Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio Offers Intimate Look at Artist’s Life

I stand transfixed at the dominant picture windows inside the studio of the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio, once the residence of one of the 20th century’s greatest American artists.

The panorama from the seamlessly abutting panes of glass is magnificent – a canvas of desert landscape surreal in beauty and monumental in scope. Beneath a bright blue sky accented with shifting clouds, the Chama River valley of New Mexico spreads wide, unobstructed, and lushly green with cottonwood trees stretching to the low mountains beyond. This expansive scene offers an arresting backdrop to the room’s Mid-Century Modern décor (Eames lounge chair, Saarinen table, Barwa lounger) as well as various iconic paintings and sculptures by Georgia O’Keeffe herself.

“Location, location, location,” I whisper. That’s the mantra real estate agents intone to sanctify a property’s desirability and value.

My awestruck reaction to this setting is surely a mere shadow of the profound and transformative sense of place Georgia O’Keeffe must have experienced the first time she set foot on this nine-acre compound. These buildings, their immediate surroundings, and the killer views they command – a holy trinity of location, if you will – became integral to both her life and her art, and inspired many of her best-known Modern paintings.

As O’Keeffe said of the area, “It’s the most beautiful place you can imagine… It’s so beautiful there. It’s ridiculous.”

The Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio, now a National Historic Landmark, nestles above Route 84 in the small town of Abiquiu. I’ve made the hour’s drive from Santa Fe for a guided tour.

A serendipitous find

O’Keeffe discovered the property in the early 1930s during one of her frequent trips to northern New Mexico.

But, unlike the lovingly preserved and maintained adobe home and grounds I’m visiting today, ruins of the long-abandoned main house, outlying buildings, and land greeted her. Walls had cracked and crumbled. Unhinged doors languished askew. Wooden beams had buckled, and a section of the roof had caved in. Nature’s elements and animal life had intruded.

Undaunted, O’Keeffe knew she had to own it.

Fueled by ambition, her innate artistic eye foresaw massive potential beyond the decay. She envisioned creative possibilities in the variety of hues, lines, shapes, and forms around her, even in something as seemingly prosaic as a door on a still-standing wall along the patio.

“That wall with a door in it was something I had to have,” O’Keeffe often recalled, and it became a favorite subject.

Another selling point for O’Keeffe was the garden. Surprisingly, the plot retained active water rights, which meant she could irrigate and grow her own fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Not even the decade and a half it took for O’Keeffe to persuade the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe to sell her the property in 1945 dispelled her enthusiasm and persistence. With the property redesigned and reconstructed in collaboration with her friend Maria Chabot, O’Keeffe moved permanently from her base in New York to New Mexico in 1949.

This was O’Keeffe’s primary residence until 1984, when she moved to Santa Fe two years prior to her death at the age of 98. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe now manages the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio.

Inside and outside the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio

Aboard a small bus, our group of 12 (tour size is limited) departs the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio’s welcome center for the brief ride to the hilltop. Our guide details a list of dos and don’ts.

“It’s an extension of the museum, so treat it as a work of art, which it is,” she instructs. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t lean against the walls. Only take photos of the exterior.”

We nod in assent, accepting our role to help protect this historic treasure for the future. What we’ll see at the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio has largely been left as it was when O’Keeffe lived here. Remarkably, even some of the staff and their families who assisted O’Keeffe with the house and grounds continue to work at the site, ever respectful of her legacy.

We exit the bus and pass through the open gate made of adobe plaster and textured with flecks of straw. The desert breeze is warm and welcoming on the plateau as we approach what our guide says is the most Instagrammed spot for selfies – a lone ladder propped against a wall. The look is indicative of O’Keeffe’s minimalist style.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio reflects a blend of Native American and Spanish Colonial architecture dating back centuries, yet it is decidedly her creation.

The house, flat-roofed, single-storied and ochre-colored, probably was built in the mid-1700s, first in a rectangle. Subsequent expansions made it L-shaped, then U-shaped, and finally in the enclosed-patio-Plazuela style. Initially, there were no interconnecting doors between rooms, so occupants went outside to go back inside to the next rooms. For easier interior access, Chabot incorporated passageways.

O’Keeffe’s aesthetics deviated from traditional adobe structures. She infused her home with abundant access for natural light through large, strategically placed windows – all the better to capture the drama of desert views – and skylights. She updated amenities, and decorated with a pale neutral and white palette and Mid-Century Modern furniture.

We enter through O’Keeffe’s washroom, stepping down into semi-darkness. Used as a kitchen in the 1800s, the space has a still-blackened, rustic ceiling fashioned from hulking pine beams, called vigas, and split cedar. A hole indicates where the wood stove was vented.

In a painter’s kitchen

In the pantry of the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio is a lineup of white metal cabinets embedded into thick adobe walls. Everything is arranged and shelved neatly, orderly and, of course, artfully. Stuff, to be sure, but not a hint of clutter. Gathering baskets, canning jars, and pickling crocks tell you a gardener lived here. So do the large glass containers of O’Keeffe’s residual dried herbs and spices – “authentic, but not useful,” our guide notes – from 1984. There’s a washboard, commercially packaged canned goods, a collection of coffee pots and tea pots, a wheatberry grinder for flour, and a butter churn.

I recognize brands and functional appliances from my own childhood – Revere Ware pots, Corning Ware cookware, an electric skillet, and a cake cover. Interestingly, it’s all regular culinary tools and equipment, and gives little hint to O’Keeffe’s wealth.

A tongue-and-groove ceiling helped keep out bugs from the spacious, all-white kitchen. There’s a Chambers propane stove with a four-burner range and a broiler, a white porcelain sink under a window, a long, wooden worktable, and one of the first KitchenAid dishwashers. Given I’m lacking green thumbs, I’m astonished to learn that the thriving, vibrant houseplants situated along the windowsill – geraniums, aloe, and jade – have survived since O’Keeffe’s day.

My mind wanders back to a recent introduction to author Margaret Wood, who served as a companion and cook for O’Keeffe in her later years. I had met Margaret at the Santa Fe School of Cooking, where she shared stores of O’Keeffe – or Miss O’Keeffe, as she politely called her – during the “Cooking Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe” demonstration class that the cooking school hosts with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Margaret had explained that fresh, healthy, delicious, simply prepared, and straight-forward food was essential to O’Keeffe. The artist loved to cook, entertain (albeit not in a large or glitzy way), and share the bounty of her garden’s harvest.

In her book A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe, Margaret writes:

“Miss O’Keeffe exhibited discriminating taste in all elements of her surroundings, so it is not surprising that she was very particular about the food she ate and the environment in which it was prepared.”

Off the kitchen, we can peer into – but not enter – two other rooms.

The Indian room served as O’Keeffe’s root cellar for potatoes and onions, as well as fruit.  Pre-O’Keeffe’s days, a single raised shelf once served as a bed for a shepherd and his lambs on cold evenings.

Centered in the dining room is a simple plywood table, its top lightly stained with O’Keeffe’s own whitewash recipe. Overhead hangs a lantern by Noguchi, fashioned on a pulley to be raised and lowered at will. A simple Hopi fireplace nestles in the corner, with a small pile of wood stacked on the floor.

How O’Keeffe’s garden grows

Outside, we follow O’Keeffe’s footsteps as we head toward the garden. O’Keeffe grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. She loved to keep her hands in dirt.

Back to Margaret’s cookbook:

“I remember how she guided me through the large Abiquiu garden, telling me where all the vegetables, fruits, and herbs could be found. She spoke with pride about her organic produce: the two-pound tomato that was grown the previous summer, the tree that bore the best applesauce apples, and the hardy raspberries that survived one spring when all the other fruit froze.”

Even today, the garden remains planted as in O’Keeffe’s time, and continues to be productive. Sweet corn, greens, chiles, and squash over here. An herb section, berry patch, flower beds, and fruit trees over there. Staff and interns from surrounding communities work the land, distributing the produce locally. Our guide tells us we can keep up with the garden’s seasonal changes by watching the live feed from the roof-top camera online.

We walk around the plaza, duck though narrow, low-slung passageways, and venture into a small open-air room containing found objects– skulls, antlers, and rocks.

We peer into the reflective glass of the sitting room. Nature plays an integral part in the design, for a large expanse of glass on one wall frames a feathery, old tamarisk tree. A Saarinen womb chair and ottoman stretch out invitingly. Fond of music, O’Keeffe owned a stereo system and long-play records by Segovia, Paul Robeson, and Marlene Dietrich.

Strategically placed collectibles throughout the house – pottery, art, and other mementos – attest to O’Keeffe’s world travels. Hidden from view are some 3,000 volumes in her private library.

My tour of the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio has been a lesson in the importance of place in informing her life and art.

“I wish you could see what I see out the window,” O’Keeffe famously said.

Now I know what she meant.

This trip was taken prior to the pandemic. For current status of tours, check Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Excerpts from the Introduction to A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe by Margaret Wood (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009). Reprinted with permission of the author and publisher.