Georgia Goes to Hawai'i!

O’Keeffe’s Tropical Dream Lands at the Brooks.

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"My idea of the world — nature, things that grow, the fantastic things mountains can do,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, from Hawai’i in 1939, “has not been beautiful enough.”

Traveling to lush Hawai’i from her home in snowy New York, O’Keeffe was, at 51, an established artist, and one accustomed to digging deeply into new landscapes. Her New Mexico sojourns had begun a decade earlier. Known already for her desert scenes and her flower paintings, too, she was commissioned to help sell pineapple juice.

The Hawaiian Pineapple Company, now Dole Food Company, wanted art for a few print advertisements, and ad agency N.W. Ayer & Son asked O’Keeffe to create paintings for said print pieces. O’Keeffe, who by her own admission needed time to absorb the idea of a new place, was determined to delve into as much of Hawai’i as time allowed.

First, on a cross-country train ride — New York to California — she observed the changeable American countryside. “I’m doing nothing but looking,” she wrote in a letter while the train chugged along. In California, she boarded a boat to Hawai’i, where she spent nine weeks. Landing first on Waikiki, then exploring outer islands, the landscape struck her as new, beautiful, even unbelievable.

The paintings that resulted from this long, revelatory journey — along with sketches and other mementoes — were exhibited at Stieglitz’s gallery in New York upon O’Keeffe’s return. And they are on view at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art now, and through February 24th, in a show titled “Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i.” The exhibit, which was organized by The New York Botanical Garden and curated by Theresa Papanikolas, arrives in Memphis midwinter with the warmth and brightness of a sudden summer breeze.

All a New Color

O’Keeffe’s paintings fall into certain predictable categories — or so you may think. After seeing her Hawai’i paintings, you might just rethink. She herself seems to have been in the process of rethinking, during her island time — in the process, that is, of finding new inspiration, new revelation; new colors, new forms, head-spinning wonder. It’s fun to watch the creative evolutions traced along the gallery walls as O’Keeffe’s photographs turn into sketches, sketches into paintings; every iteration, a new discovery.

“It is all a new color for me,” she wrote shortly after disembarking, “and I think it is going to be very good for working. I hope that I can put it into form, as well as enthusiasm.”

A series of works shows O’Keeffe feeling her way along the wild edges of a black lava bridge off the coast of the island of Maui, in Wai’ānapanapa State Park. A photo she took of the lava bridge is printed so large you consider walking into it; nearby, a sketch, the bridge here all zig-zagged black lines above pointed wavelets and the idea of water; finally, the resultant oil painting, or one of them: Black Lava Bridge, Hāna Coast, No. 1.

The painting comes alive with shape and line, with the variegated colors of the water; it’s abstracted in a sense — the waves are graceful, upturned V-shapes, each one a slightly different hue, the paint applied in chubby lines — yet all the truer for the abstraction. If you were to stand on the coast yourself, look at waves pulsing and lurching against rock, then shut your eyes, this is what you might see flashed in the darkness against your closed lids.

A Luscious Big Pineapple

A digression, that isn’t: Magazines — like this one, right here — depend on print advertisers. Always have, and always, we hope, will. Ours is a symbiotic relationship: The more ads we run, the more stories we can place near or next to them. And the more readers like you are reached by the ads, the happier are our advertisers. But we think of ads, nowadays, as a separate beast from the creative content of the magazine.

Almost 80 years ago, when O’Keeffe traveled to Hawai’i on a contract with Dole, things were different. She produced paintings that would be translated into two full-page print ads, one showing a heliconia flower, the other, fittingly, a pineapple bud. She spent time while in Hawai’i visiting Dole’s pineapple plantation; the pineapple bud resulted from this visit.

The painting occupies most of the full-page ad; it’s made to appear framed, with a brass placard drawn onto the bottom of the frame, “inscribed” to read, “A pineapple bud from the Dole plantation in Hawaii — Painted by Georgia O’Keeffe.” Below the frame, a much smaller, Rockwell-ish family gathers around a patio breakfast table, deep green leaves behind them mimicking the long green lines of O’Keeffe’s unfolding pineapple plant. The father figure, in a double-breasted suit, stands holding his goblet of pineapple juice aloft while the mother and well-groomed children sit smiling around the table.

The ad copy is wonderfully dated. Excerpting it simply wouldn’t do. All ellipses original:

“Perhaps you have never seen a pineapple bud — and words cannot describe this glowing crater of color which on the Dole plantations grows and ripens into a luscious big pineapple … Perhaps you have never tasted Dole Pineapple Juice — and there is no other way to discover the fragrant, zestful goodness of this pure juice. Try it for breakfast … after shopping or exercise … with the children when they come from school … whenever you and your family crave refreshment.”

Impossible That It Is Real

The primary-color language of the ad copy stands in almost comedic contrast to the nuance and wonder of O’Keeffe’s Hawai’ian sojourn, expressed in both her paintings and her written descriptions, in the letters to Stieglitz. She had found herself in a bit of a rut, it seems, before the trip, and the relationship with Stieglitz somewhat strained. (“Mr. Stieglitz, you said in your letter you had no idea what I am thinking,” she wrote, going on to tell him, “One of the things I find myself thinking most often is that there is something so perfect about the climate here.” Probably not exactly the sort of “thinking” about which he had no idea?)

The pineapple-company advertisement promises refreshment. O’Keeffe, one senses, found refreshment of a different order — creative refreshment, in the form of surprise, and the delight it can bring. This extends from a description of eating raw fish for the first time (“You will be disgusted when I tell you that I ate raw fish for lunch … a special fish that they eat raw, and it doesn’t even taste like fish”), to the material that found its way into her paintings. A certain unreality winds throughout her letters, from first arrival to departure.

At a party just after she stepped ashore, “A man walked up to me and handed me a pink camellia with a very large, handsome bud,” she observed. “It seems impossible that it is real.”

Later, in a different letter: “So many of the flowers just simply seem unbelievable.” Then, of a white paradise flower: “It is a mad sort of flower.”

She noted of the shoreline lava that it “makes a crazy coast … queer formations, born in the lava, bridges, gateways, holes through which it seems solvent where the air comes up and sprays, hissing, blowing …”

“I will be off in the faraway somewhere,” she writes before setting sail for Hawai’i’s remoter islands, “but everyone says this is the good place.”

This unreality appears in her paintings, too: fantastical visions that flummox a straight-ahead point of view. A papaya tree rises up, tall and cartoonish, seemingly above the tops of mountains in the background — the perspective is wonderfully odd. A bella donna flower, flanked by a pink ginger flower, seems to float, giant and billowing and free, with the blue ocean and horizon line behind. A heliconia flower rises up not from earth but from seafoam, in O’Keeffe’s vision of it, all green-tipped and salmon-flushed, bracts (leaves that shield blossoms) like steps up the ladder of its stem. A plumy, orchid-hued fishing lure with a round glass attached seems to hover at the horizon line, the ocean and sky stacked against each other within and without the glass.

Off in the Faraway

I don’t get ahold of a new thing so quickly,” O’Keeffe noted near the end of her time in Hawai’i. “It doesn’t happen in a minute.” After nine weeks in the islands of Hawai’i, O’Keeffe packed up her paintings and sketches (many of which you can flip through on a small touchscreen, at the Brooks), and began the long journey home. The reenergizing element of the trip, and the productive destabilizing effect, inspired a series of far-flung trips in the years that followed.

For now, as at the end of every worthy trip, O’Keeffe was glad to be returning home, to solid ground, where things are recognizable, where she trusts she is waking and not dreaming. “You know from what I wrote you that the islands were lovely,” she observed. “But I had to laugh to feel how glad I was to be nearing what I call real land. Out there was a sort of dreamland, one of those perfect places nature arranges once in a very long time.”