglitz had the only modern things

that you could go to see.

He had the first Picasso's.

That was what seemed to be the most important place.

All the instructors at the league told us we should go and see

the Rodin drawings because it MIGHT be important.

I thought they were just a lot of scribbles.

It wasn't anything like what I'd been taught to draw.

-This is September 1915.

-June, September...

'But now she was saying to Anita, "I'd rather have Stieglitz like something,

'"anything I had done, than anyone else I know of."'

And Anita writes, "I had to do it, I'm glad I did it,

"it was the only thing to do. Well, I had to do it, that's all.

"I walked up to 291..." That's Stieglitz's gallery.

"..and I said, 'Mr Stieglitz, would you like to see

"'what I have under my arm?'

"He said, 'I would. Come in the backroom.'

"I went in with your feelings and your emotions tied up

"and showed them to a giant of a man.

"It was a long while before his lips opened.

"'Finally, a woman on paper.'"

"Finally, a woman on paper."

HE CHUCKLES

Stieglitz showed her charcoals at his gallery that spring,

100 years ago.

She writes to ask him what he thinks.

'Mr Stieglitz, if you remember why you liked the charcoals

'Anita Pollitzer showed you, and what they said to you,

'I would like to know if you want to tell me.'

'I do want to tell you they gave me much joy.

'They were a real surprise, and above all,

'I felt they were a genuine expression of yourself.'

He's married and 23 years older than her,

but they're fascinated by each other.

'Sometimes your letters are so much yourself, such an intense

'live sort of self,

'that some mornings I wake with a shrinking sort of fear

'that there will be a letter from you popped under my door.'

'You are a very, very great woman.

'You have given me something so overpowering that I feel as if

'I had shot up suddenly into the skies and touched the stars.

'And found them all women!'

By 1916, early 1917,

Stieglitz was writing O'Keeffe two, three,

four times a day in letters that could easily be 20,

30 or 40 pages long by the time he'd finish.

These envelopes, as she said, sometimes burst open in the mail.

They fall in love, really, through their correspondence,

they spent very little time together during those years.

Back in Texas, teaching, Georgia now felt ready for colour.

'I believe it was June before I needed blue.'

Soon, every colour exploded into her painting.

'Tonight, I'd like to paint the world with a broom,

'and I think I'd like great buckets of colour.

'Lots of red, vermilion.

'And I don't want to be careful of the floor.

'I just want to splash.'

This is an incredibly intense, productive time for her.

She's reading avidly. Ibsen, Dante and the Russian artist Kandinsky.

He thought art could be music.

It should not copy nature,

but use it as the springboard to express ideas and emotions.

Kandinsky wrote, "Nowadays, we are still bound to external

"nature and must find our means of expression in her.

"But how far may we go

"in altering the forms and colours of this nature?

"We may go as far as the artist is able to carry his emotion."

It's her radical experiments with abstraction that really appeal to

some young artists today.

She was one of the first people in America to embrace abstraction,

-wasn't she?

-Yeah.

She might start with a spiral or a wave

or a gradation of colour. And when she does it over and over

and over again, it becomes something far away from that.

Something that's totally transcendent.

But I love these because this is the genesis for everything.

It's like she's starting this quest and she's always circling around

this thing that's kind of unnameable,

which is the naming of emotion through drawing and painting.

Georgia talked of that memory, or "dream thing I do".

She starts by drawing a natural form, a landscape, say.

Then takes the sketch indoors and abstracts from it

until it takes on the emotional resonance that gives it power.

There is a very clear relationship in this work

-between human shapes and natural spaces.

-Yeah.

I think she's seeing things both in landscape and in nature that she

sees in kind of human experience and human body parts, if you like.

-Look at that.

-Yeah.

She's not afraid to embrace what's in her head, is she?

She just seemed super bold, like she had nothing to lose.

She likes these curves, these shapes we've seen earlier.

You can see in the repetition of these forms

a kind of language forming.

You know, you don't learn a language in a day.

For me, she demystified that whole kind of genius artist,

which usually goes along with some kind of male archetype.

You know, like a Leonardo da Vinci genius,

it's just like a bolt of lightning.

But for her, she lifted the veil of that.

And you can see these small, kind of design elements, which were like...

like words in a vocabulary,

that built into some kind of sublime language.

Georgia was still in love with Arthur and yearning for

-a child with him.

-It actually looks like something internally.

That's right, it does.

'There had never been anyone else that I would want or have

'as the father of my child.

'My face is very hot as I write it to you.'

There were no letters between them for six months.

Their affair fizzled out.

All the while, she is telling Stieglitz everything.

O'Keeffe is telling Stieglitz about

her life there in Texas.

She's talking about the students that she's spending time with.

Her infatuation with some of the men in her life at that moment,

some of whom were students.

Of one boyfriend, she writes teasingly to Stieglitz...

'He is one kind of cowboy. He has a lot of cattle.

'Tall and thin, muscles like iron.

'We lay out there looking up at the sky for a long time. I like him.'

But Stieglitz, who does not have muscles of iron, has other attractions.

He was a star in a different kind of firmament.

In 1917, he staged her first solo show in his New York gallery.

What a friend to have.

I was interested in what he did, and he was interested in what I did.

Very interested.

You try arguing with him and see where you get.

Their connection gave both of them a sense of power.

She did control her own work,

but Stieglitz, because he was the person he was,

always felt that he had the right to tell her what to do.

This was three years before women got the vote in America.

Through Anita Pollitzer, Georgia joined the National Woman's Party.

She argued for women's independence.

But with Stieglitz, it was complicated.

He started photographing her. He posed her in front of her work.

When she came to live with Stieglitz in New York,

he took the same photos but with fewer clothes on.

'When I make a photograph, I make love.'

It was a collaboration of sorts.

An experiment in modernism.

Fragmenting the body into parts.

But it was also an imposition.

He photographed me until I was crazy.

And he would be photographing every day.

And he started photographing me with glass plates,

when you had to stay still between three and four minutes.

And you would itch here, you would want to scratch there.

In that three minutes,

you could have more itchy spots on you than you could imagine.

Though acceptable in their circles, it wasn't outside.

The fact that they were living together

was considered quite scandalous.

And the fact he had left his first wife to live with O'Keeffe was

not condoned by many people within that more proper, respectable world.

My mother didn't like the photographs.

In fact, in some of the books I've torn some of those out

when the children were little.

I thought, I'm not going to have them see...

I'd like them to think of her as an artist and what she did, not of

these nudes, which were evidently quite a success in New York...

But that was Stieglitz's way of promoting her, I think.

What did you think about all that at that time?

You know, as a family member, you think,

"I don't want my great aunt showing, you know, pictures like that."

But, on the other hand,

you can't take it out of context and I wasn't a part of that context.

And that is something that, had she not wanted to do it,

she wouldn't have done it but she did, so OK.

But you could see why she was a sexualised figure.

I mean, if this was what, 1919, that's pretty scandalous.

Absolutely.

And I'm afraid they do...

You look at those and you look at the flower pictures and you can't

pretend there isn't a connection. So this is Stieglitz.

He's kind of imposing...

Imposing and sharing something rather private with everyone.

Exactly.

-And maybe this influenced her.

-Yeah.

She could see how Stieglitz,

by bringing his camera in close to her body,

cropping out parts of it,

could make a real object this abstract expressive form.

So she begins to bring her eye in very close.

The way she painted changed profoundly at that time.

She abandoned the sort of loose, feathery brushstrokes that she had

learned from William Merritt Chase.

And, emulating the very clean and sharp lines of a photograph,

she began to make her paintings much crisper,

much more carefully delineated.

So this was a flowering for her work, not just for her sexuality.

But there was a downside. She was seen as a vamp.

And her paintings were interpreted in the light of the photographs.

'Her great painful and ecstatic climaxes make us, at last,

'know something that man has always wanted to know,

'the organs that differentiate the sex speak.

'Women always feel, when they feel strongly, through the womb.'

'A clear case of repressed, Freudian desires in paint.'

'Her new paintings seem to be revelations of the very essence

'of woman as life giver.'

O'Keeffe was horrified by these comments and after that,

you very much see her turning away and trying to start to control

when and how Stieglitz depicted her.

It led her to deny her work as sexual at all.

Well, they were talking about themselves,

not about me - the people that saw them that way,

they were talking about their own self, not about me.

But the vexed question of sexuality in her work rose again in the 1970s.

The American artist, Judy Chicago, put Georgia O'Keeffe

at the head of the table for her monumental Dinner Party.

It's a symbolic history of women in Western civilisation.

I didn't really care that O'Keeffe

did not openly identify as a feminist,

because for me her work spoke to me from a female-centred point of view,

and that was what was important to me.

But, I also knew that O'Keeffe

had been a lifelong member of the National Woman's Party.

That Anita Pollitzer,

the woman who brought her work to Stieglitz's attention,

was an ardent suffragette. So there was obviously a back story

in terms of her own personal identification.

But women that don't want to be labelled, they don't want to be

patronised in that way.

I guess she felt that it would not be to her advantage

to be overly identified as a woman artist,

because of the stupid critics.

But again, O'Keeffe's prices,

which far outstrip those of most other women artists,

are still way less then male artists, and so whether O'Keeffe

wanted to be identified as a woman artist,

the fact that she was a woman artist shaped both the resistance to

her work, the lack of comprehension of female-centred imagery

and affects her market value.

The critic Lucy Lippard used to say art has no gender, but artists do,

and who we are as people shapes the images we make.

Back in New York in the '20s,

Georgia was painting the landscape around her,

the iconic cityscape of ultramodern New York.

In doing so, she was consciously competing with the men.

What are you going to paint New York for anyway? You can't do that.

The men haven't even done very well with it.

What do you think you're going to do?

This is my first New York.

I think New York is wonderful. It's like a dream.

It always makes European cities look like villages to me.

I think of a city going up, don't you?

She and Stieglitz loved skyscrapers so much, they moved into this one.

It was the tallest building in New York at the time.

Having married the year before, they lived here for ten years,

taking their meals in the dining room so neither had to cook.

He would photograph - and she would paint - the view from their window.

Georgia even put Stieglitz's name in lights

on the brand-new Radiator Building.

In the summer, they'd escape the city to stay at Lake George,

where she'd gone as a student.

Back then, she'd found it green and gloomy.

'Sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces it seems so perfect,

'but it is really lovely.'

Stieglitz's family had a big house and land by the lake.

For the first six summers that he came here with Georgia,

Stieglitz was not yet divorced -

not the norm in a family like his.

There'd 20 people at the table, eating corn. Can you imagine it?

On the cob?

He had to have people around,

and I find people very difficult,

and when I couldn't take it, I went in my room and shut the door.

She found it quite difficult,

this relationship with the Stieglitz family.

Quite suffocating.

Well, I think she didn't always find them suffocating,

but, yes, at times she needed her privacy

so that she could focus on her art.

So, she converted an old rustic building on the hill

into her studio, and she called it her shanty.

She came in the early spring,

when the family wasn't here.

And she enjoyed getting the house ready,

getting the gardens ready,

getting everything prepared for the summer.

When she was painting the Jack in the Pulpit series,

she talks about spring

and how beautiful spring at Lake George was that year,

and that she hadn't seen spring like that since she was a child.

The family sold the big house and moved up onto the hill.

Where that house is was the croquet lawn,

and then next to it, up here,

was where the farmhouse stood.

-Oh, yeah. What a view.

-Yeah.

And lots of forestry. This is where the green,

the infamous green, came from.

Right, the infamous green.

There's one thing O'Keeffe needed in her art was a connection to place.

The mountains ring the water on the lake

and cast a reflection on the water.

She would take the rowboat out at dawn.

Those provided moments of contact to nature

and observations that she would make

that were then transformed into a painting.

And she painted the trees on the property.

The oaks, the maples.

They take on sort of bodily shapes and forms.

I think, in a way,

they were surrogates for representing something.

She's beginning to feel enclosed, trapped.

'I look around and wonder what one might paint.

'Nothing but mountains, lake, green and Stieglitz, sick.'

He was also embarking on a major affair.

Theirs was an open marriage,

but they were meant to put each other first.

The relationship is undermined by this affair he's having.

What about children?

O'Keeffe very much wanted a child

and she wrote about that to a number of people

and it was part of her life.

For Stieglitz, it was an absolute impossibility.

Childbirth had destroyed his favourite sister

and destroyed his daughter.

He was terrified of it,

and also he felt that O'Keeffe would not devote enough time to her work

if she became a mother, and he felt that was his decision to make.

And she put up with it?

She did put up with it.

Stieglitz said she wouldn't have time for a child.

She couldn't paint, it would disturb her.

It's surprising that Georgia,

being so independent, she would take that from Stieglitz.

She needs space, literally and emotionally.

'If I can keep my courage and leave Stieglitz, I plan to go west.

'It is always such a struggle for me to leave him.'

She sets out boldly, like her pioneer grandmother before her,

who had written proudly in her diary 75 years before, "I came west."

'As soon as I saw it, that was my country.

'I'd never seen anything like it before,

'but it fitted to me exactly.'

Like something that's in the air, it's just different.

The sky is different, the stars are different, the wind is different.

I shouldn't say too much about this,

because other people may get interested

and I don't want them interested.

It was distant and deserted,

but she was not the first person to arrive from the east.

In the mountains of Taos, she stayed at this splendid folly of a house,

where she could sunbathe naked on the roof and have a wild, free time.

She arrived with the painter, Beck Strand.

She wrote to Stieglitz back in New York.

"Dearest boy, dearest boy, such days, such days.

"Think of me with hands like dark brown gloves,

"my nose sore on the top from sunburn.

"I just cook in the sun as I work.

"I can't tell you how far away I feel."

"Mabel looks at me and says,

'I wouldn't believe anyone could change so much in a few days.'"

Mabel was the legendary arts patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan,

who owned the place.

She was married to a Native American, Tony Luhan.

DH Lawrence painted her bathroom.

She gave Georgia and Beck the use of a house across the field,

with a studio attached.

'We are to have a house, and I a grand studio besides.

'The daylight is coming. I am going up on the roof and watch it come.

'We do such things here without being thought crazy.

'The sacred mountain of the Indians sits massive on the plain.

'The world is so wide up there.'

And here's the man who has the house and studio now.

There are places up there that no-one has ever been. No-one.

When these people showed up here and saw that and they said,

"Oh, there's a river? We're in paradise."

'I kiss you and stay here with my stove and my mountain

'and the grey, sage desert, while my letter goes on to you.'

Of course, Georgia wasn't Mabel's only guest.

Mabel brought everyone.

You have to realise that she was in

Gertrude Stein's little cadre of characters in Paris before here,

in the teens, when the people who were showing up at Gertrude Stein's

were Matisse and Picasso. So, she was a part of that.

Found this place, never left.

But this isn't Paris, is it?

It certainly is not.

So, how come all of these people aggregated here?

Why did DH Lawrence come here?

That's Mabel, thinking, "Here's someone who is really turning things around. I want this person."

That's who she was. She wanted you to come here.

I'm sure you were either at the table or on the menu, you know.

But, she would...

She invited everyone and they showed up.

Carl Jung stayed here in '23.

Stravinsky in the late '30s.

And Tennessee Williams.

I mean, that's quite a trio.

She was a quite solitary creature, Georgia, so what do you think she made of the whole Mabel set?

She probably got out of here fairly quickly,

as did Lawrence when he came here.

Lawrence headed off to a ranch north of here, the Kiowa Ranch,

that Mabel had given to him.

She wrote to Stieglitz.

'Kiowa Ranch, New Mexico.

'I wish you could be sitting beside me under a huge, green pine tree on the side of the hill,

'in my red coat, nothing under it,

'waiting to continue the sunbath that was interrupted by a cloud.

'We slept up there by the big pine tree, a stormy sky,

'then the moon and stars.'

She didn't have to walk far from her house to feel the power

of the landscape and its history.

'Things go on in me that are rather difficult to tell about.

'A curious sort of rearranging of myself.

'I think my painting is going to be

quite different in colour.'

Stieglitz is bombarding her with letters,

fearful that she will never come back.

'When are you planning to go to the lake?

'Seeing you there without me seems very sad.

'But, my urge toward what I feel here is stronger than my sadness.

'I want so much to work here and you are there.

'I feel myself almost pulled in two in the middle.'

She made up her mind.

She chose New Mexico,

but continued to visit New York and Lake George for next 20 years.

Listen, he didn't let me go. I just went.

He was never convinced, but I went. I had to go.

And Stieglitz never came to New Mexico.

'This seems to be my world and I can't help it.

'I feel like flying, like turning the world over again.

'Like I used to feel.'

Leaving Mabel and her entourage behind,

Georgia headed further out into the desert.

She would find a place to suit her need for solitude.

It was called Ghost Ranch.

The first year I was out here, because there were no flowers,

I began picking up bones.

Well, I wanted to take something home.

I wanted to take something home to work on.

When I got home with my barrel of bones to Lake George,

that's where painted my first skulls.

And that was at the time that the men were all talking about

the great American novel, the great American play, the great American...

Oh, it was the great American everything.

And I thought they didn't know anything about America.

A lot of them had never been across the Hudson.

So, I thought I'll make my picture a red, white and blue.

I'll make it an American painting

for these people that don't go across the Hudson.

And this was my painting.

I put a red stripe down each side.

Entertained me, but I don't think anyone else caught on to it

for a quite a while.

When I first noticed her work I thought, you know,

"Bones? Who paints bones?"

It was something that was very, in a way, shocking.

This feels like it could have come straight out of,

from Georgia O'Keeffe. Tell me about this.

She often traded things with my husband's father.

He would go hunting, find skulls for her and, you know,

this was one of her models.

But, somehow, we ended up back with it.

When I first heard about the famous woman that came out west,

I just thought, "It is very hard to live out here."

Why would you want to come out here?

I want to leave, you know, this behind and go live their life.

We lived outdoors.

We've moved with the animals,

because my parents were sheepherders.

We camped outside every night.

It was very exotic for her to do that.

But, I think she's always had that strong sense of independence.

And I think that was also helping her find her place.

I think the land that she experienced out here

became her muse.

It's the light.

The high-altitude.

The air is very thin.

Our trees are very short.

It's open.

Back east, you have tall trees that hem you in and it's grey.

It's dark all the time and you look up and there is just,

you know, this, around you.

Where I grew up, it was extremely quiet.

Sometimes you could hear your own head moving.

Things moving in your body.

In some way, for me, that was very comforting,

but if you've never experienced that, it's very frightening for a lot of people.

And I think maybe Georgia liked that.

You know, the fact that, you know, here was this solitude.

This quietness that, you know, she could retreat into.

And I think that was something that she really valued.

Pedernal. It became Georgia's sacred mountain.

It sucked her in.

She painted it again and again,

at all times of day and in all seasons.

She took something from it

and sent it out to the rest of the world.

That's a waterfall.

There is a black streak in there,

that's a waterfall.

Maybe it's a little hidden. There's a black streak right there.

Black water comes from it and it spreads in a spray as it gets

down a little way, then it runs on down the arroyo.

Drawing waterfalls.

She had a visitor from the east.

I was 16 or 17 and my mother put me on the train in Chicago by myself.

It was quite an adventure.

But it was fun driving out there.

We went through the Indian villages on the way.

And then we got to Georgia's.

And at night, I wanted to sleep up on the roof

and I could use her sleeping bag.

She doesn't let just anybody use her sleeping bag.

Then I went up on the roof and I loved it.

Stars were just falling out of the sky.

One day, she said, "Well, take your clothes off.

"It's a nice day, go out and lie in the sun."

I couldn't do that.

And, of course, I wore glasses and she said, "You don't need glasses.

"You should exercise your eyes by looking up into the sun."

I didn't like doing that, either.

Oh, I never saw her painting,

though I saw the pictures.

I thought they were beautiful.

I didn't always understand them,

but I thought they were beautiful.

In 1946, Alfred Stieglitz died.

There's nothing holding me in the big city, so I came out here.

I always knew I'd live out here.

If I had a chance.

Georgia would outlive Stieglitz by 40 years.

I used to get right up in the morning and start out,

and stay out all day.

I'd start off around seven,

not get back until around five.

It was terribly hot and in the afternoon, about four o'clock,

the bees would try to get in the car.

So, you'd have to close the windows.

You could take the back seat out and the windows were large enough,

so it was very good.

I could use a great, big canvas that way.

One of her favourite places to paint was

a day's drive away from Ghost Ranch.

Often, she did camp there overnight.

A friend went with her and took the pictures.

Georgia didn't want any spoken word, really.

Except when we were discussing things that had to do with

the food department.

There were nights when it was so cold that I would have to dig out

a flat opening, wide enough for our two bed rolls,

and keep a fire going in it all day

so that we could sleep in it at night.

She liked to be out under the stars anyway.

In this vast area, the Black Place,

she painted the same shape over and over.

This cleft in the rocks,

a sensual fold.

There was never such a thing as a finished painting

in Georgia's thinking.

That's why she kept going back and back and back.

It was always the experiment,

the exploration,

the going the step further.

She came frequently to this huge, overwhelming,

cathedral-like space and homed in on these "V" shapes.

That is all she ever painted here in the White Place.

O'Keeffe came to be seen as the spirit of the place.

An American myth.

Almost the high priestess of the desert.

A cover story in Life helped boost that image.

At lunch, she started talking about killing rattlesnakes

on her walks round the countryside.

And I said, very politely,

"Would you mind if I took a picture of you with your rattlesnakes?"

There she is. She'd killed a rattlesnake.

Apparently, she'd killed dozens of them.

I had the feeling that she would love to have the readers of

Life Magazine know she was a killer.

She was a killer, yes.

I met O'Keeffe in 1977.

She was really quite different from what I expected her to be.

She was known to be very reclusive.

Could be severe, could be abrupt.

She was very, very quick-witted.

Very funny, with a very dry sense of humour,

which I really had not been expecting at all.

She was almost 90 at that point,

yet she still had just remarkable energy.

As well as her retreat at Ghost Ranch, Georgia bought

a less remote house in Abiquiu,

further down the road toward the town.

Every time she travelled to and from Ghost Ranch,

she'd look at these beautiful gardens.

She could not have a garden there.

She'd talk about jumping over the walls

and looking inside the house,

which was a major ruin.

My grandfather was Miss O'Keeffe's gardener.

Our mother was housekeeper and cook when I started in 1974.

'As I walked about the ruin,

'I found a good-sized patio with a door on one side.

'I bought the place because it had that door in the patio.

'I had no peace until I bought the house.'

This door was the inspiration for many paintings.

I think there's about 20 paintings.

It's extraordinary, isn't it, to think that

this door inspired so much?

The beautiful shadows

throughout the seasons.

She would, sometimes,

just sit here quietly.

So, looking up here at this incredible blue,

and it's bluer than blue, isn't it?

The adobe walls just brings out the striking blue.

She bought this house in 1945.

Increasingly, it became her main home.

She was never far away from this landscape, was she?

From the beautiful landscape, no.

This is something, to be completely surrounded by glass, as she is.

Looking across at the curve in the road.

Everywhere in this house,

she's outside.

She did a painting titled the Winter Road.

You have this beautiful swing of the road.

Many people think it's calligraphy

instead of an actual landscape.

Pita's two brothers work here, too.

-This is Mino.

-Hi, Mino.

-Hello.

-I'm Alan.

-Belarmino Lopez, and this is Margarito.

-Margarito's the gardener.

-Hi.

-Nice to meet you.

And Belarmino actually helped her with some of the later artwork.

And how did you help her?

She lost her central vision.

She couldn't really see what she was doing.

I was like her third hand.

Was she still passionate about painting? Did you see her...?

Yeah, she really was into doing her own things.

She really enjoyed it.

She loved Mino.

She loved the way that he would work with her.

He was real patient, and, er,

I think that's probably why she got real close to Mino.

-This is her studio?

-This is her studio.

She would say, "I want to do some lines."

I'd mix the paints for her.

The red or the green.

Cos she would tell me, "I want the inch paintbrush,"

or the two-inch paintbrush.

So, we did some lines.

Some watercolour lines that were wavy

and some were dots.

And she'd start doing the strokes on the blotting paper

and if she liked it, she would keep it.

If not, she would just put it aside and afterwards we would go out

and burn it in the fire pit.

I usually did the circles.

She would just say, "Just put it there and turn the paintbrush."

She was strong. She was a strong lady.

It's remarkable how much these last pictures

look like her very first work.

She's gone back to her beginnings.

I'd pass in front of her studio

and I'd see her still moving her hands around.

In the winter, when it'd snow, she'd just love sitting in front of

her fireplace and watch the snow fall on the windows.

Was there a point when her sight was really going?

Yeah. Those are the times that you would have to...

She would hold on to your arm and walk with you real close.

Georgia O'Keeffe died at the age of 98 in 1986.

We continued working here

as though she was going to be here the next day.

So, we kept the place as if she was still living here.

We thought of her as family.

Her great-nephew visited her near the end of her life.

That was a great weekend.

I remember she told me stories.

She was a good storyteller. Nobody talks about that.

She had lost much of her eyesight.

We spent time together, listened to music in the sitting room.

Talked a lot.

We were at the door to the studio

and the light was right on my face.

Then she said, "I want to know,

"how you are and how you look."

And so that's when she put her hands over my face.

I went down onto the highway.

I stopped the car and I got out on the shoulder and I looked up.

There she was, in the parking lot,

looking out directly at where I was.

She couldn't see me, of course,

but she knew sort of where I should be.

And she was right.

The Georgia O'Keeffe show is at Tate Modern in London until October 30.