 Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Lisa Small. I'm the senior curator of European art at the museum, and I'm happy to welcome you to today's exciting program. Before introducing the program, I just want to extend a special thank you to all of our Brooklyn Museum members who are attending this afternoon. Your support means so much to all of us, and it helps make programs like this possible. So if you're not already a member and you're interested in becoming one and enjoying perks such as free tickets to the O'Keeffe exhibition and invitations to members-only mornings, please visit the membership desk in the lobby. I also want to encourage you to return on Thursday, March 30th at 7 p.m. for another fascinating program, rapid-fire lectures, and a roundtable discussion called Deconstructing the Artist's Persona. It will be led by Jennifer Blessing, the senior curator of photography at the Guggenheim, and she'll be joined by other art historians to examine the construction of the artist's persona. Participants there will include Joanna Burton on Cindy Sherman, Theresa Latimer on Claude Kahoon, Richard Meyer on Andy Warhol, Adriana Zavala on Frida Kahlo, and our good friend Wanda Corn on Georgia O'Keeffe. And of course, Wanda Corn is here with us today. An esteemed scholar of late 19th and early 20th century American art and photography, Corn taught art history for almost 30 years at Stanford University. She is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning study of avant-garde modernist culture called The Great American Thing, Modern Art and American Identity, 1915 to 1935. She has also been an active guest curator, having recently organized the exhibition and written the accompanying book for Seeing Gertrude Stein, Five Stories, which was on view in 2011 to 2012 at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. It has been my great, great pleasure to work closely with Wanda to organize the Brooklyn Museum's presentation of Georgia O'Keeffe Living Modern, which is the beautiful result of years of her thorough and groundbreaking scholarship. Please join me in welcoming Wanda Corn. One of the appendixes to the book that I've written to accompany this exhibition, you will find a list, best as I could, pulled together of all the photographers for whom Georgia O'Keeffe sat. And I'm up to somewhere between 40 to 50, I didn't recount. But that's an amazing record for any living artist or an artist of the 20th century. And I probably can say without any problems, without any contestation, that she probably is the most photographed modern artist from this country in the 20th century, or certainly the most photographed women modern artists. And you know, if you've seen the exhibition, that her life as a model began just about the same time as her life as an artist, because she was the lover and then the wife of Alfred Stieglitz in New York, who was a great photographer, and he took it upon himself to create what he called a continuing portrait and made his first pictures when he first met her in 1917 and his last pictures 20 years later. And he photographed her on an annual basis, and that so-called continuous portrait numbers something like 330 photographs, formal photographs staged and beautifully composed photographs. What happened then is a very interesting story. He sort of had a monopoly on her during their years together. But once he stopped photographing her, then other photographers came knowing what a great model she was. Let me just get out of your way here. And I'm giving you just a couple of examples that are in the show. Ansel Adams, for instance, and Philip Halsman, or a little bit later in the game, Laura Gilpin, and then Bruce Weber, who I think probably gets the honor of the last photograph taken of her where she dressed for the occasion and clearly was posed and staged against a piece of her sculpture. So what we have going today, which is so thrilling, is sort of helping to fill in the pieces, the post Stieglitz pieces of O'Keeffe as a model. And what we're going to do is we have four people who had a variety of experiences working with Miss O'Keeffe and we're going to take them one by one and I will have a conversation with them. And hopefully at the end, if you have questions, we'll keep them till the end. You can talk to each of our guests as well. I should tell you that the man in the picture is Juan Hamilton. You'll be meeting him in a couple of other places during our afternoon and you'll learn how he came around to ask her whether he could help her in any way do chores or whatever, and eventually he moved into becoming her assistant and he did everything from record keeping to helping her with her daily schedule. But she had macular degeneration in the 70s and maybe Perry, you can mention this because I'm always amazed how sure-footed she looks in your picture, but in fact she wasn't seeing that well, but she always seemed to be looking directly at you and walking as a woman with purpose, she walked every day. But tell us a little bit about interviewing her. You know, I really didn't have the feeling, though I know that's the word interview, that I was interviewing Georgia. It really was a question of having done a lot of research and having had the luck to have the counsel of Lloyd Goodrich, who was the head of the Whitney Museum at that point, and he was warning me about who to interview and not to interview because if you interviewed a certain person, George O'Keefe would not talk to you and of course if you've seen the film and you know about George O'Keefe, you know of course that it was Dorothy Norman, but Dorothy Norman owned a lot of the material Stieglitz, which this is some years later, but talking to Georgia, the question is what is Georgia like? People ask me and I say if you've seen the film, that's what she's like. She's completely relaxed. She's very... When she had agreed to do the film and I started talking before about it, the question is why did she say yes at that point? It's a question of timing. I think in life that timing is of the essence. I mean, for example, those of you who are married or have a very intense long lasting relationship, you know that if you had met that person five or ten years earlier, you would have had nothing to do with each other. The timing was right for one thing, her age. She was 88 at this time. And the fact was that Juan Hamilton had become very useful and very important to her and they became quite close. And Hamilton felt, look, George is 88. If there's going to be a film done, it better be done now, you know, not to wait. And fortunately, he also was enthusiastic about the George Gertrude Stein film and whatever else he knew about. But I did get recommendations from some people who were important to her including James Johnson Sweeney and Lloyd Goodrich, et cetera. But also, it was the letter. And what did I say in that letter that I worked for weeks on? I said, in essence, people have written and written and talked about your pictures and why you do them and about you. We'd like to hear your voice. What is it that you would like to say? And that seemed to work. They understood that she was going to be able to express the way she felt from her own point of view. In any case, she finally said, okay, agreed that I can come and visit her. And as I had told you, NET was willing to cover my expenses. And when I first got there, when I first entered, I have to admit I was really very, very, very nervous and very insecure about how this was going to go and intimidated because Georgia had a rather intimidating reputation. As far as if she didn't like something or somebody, she didn't make any pretence. And so I was going, I was on a vacation actually with my husband and managed to work it out so that the end of the vacation, we ended in Santa Fe and I was a little embarrassed because as a woman producer, if I was a male producer, would I have my wife with me? In any case, if we were out in Santa Fe and we were going to see George O'Keefe, I certainly was going to bring my husband along. And it turned out very well because he, the builder, and she was so proud of her house. She kept talking about the four-foot walls in Abacue. She had two houses. One, as you may have seen in the film, Ghost Ranch and this other house in Abacue. And that's one of the exciting things about the exhibition is the things, the original things in the house decide her clothes and all the furnishings and the way she lived. The whole idea of living modern is in the exhibition, which of course you either have seen or will see. And when she came, she said, she said to him, we have such warm hands and she looked at me and she said, you don't look like a producer. And I thought that was a good sign. And this is exactly what she looked like at the time because you have that wonderful picture with her. Let me ask you one other question and then we're going to need to move on, Perry. But I wondered, did you ever get any sense from her after seeing the film what she thought and had she asked you to see it when it was in rough cut or did she give you complete liberty to go forward? It was a rule that we never showed a rough cut. A rough cut to anybody in any of our films. It was an absolute rule. But I did have an understanding with her and with one that I would send him a copy of all the transcripts which are invaluable, and now they're at the Georgia O'Keeffe Research and Wanderkorn has first access to the most incredible because if you know when you do a film, you use maybe five minutes out of the hour of talking. And if you've done, obviously we use more than five minutes with Georgia, but the fact is that there are pages and pages of marvelous stuff that we just couldn't use. And I started with a 90-minute film and it had to be cut down. In any case, I think that there are other people who have to talk. Well, before we give her a round of applause, I want to say that I had one privileged moment with Georgia O'Keeffe in 1980. So I was seeing her a little bit after this film had come out and I had the benefit of seeing it. And I, too, was intimidated. So intimidated that I didn't even ask if I could have a picture with her. I'm really envious that you got that one picture with her because I felt that might just close the interview right down. But I think you had the same experience I didn't speaking with her. When you ask her a question, just as you see here, she has kind of a beginning, middle, and end to her answer. They don't wander. They're like little nuggets that she gives you and it's with a spareness, I would say, that is typical of what we're demonstrating up in the exhibition. She did like it. I didn't really answer. She did like the film because she asked me to do a film a couple of years later, just a few years later, on Alfred Stieglitz. And if she didn't like it, she would not have asked me to do the other film. I didn't know that connection. That's very nice. And you, by the way, can get these films on Netflix, I think. Can you get them on Netflix? These films are rentable. Are they not? Well, Alfred Stieglitz is actually, and Georgia, we were able to raise the money for the Stieglitz film because the film that I had shot in 1980 turned out that I not only had an old print, but that original negatives were still at the lab. And it was 25 years later. So this is one of those miraculous things. And once you could say that you had this marvelous material, original interviews with O'Keeffe, then it was possible and not easy, but not too difficult to raise the money for the Stieglitz film. Anyway, I recommend them to you. The Stieglitz film is called Alfred Stieglitz. An eloquent eye. An eloquent eye. And I'm very, very sorry to say that after selling, I guess like, I don't know, two million copies or whatever they sold of Georgia O'Keeffe, it's impossible to buy a film, the original Georgia O'Keeffe film. But I would say that hundreds and hundreds or thousands of libraries have copies. I'd be very surprised and lots and lots of schools have it. I'd be very surprised if that you would not find a copy to borrow from a library. Thank you so much, Perry. I was going to recommend your library. Okay, my... I'm not being able to advance. No, that's too much, isn't it? There we go. There he is. Sorry. There we go. All right. Tony, you're up. But let me say a word about you. Tony Vicarro is well represented in the exhibition upstairs. You will see some of those images as we talk, but just to give you one that I'm sure you've not missed if you've been upstairs when she's looking through this cheese with the big hole, she's looking right into the camera of this gentleman to my left. He is a very celebrated American photographer, and when he speaks, you'll hear that he has deep Italian family roots, and his work has been exhibited and published in so many articles, and a number of books have been dedicated to his work that are notable. His career and public notice began when he was a very young soldier in the American Army during the last two years of World War II, and he stayed on after the war and took a number of pictures in the European theater and in Germany after the fighting had ended. He went on to become a fashion and lifestyle photographer for magazines such as Life and for Look, and he had, you name a few celebrities, Sophia Loren or Jack Kennedy, Fellini, Picasso. In fact, I think we see him behind one of his images of Picasso here, and so on. Georgia for him was an assignment, although he got some of the most unusual photographs of her on that assignment. So I'm going to ask Tony to speak with you, but before he does, I want to tell you how I came to know Tony before I came to really know Tony, which was today. But I had this dress in mind, which is on the left, and you know that there's a wrap dress over another white wrap dress upstairs just like this. It's something she wore for 25 years for many photographers that came to visit her in New Mexico, and I had to figure out where those dresses started. Tony, I hand you this honor. You are the first photographer she ever wore that dress for, and she must have liked your photographs so much because they translated particularly that dress outfit translates very well in black and white film that she never stopped wearing it for photographers who trekked her way ever since. So that's my first introduction to Tony was to give him the wrap dress award. And I'm going to have him... I'm going to have him tell you about the visit, but the award he also gets is for patience and for cleverness because he had to... He spent many days on assignment. If I can just say it really quickly, he had an assignment from Look Magazine with the art editor, whose name was Charlotte Willard, and she was going to do, and this is 1960, something that was really very unusual. She was going to do an article on women artists, and she wanted pictures of each of her five or six women artists that were at work seeing with a work of art, and they had to be in color. And if you know anything about Miss O'Keefe, you know her preference was for black and white because that's the way she had started her life as a model and so on. She was, according to Miss O'Keefe, she told Charlotte Willard to go find a photograph that was ready-made and use it for the purpose, but that wasn't what she couldn't find a ready-made for what she wanted, so she brought Tony along. Am I got this right? Okay, so when Charlotte and Tony arrive, she's, shall we say, annoyed or surprised or what would you say, but anyway, she wasn't expecting a photographer and she wasn't sure she was going to cooperate. So that's where I'm going to have you start the story. Thank you. I am very pleased to be here to speak about Georgia. I went there with the idea of taking some unusual pictures of her different from other photographers. One way to do this was to get to know her very well. We walked and walked and walked before I took the first picture. After a while, I realized what a magnificent person she was. I was at the beginning of my career a gardener. I had a farm in Italy before I was born in America, but I have a farm in Italy that I still love and it was through this idea of showing her how it was to plant things and see things growing. And sure enough, two, three days later, she arrives with empty cans that she fills with dirt and start planting in Abicchio. Here it is, yes. This idea came from what I told her. At the beginning, she was annoyed with me, but eventually she literally grabbed me in such a way the conversation that we were having that the editor that had come there with me got up and says, I don't belong here and left. And so I remain with Giorgio Keefe for maybe two more weeks and we did all, I'm sure, pictures that you're going to see. We had breakfast together. We had breakfast, lunch, dinner. We talked about how to make the best salads, the best spaghetti, the best linguine. She wanted to know all of these sauces that you see there. There's three different sauces that I made her taste. Shall we go look at the next one here? This is one of your playful ones remember, how did this come about? Where are you in the front seat? This came about one day when she said, let's go for a picnic in the desert. We arrived at that desert and it was the location where the Indian who is on a nickel or she wanted to meet the family of that Indian. The nickel, they make jewelry out of the Indian on nickels. Yes, yes. So she wanted to meet these people and we went there this particular day when we arrived you can see the background there. It's a little blurred. We couldn't go out because it was raining. So we had our picnic. You see there's a glass of wine there and Swiss cheese with a hole in it and while I am cutting something else I turn around and there she's looked at me through this cheese. So by the time we arrived this was a rainy day beginning to rain and the conversation went on to many people. She was interested in the greatest bullfighter of Spain that I photographed. Oh, do you have his name there? No, I didn't write it down. I'm sorry. Manolete. Manolete was unique. In the bull ring he had such glass and she knew all about Manolete. She had never seen him but I showed her the pictures of Manolete and we became closer friends. So how many days are you spending photographing her and I asked this question because she wears that dress every day so I cannot count different outfits. We spent together I would say 15 days. It's quite amazing the adventures they had together and this is one which he hasn't looked at for a long time. It's not in the exhibition but if I have this right it's also a wonderful picture for me because it shows me what the back of that dress looked like and you notice she often wears it with gloves and in several of Tony's photographs upstairs she has gloves on and we just saw some gloves in Perry's film I noticed. She liked to keep clean, it was very dusty that also helps explain her use of scarfs and hats was partially not just to look the part of her surrounds but also to keep the dust and dryness out of her hair but I asked Tony if this isn't a setup because if you see it the way I see it it looks like she's holding up her ghost ranch house. You see that? You know how people will often do that with the Washington monument they'll hold their hand out in such a way so it looks like it's growing out of their hand but you don't remember that, do you? She was telling me about the mountains in the background because of the color that those mountains had They're hills really. The Pedernal, we will see a little bit later on and also Malcolm's. Well you finally got the picture you were after the picture that was going to go for the article but that's like several days in, isn't it? Seven days. So let's just tell that story. First of all we're going to show you it was Ms. Willard's idea, the editor's idea that it would be a studio picture and what she didn't know is that so it was like this is the Apicuse studio and she's moving, you can see the gorgeous view she had, in this case it's a view of a river valley the Chamo River Valley from this house all those lowly cliffs and so on are out at Ghost Ranch two quite different terrains but what the editor did not know is that O'Keeffe never allowed herself to be seen painting except in one instance that Barry used that Ansel caught her but she was not, I'm sure Tony had to cajole her to get her even near one of her paintings she used very few paintings to decorate her home so I think his award-winning picture which is this one, there we go in color, I've never seen, I've seen versions of this in color but I haven't seen her posing for you in color in any other venue than this The reason this picture is this way is that I had visualized the picture her world and nature why did she go in this desert to live in this desert and the reason I left all this room is that I wanted the story on her printed over this terrain, you see but eventually when Luke went to do the story they caught at the elbow and all of this was a way but the story that I wanted I wanted to be done on this picture Well, you'll be glad to know in my book I wanted it too, so this is the picture we have in the book we restored that right panel I had seen her work in the gallery of her husband I had seen the new pictures that she had posed for her husband I wanted none of that I wanted class because that's, to me, this picture is class and that's what it is this picture is cut at the end of the elbow and so you don't see this at all As for in my life it's one of the moments that I cherish the most the time I spend with George O'Keefe That's so nice and I have read that in an interview that you have given and I didn't see her again until 1970 at the Whitney Show which we're going to talk about in a second the catalog for the Whitney Show is right down there and she was, of course, surrounded by people this was a big, big opening in retrospective and she caught out of her mind and then she caught my eye she sees me and she had enough of those people you know, she came to me she puts her arm around me and said Tony, let's go look at our picture she didn't say my picture this picture our picture, that was wonderful and that was this painting I presume, right? Yes, in the back there was a at the Whitney, this was at the Whitney took place at the Whitney Museum well that is just a charming story and when we asked Tony to pick out some of his favorite pictures he came up with two I want to show you that I don't believe have ever been published I certainly have never seen them and I like to think I've seen most of what's out there but here's one of them which is a very beautiful color shot did she resist color film with you at all? because you did many black and whites and just a few colors I didn't tell her when I was doing color what I was doing black and white probably a very good idea but this is a very very handsome picture and then this one is very unusual and I bet there's a story which is this one this it was spring as you can see all over and I wanted to give the world this ethereal quality that she had through a photograph and this says it for me it says it she is one of those flowers it's just gorgeous thank you Tony that's a great way to end thank you very much now I'm going to turn to Malcolm Varen's work and he has a very different story instead of experiences his made DA as a photographer is to make beautiful reproductions of paintings, sculptures, decorative objects he's made a career of doing the kind of work that you see in beautiful art books and rarely does the photographer get enough credit for the hours spent lighting and photographing those paintings that of course are the work of somebody else well that's how he and Georgia O'Keeffe met his first assignment is the book that you see on the left here and it's that size and that was for the first really major catalog, museum catalog on her work 1970 I certainly remember it it opened at the Whitney Museum I had never known any I knew her name but I didn't really know what her life's work looked like I can remember that show vividly I was in graduate school here in New York and that show went on to Chicago and then to San Francisco and so it was momentous for her because it was a national event she'd had smaller museum shows but nothing quite of this stature and he was hired I'll let him tell a story himself to do the image that's on the cover but also to do some of the images, the color images only a few color images in that book which is why she wanted to in part write another book because she really did not have a book that was totally in color it wasn't quite yet possible without a lot of money being spent for an all color production so in 1976 she did the book on the left which is the paper version I'm not sure that may be the hardback but one this is the original size and heft of that book it's lost its cover but I didn't barely pick it up it's so big and the notable feature of this book was a she was its author there's a running text but also she didn't want to be broadcast as so much as the author she wanted her paintings to be the gist of the book the heart of the book and it is the first publication that used only color for the reproductions of her art and Tony took a lot of those particular pictures and then he went on to become kind of the court can we call you the court photographer whenever anybody had an okif that needed to be photographed for reproduction whether as a print or in a book Malcolm became the go-to guy for this and he has something is it 600 photographs or something like that in the catalog this is the two volume recording archive of every work that we know of okif and it's whereabouts and it's provenance and so on and he worked he worked very hard I think on that on that production and it's where he and I met I think for the first time was around that so Malcolm I'm going to let you tell I have asked Malcolm to talk a little bit about his photographs of place he also has a few of of Miss Okif later on but we haven't heard much about the houses we've seen details of it but this is as he will tell you the way you get to see her if you went to Abicu this is where Perry we all have visited there you drive through the gateway into this kind of parking parking lot with her house there to the left so Malcolm maybe I suppose it's a useless question to ask you how many times you have seen Miss Okif or been with Miss Okif but because it's many right yes I spent six weeks in Abicu photographing for that book and we had lunch every day also and she was she had she lived in a Abicu is a town that's populated only by descendants of the original Spanish settlers that came here from Spain they had land grants from the king of Spain so all the people in this village except for Okif are descendants of those people and so we we had lunch every day she employed the people in that village and so there was a woman who cooked dinner there cooked lunch and dinner even though Okif herself was a cook so I have these pictures to show you the ambiance and the atmosphere in which these photographs of Okif were taken the I'll just go to another picture here this is a shed inside of her house and if you've been through the exhibition there's a photograph by Karsh which shows her in profile sitting right underneath that set of antlers and it's in black and white well this is the actual shed and Okif was very particular about how things looked in her house she was very simple in her taste in that respect but everything here was placed in exactly the way she wanted including the cords of wood that you show on the right now there's some discrepancy here whether that door is actually the black door there's a lot of paintings called the black door and behind that black door is where she kept all of her paintings and this is a courtyard in the house this house is built around the courtyard it's all built of Adobe and that to my best recollection anyway is where she kept the paintings and so I took a picture of that this circular thing in the middle is a well which was not used anymore now I put this store away and not so much because it's some great architecture or even maybe not a great photograph but I put this store in because when you walk through Okif's house you walk through a bunch of passes waves like this it was a very simple house it was all Adobe the floors were Adobe the walls were Adobe the benches were Adobe and there was no exhibition in this house at all it was extremely simple and you can see here in this little passageway between the rooms she has a a hose hanging up on the wall and rakes and brooms and things the reason I put this in here is that on one of the next pictures I'll show you where this leads to where I shot Okif sitting on a bench although you can't see the bench on an Adobe bench oh by the way I put this picture in again not because I wanted to show a great picture of her kitchen but because it shows you how simple she lived she had enough well she was very wealthy these pictures were taken in about 1973 between 1973 and 75 she lived extremely simply there's no expensive gadgetry in her kitchen it was a very simple life although she could have afforded the most ostentatious kitchen you could imagine can I talk about the table in that regard so she designed a table because she couldn't find what she wanted for either of her two kitchens or for her dining room and because she was frustrated in finding anything that was sort of out there either an antique or a current piece rotation marks I think this simple table which she had her helpers make it's basically two saw horses and then a veneered what do you call it plywood, thank you thank you plywood top and she liked it because she could take it apart and people could then sweep or clean up afterwards and she wanted an empty room if she didn't want to have a table she wanted an empty room for the occasions the whole thing could be broken up very easily these are very simple tables and some people find them a little which I call raw for the setting but she was very proud of this design and told people about it and she also had those tables at ghost ranch as well both houses now what I came about was I was photographing the paintings for that book in 1975 was just before O'Keeffe's 90th birthday and someone a writer from art news, Mary Lynn Cotts was in Abacue interviewing O'Keeffe and wanted some pictures of O'Keeffe at that age and O'Keeffe had none but one speculation photograph O'Keeffe and then charge an O'Fee unless they actually used him in the magazine and so O'Keeffe agreed to that and so did Mary Lynn Cotts and for two days I walked around ghost ranch and Abacue photographing her with Juan Hamilton who's not in these pictures but he was also in the entourage and so this picture was taken in ghost ranch these cliffs in the background which she made a lot of paintings incorporating those cliffs and that waterfall that we saw in one of the pictures before is somewhere along that row of cliffs and of course she's wearing this dress with this, that's a caulder caulder pin right this is exactly now this is a tree I think this is a tree she painted and I forget what the name of the tree is but this is also in ghost ranch and I thought it would be interesting to photograph her in one of the trees that she painted and so I did and by the way you see her with a cane now I spent a lot of time with O'Keeffe and I saw her walk around without using a cane she was capable of walking without a cane why she had that cane and her answer was that when she walked out in the desert she needed a cane to shoo away the rattlesnakes and there were a lot of rattlesnakes there I can tell you that because I killed one while I was there who almost bit me when I was walking around the compound she told me the same thing yeah exactly now you've got cooperation it's a true story I took this picture of her because you know O'Keeffe when you were with her you never saw her as an old person and you saw her as a very gentle person and she was also relatively short actually but this picture she could have this appearance of being extremely regal almost imperious and I saw that and I shot that when I took this picture and this hat by the way is a goucho hat it's upstairs in the exhibition also this is a hat she wore all the time and it's actually a goucho hat an Argentinian horseman's hat now this is in Abacue and she's, you can't see it here but she's sitting on a bench which is also made of adobe everything was made of adobe here and the interesting thing about being an O'Keeffe's house in Abacue is that she's surrounded by this very ancient architecture and one day I was walking through that passageway that I showed you before and I was walking to my studio which went through this room to get to my studio when I was walking through that passageway in this adobe setting I hear Wanda Landowski playing the well tempered clavier coming from I don't know where, it sounded like it was just coming from the sky and it was filling the whole house with this music and I thought to myself this is it's strange and startling to hear one of the one of the most beautiful things ever written in the modern era in a place that is totally ancient in its aura which is the adobe setting so I decided to take a picture of O'Keeffe in that room and I took it so that you could see when O'Keeffe looked at you it was an intense look you felt that she was looking into you, through you, beyond you and could see everything about you including all the things you didn't want anybody to know and the witness to that is this pelvis bone in the background like a ghostly figure witnessing like a Greek chorus what was going on anyway that's how that picture got taken now that's the paternal in the background and in O'Keeffe's pictures in the paintings of the paternal she always paints it blue and out of focus which is actually how it looks in real life it's so far away this is Ghost Ranch it's looking out from Ghost Ranch and it's so far away that the blue haze in the sky causes it to look blue and so I thought I would take make kind of what I thought would be an iconic image of O'Keeffe just her face and her profile together with an icon which she created in her paintings which was the paternal mountain this is my choice the ending of these pictures she didn't smile a lot but but Juan Hamilton you may or may not who he is I won't even go into that because this is not the place to talk about that but he was a companion of O'Keeffe and was a very important figure in her life and he was really the only person that I ever saw that could make her laugh and Juan was here and was I don't know what he did to get this reaction but she's laughing very hardly in this picture and so I shot it I think that's it so Malcolm, we probably should tell our listeners the story of the paternal is that she liked to say and maybe she says it in Perry's film I'm not sure does she say something like I thought if I painted that mountain enough times God would give it to me and it was a it's a familiar motif it's sort of like some victoire was the mountain of south of France that Cézanne painted so often and the same was true of this mountain and its special relationship to her art I want to also say that Malcolm tells me that there is a book forthcoming published by the University of New Mexico Press that will be these kinds of pictures a collection of them and they're as well known because in a certain way he had an assignment or two but he was working very hard on the reproduction so it's going to be exciting to see them and there are a couple of pictures upstairs in the exhibition that Malcolm has also loaned for this show so let's go then to our final speaker and I'm showing you two things I think I'm showing you yes here we go two paintings a painting and a small polaroid that is upstairs in the exhibition at the very end of the exhibition it is a portrait that Andy Warhol did of Georgia O'Keeffe and he based it on a polaroid much like the one that you see here having made a whole series of polaroids of her in 1980 and I think for our audience it's a surprise to learn that she and Juan Hamilton visited with Andy Warhol I think from my research three times once in Ghost Ranch and then twice at Warhol's studio and the factory where and in those two times that they were there they were photographed the first the polaroid shots of Georgia O'Keeffe that Andy himself took and then the gentleman to my left Christopher Makos was there for a second a second visit this one's very late in her life in 1983 and there was a very specific purpose for this visit Andy Warhol had a magazine called Interview the interview I believe still exists and is still being published and he wanted to do an interview but needed and also wanted a photographer on hand so that this interview could be published which is what you see both behind me but we also have a copy upstairs on view Christopher Makos New York photographer based here is very well known for his pictures of artists and musicians and he has some interesting things to tell us about what was an exclusive visit if I've got this right he was called in or he was with Andy at the time when this interview took place a while Andy did the talking did you do the photographs not quite sure what came first I just want to you had said a lot about this photo session and actually there's a few things I want to correct about it which this actually this wasn't done at the factory this was done uptown and also from my perspective just so your audience knows I was part of the warhol factory from 1976 to 1986 so my sort of metier in my world unlike this esteemed group here who spent days and weeks with George O'Keeffe my time could be spent in with hours so I only spent a few hours so I'm the newbie in this group of esteemed people here who have spent a lot of time with her but it was the quality of time that we spent not the quantity and another correction here although the beginning of this showed off interview magazine and the portrait that I did of her and Juan Hamilton who was at the time both Andy and I think George O'Keeffe were trying to promote Juan as a plotter but much more sort of like an artist potter and so the other alternative reason I think the main reason that you see here is this photo session and interview magazine from what my recollection of the story was that Andy and George O'Keeffe were going to exchange paintings in the way that artists often do you can have one of my paintings I can have one of your paintings that was my recollection from this story and this idea what we'll do an interview with you and put you in an interview magazine so I don't want to correct your part of the story but from my perspective that's the story that I knew so the swap didn't ever happen the swap never happened it didn't no it didn't happen Andy was disappointed about it and also to tell further tell you about this I actually went to the Upper East Side and I don't remember exactly where it was I think it was the hotel that they were staying and the reason why I say that because I can see on the left of George O'Keeffe's outfit looks like one of those fancy uptown chairs we didn't have chairs like that at the factory so I was there to photograph George O'Keeffe frankly I didn't know who Juan Hamilton was I was always naive at all these photo shoots so here's this and I kind of would try to do my research but I was too busy with something else so I would just go along and then I'd say wow just like this time here these people are unbelievable this gentleman next to me Tony he told me stories backstage about World War II and I mean his stuff we should leave the stage and just let him talk and also Perry over there she's got some stories that are unbelievable but I'm so humbled by their presence the real story is I mean look at the facial expression in Juan's face he is very suspicious like what are you doing but what I'm doing is I'm cutting you out of the picture okay because I didn't want him in the picture because I wanted a portrait now if you go to the next one look at the expression I think he knew that I didn't want him I didn't care about him in the picture because for me he he doesn't really belong there no he doesn't belong there and this is the picture that I got and upstairs you can see my contact sheets are in this show and you can see me cropping him out wherever I can so this is my portrait of her that I came away with and so that's kind of my story about how I met George O'Keeffe was trying to get her partner out of the picture can I ask do you remember what time of the year this was this is another lead in to address question was it summer? somebody recently in my studio referred to the guy that runs my studio Peter Wise who's my archivist and when that question comes up referring the room he will just answer the question with a date because I live so much in the moment that all of this work is really you know my photographers we really speak through our photographs and we are often asked to come and talk about our photos which we do have stories but they're not usually stories about our photos they're stories about our experiences around the photos hopefully if we're successful that we do our photographs speak for us and so that's why I don't have that answer so I call we've been calling Peter Wise Google because somebody will just say when did this happen or what's time of the year so Peter I know you're here somewhere do you know and he asked me not to call him out so I'm not really calling him out but if a voice in the darkness of the room out there knows when this was done would you say yes? okay okay that's great the reason I asked is she is wearing this black robe dress again but customarily she did not wear that when she was on the road she wore a black suit she used to call it her city clothes and somehow no she's not but she's got the pin in the belt a different belt in this case this is another belt that she owns she didn't have much jewelry but this is one anyway I just thought I have been proven wrong again which is I think I might have said in the book that that dress was always worn when she was local in the southwest and always we had to drag out the suits and she sometimes complained about that when she went to New York so you have a special photograph here from that perspective as well yes that's well this is not the Aguiar belt but it's a belt that she did pose in a couple of times little less than the number of times you got her so do you want to look at the next one here we go these are the pictures with Andy and once again I can really know that this wasn't done at the factory because to see the chair over here this is like one of those uptown chairs in fancy hotels you know that we know so this was Andy I guess he was trying to laugh and giggle because he really wanted to get one of those paintings out of her because that was the real goal here folks it wasn't I mean I'm sure so does he have a mic is he recording her at this point is he interviewing her he never had a mic but he always had he had tape recorders you know those little Sony tape recorders and it was probably sitting on his lap there but I have to tell you watching all these photographs that these wonderful people have of her and looking at the pictures of her in the desert and looking at my pictures of her wearing this simple black thing I have to tell you being a smart woman as she was my guess is that since she understood coming to New York City it's about being chic and black and putting a white thing underneath this wouldn't have been ish and also the way she wore that white robe with this black one was much more country this is much more contemporary much more chic New York all in black which is accessorized with a little bit of you know excuse me fancy jewelry you know what I mean so that's what that story is and the next one I think is the same picture there she is again with Andy's eyes shut and these next series of pictures are to show you see this this is a $19 camera that Andy used it was a Polaroid camera see the little flash cube there this happens to be Debbie Harry and unlike the story that was done at the factory George's you can see the factory thing didn't have that kind of a look and this is a portrait of Debbie of the blondie fame and this is Andy doing the way he did his portraits back to the first thing with this very like a $20 Polaroid camera and the next picture is it's the same camera with a much more expensive flash on it and this is Princess Caroline of Monaco and then here's Princess Caroline of Monaco looking he didn't do this with Georgia he just did the pictures at the studio but part of this story is actually Princess Caroline was asked by Vogue magazine to be the guest editor of Vogue magazine and so she was being an editor at this time editing her pictures and of course this is the last series of pictures and I'll point this up which is really interesting this is Basquiat who I introduced Keith Herring to Andy and also Basquiat to Andy but you see Andy's hands up here Andy if you know any of my work whether it's the alternate image series or any of the portraits that I did of Andy his hands are always front and center well because Andy was an artist he never knew what to do with his hands so in my pictures especially he always did something with his hands he didn't know how to pose I often refer to people in Southern California if any of you are ever out in Los Angeles and you're at a party or anything Californians or people from Los Angeles they always have set poses they're always prepared to be in a selfie or to be in a picture and they always have a set pose Andy really was the precursor to that idea he knew that if someone was going to take his picture part of his set pose was to put his hands somewhere in the photograph so I don't have as long a story because I only spent two hours unlike these people spent seven days lucky two hours but I have to say let's go back to the picture that Andy did on the Polaroid you were talking about how stylish she was and I totally agree but when he went home that night after making these Polaroids he hadn't yet made the paintings he wrote in his diary O'Keeffe seemed old to me this visit she had some old black thing on her head which he liked well enough to make a very nice picture and there are several of these these are the diamond dust pictures where he had taken some glitter diamond dust glitter and would put it into the paint when it was still wet and it would shine I'd like to add something to this though if you know Warhol's portrait work this is about as simple as it gets there's no extra silk screens there's no additional colors there's nothing I have a sense that because the portrait the trade never came about that he just did as little work as possible on this this is my take on it it's not historical context but my personal take is I knew Andy if he felt like either he was betrayed or he didn't get what he wanted out of the art of the deal he didn't do much and most of this was done by Rupert Smith who basically was the person that did the diamond dust idea and this is a pretty I have to say from my opinion lackluster portrait it doesn't have very much going on that's only my take I think that's why we're all here is to hear from the that's great can we just have a round of applause for these wonderful folks it was a very very enlightening and inspiring set of testimonies and we're very happy that we've put this on film or archiving it as a video because I think these are important stories that we don't want to lose now we do have a few minutes that we could do questions for those of you that would like to either ask a question or stand by and hear what more we might hear but is there any questions out there that yes I see one in the middle I guess wait a minute is there a mic here okay we need to get you on mic so somebody's coming with a I might say while we're getting the mics down here that I'm glad that you get to see a few of these photographs where her twinkling eyes and sort of imminent smile and in the case of the one that we we saw from Malcolm hysterical laughter she really was not always in serious gravitas mode and it's nice that some of that's come out this afternoon well there we go thank you that's the perfect lead to my question because because she did start out as a model she did have some what I would call theatrical capability in her posing and I wondered if you felt that bled into her friendliness with you all as photographers or did you feel that you got the real deal I will say as a lead in to you if you respond to this when I began to study who captured her with a smile or twinkle or looking through the cheese or someone I began to see it was always photographers she knew something of she had good feelings for she did not do that kind of pose really with the in and out fashion photographers that came from New York to the same degree that she did with Tony or with Malcolm's well he was just kept lucky to capture I think her in total laughter because she was known to tell other photographers maybe you all got this too don't shoot me smiling I learned from Stieglitz that that's vulgar and then she even would qualify that and say okay but no teeth meaning if you could have a semi-smile I don't know Perry did you get any admonitions as to whether she would smile for you or not that she did she direct you at all as to what poses she was going to be in oh you've lost your there we go I mean I guess the question is whether she I see her twinkling eyes looking at you in couple of those cuts the thing O'Keefe was that once she made up her mind she was a perfectionist very much like Charles Eames in that way being very reluctant and she had to be persuaded to do the film but once she made up her mind she it's it was going to be the very best film possible and she gave us everything she gave us baby pictures home movies home movies of her in secrets home movies of her up on the roof things that I didn't know anything about just started coming in and we were told now look Perry you've got three days to shoot you know we don't want to exhaust her and overstay your welcome and well we had five days the first time and she came to New York we shot her again but she was determined that she was going to give the film everything that she could and once she made up her mind I think she always felt that I talked too much well of course I probably did I probably do and we never became friends but she was very relaxed with me and we had of course while I was there we invited to lunch every day and and then on December 22nd which was my birthday it turned out that Juan Hamilton's birthday was on the 22nd and another one of the friends of her group the 22nd and all of a sudden all of a sudden the three of us were having this big birthday party she made a very nice party and they had cake etc so it was never a question of getting her to smile I mean if she talked about something that she thought was funny she smiled for example one of the we have time now for a little a little extra but we can't pull up any film if that's what you're thinking that would be too hard but she was not very fond of the crowds of Teagliss relatives that she had to be with every summer for decades up at Lake George and one of the things it's in the film as a matter of fact she said 20 people sitting around the table eating corn on the cob you know this was not not her idea she really loved to be alone but with people I mean she had a lot of friends she was not antisocial but she needed to be alone she needed to become a cliche her space and and Teagliss needed people around all the time Teagliss absolutely had to have people and so I asked her once knowing they were so enormously different temperaments how did they stay together, married and from what I can see in spite of shall we say marital serious marital involvement on his part with Dorothy Norman how did they stay together until he died why did you once she found that she adored and was so happy and worked so well in Santa Fe why did you keep coming back to New York and she looks at me as though it's sort of a ridiculous question she said Teagliss was there you know where else should I be so there really was a very profound connection and she talks a lot of course about the intense involvement and interest in each other's work the work was very her work was very important to him his work was very important to her and they had a similar world view so the fact is that I think that she really loved each other in spite of everything and some hard times in the marriage until the end yes we have another question could I add something she detested to waste time she would rather listen to Mozart Vivaldi than just do nothing or say nothing I have her in photographs going through discs of Mozart and Vivaldi especially she loved classical music she was really a deep woman philosophy was at the tip of her brain she just was interested in the world that we live in this is the essence of Giorgio Keefe she didn't want to spend one day doing nothing she was when she came to New York to the exhibition where she had at a certain point she got bored with everybody came to me, grabbed me and said let's go and see our pictures she didn't say my picture and it was the one that I photographed where she was holding the painting so there was this fantastic woman who got away from all those people just the two of us and go and see her painting yes, thank you that's a wonderful memory and you know what backs you up entirely there were two or three memoirs by late life caretakers of O'Keefe that took made diaries and sometimes drawings and so on about their days with her and they would totally support the every day had to have a lot of activity and that activity was around music and having the caretaker read something to them and she would direct the caretaker to go find that book on the Japanese famous book on the book of tea and then she'd say I want three reds she knew exactly which chapter and once a caretaker said we both found it kind of hard to understand and she said let's read it again and see if we can understand it she was much more of an intellectual than I think we give her credit for and love her of music could I just say we got okay and then I think we have a mic back here okay this is for Perry Miller Adato I know that Stieglitz during his relationship with Dorothy Norman took similar photographs of her that he took of O'Keefe and I'm wondering if you have if Georgia discussed this at all or if Dorothy Norman discussed this at all and what their take was on this marriage with three people in it well the question I think the question was about Dorothy Norman and the photographs that O'Keefe that were taken in very many of the same poses as early photographs of O'Keefe I think it's worth mentioning that when there was this major exhibition of not long ago a few years ago of Alfred Siegel's work that O'Keefe was still alive and not a single photograph of Dorothy Norman not a single photograph that he made of her was allowed to be shown not one single one that was a show I think in the late 70s at the Met she was still alive she died in 1986 so that would be the case I see a hand here sir please and it's really amazing I was just wondering how many photographs you took in the 15 days and if you also took photographs when you saw Georgia at the Whitney Museum or that visit to New York you mean of George O'Keefe when you re-saw her when you saw her at the Whitney did you have your camera with you no I didn't have the camera with me but I loved her yeah, is she in a gray silk suit oh yes, yes black and white, yes yep, that's right and if you have any ideas how many roles of film the way she came to me and said let's go and look at our picture we're going to remember that for sure now let's use him, he's the pointer here thanks everybody was wonderful this was such an interesting session thank you very much did didn't Ms. O'Keefe have artwork from other artists in her homes and what are some of the other artists that she admired I can answer that probably better than anyone because I've looked so hard at photographs although Malcolm may have an answer to first of all, I did mention earlier she did not like clutter and very few paintings or what pleased her she would occasionally put one or two of her own in her living space and maybe one or two in the studio but it was not a place to go and sort of have a gallery filled with O'Keefe experience and that's the same case for other things that she owned she did own a few pieces by Arthur Dove and John Maron both of whom Stieglitz showed very often she had a little sculpture by Lachaise and at some point she acquired a calder the calder mobile that you see in some of the pictures on the monitor upstairs but very very few people and it was not what she would call a collection but rather mementos of artists she admired and for a while I've seen descriptions that her living with the only oh she also had a couple of African masks I should say that too that were very precious to her and sometimes were on her walls but she did have a little Arthur Dove in the living room for a very long time and a lot of people commented on it because it was odd to have just one artist and one painting from those many artists that she came with well she did have Stieglitz photographs but she did not put them on the walls no that's an interesting question because I'm not sure that she would have known that light is photography's enemy and kept them off the walls for that reason but no she did not have any photographs by anyone on her walls but she did have some in her archives sure here we got it thank you to all of you Malcolm could you talk a little bit about photographing the paintings well in particular what would you like to hear well I first started photographing O'Keeffe the first thing I actually photographed of hers was on the cover of that book when Doris Brie her friend called me to sort of give me a test which I didn't realize I was being tested but she called me to photograph an O'Keeffe and I went up and photographed it she thought it was one of the best reproductions of an O'Keeffe she'd ever seen and immediately we went out a week later we went out to Abacue and photographed that painting which O'Keeffe had recently finished and which was hanging in the back of her two car garage in Abacue we went out there at night it was a rainy night I photographed it I set up my lights photographed it and stayed overnight in Abacue ever since then O'Keeffe hired me to photograph paintings that were going to be reproduced in her books which is how I came to photograph the paintings in that big book of her paintings those are all my photographs which is why I was out there in 1975 photographing that book was published in 1976 I guess does that answer the question? the one you've just gotten from Linda in the bit that we saw from Perry's film she says she's looking at a color proof and she says the colors don't have to be absolutely like they are in the painting as long as they feel right on the page so I've had many people find this a curious thing to have said that she wasn't going after accuracy so much as she was going after the right feel that's true that is what she said I agree with that one of the things that I became expert at was to get accurate color to match paintings however in seeing thousands of paintings that I've gotten very close to including Rembrandt's and the most famous paintings anybody has ever seen I've seen them up close and I've photographed them and what I can say that the that the feel of the painting is what you come away with the accuracy of the color not so much and when you're talking about color it's the way colors relate to each other in the painting that are really what you come away with so if the colors themselves are not totally accurate if they relate to each other in a way which the painter wanted to express so I think that O'Keeffe was right about that and even though she herself went over the by the way in Perry Miller's she's holding up my transparencies looking at them she even though she was very adamant about getting accurate color nevertheless the final test was whether it looked right in terms of the overall feel of the painting and I agree with that in terms of many art books that I've seen where my photographs are published where some of the reproductions were not entirely accurate in terms of color but they actually felt like what the painting they felt like what you got from the painting when you looked at it in person sorry did you want to say something? we need a mic over here since Malcolm is talking about the photographs of the paintings in the book before I came the first day to actually in Abacue I really did not have a clear idea of what the structure of the film was going to be I had enormous numbers of wonderful interviews with her interviews with people who were close to her but then I come into that room and there she is sitting at the table looking at the pictures and Juan is sort of in the background whatever else they're doing in connection with the book there it was the structure of my film with Georgia talking holding the pictures of discussing them and then cutting away to I think it's important to mention that days and weeks and weeks of research so that you know what questions you can't prepare questions but you have to have luck in everything but especially it seems in filmmaking because the structure of my film was given to me and every time it seemed to be the right moment to come back to Georgia working on the book gave you exactly the kind of rhythm and the kind of feel that I was able to make eventually there's been much talk about the black dress did Georgio Keefe make that dress and if not do we know who did make her clothing yes some of the clothes upstairs particularly the early pieces of white the two piece white outfits that opened the exhibition and two or three of the black outfits and the next one and then the three beautiful blouses and I do attribute to her hand however once she had enough money to hire seamstresses or tailors she used them and only used her own skills which were considerable as a seamstress to darn and to mend she was a hand worker she did not do machine work best we can tell nobody seems to remember a sewing machine in the household and have some of her tools upstairs in the exhibition the wrap dress story is a late life story it starts because of Tony's pictures I can say it starts about 1960 when he made his visit though she may have acquired the first of those costumes earlier she had over 26 of them in her closet when she died in most colors soft colors but many in black and several in white and the story is that the first two or three of them were off the rack from Neiman Marcus they had started life as a coat dress that was really what they called a models cloak and models were preparing to go on the runway had worn that either over their clothes while they did their makeup and their hair to keep the clothes clean or even wore it while they did their preparations and then put the clothes on afterwards and anyway it started as a models coat although it has an earlier history of Claire McCartle's wardrobe and designs but Claire McCartle started the idea of being able to wear such a simple dress out of the house not the house dress but something you could wear out in the public in public sphere but what really sold O'Keeffe on this was it's that Neiman Marcus version was much more basic it was cotton no lining it was you need seven yards of fabric to make one cut on the bias and she loved the simplicity of it because it had no attachments it really was like a kimono she could put it on with one side down and the other side over not having to make buttons or hook and eyes or anything of that sort to keep it all together that was the job of the belt so when she discovered how good she looked in photographs she somehow was a long term solution or not all I can say is that she never gave it up as a basic costume when photographers came they just loved black and white simple and she came up with that combination of wearing the black over the white if you look upstairs you'll see that she often would put fake white colors under her black dress and at her cuffs to make it look like she was layering and had a white garment on there but in fact it was all again very self-consciously done she loved that combination and she loved it particularly when she could be dressed up and have both white and black in the equation if you can put it that way the last room of the exhibit which is called the celebrity gallery is all about her late life clothes for the last 20 years of her life where it's if she's going out on the road she leaves except for the time that Chris got her she leaves the black dresses behind as southwestern wear and she'd pick up as I said the suits we make the point in the show that she moves first from plain trousers then she goes to a matching dress and jacket the first suit that we show is a Balenciaga that she probably bought in the 50s maybe in Spain and then she used New York tailors for those more clothes for the dress she used local seamstresses in Santa Fe and I interviewed two of them who sewed and could tell me exactly how somebody said the perfectionist it was Perry that how once she had decided that that was her dress for keeps she took her oldest version took it all apart took all the had somebody take all the seams apart and then made butcher block patterns from the cloth we have that taken apart I know where it is piece and then the seamstresses that she hired would use that pattern to make the same dress over and over again and Neiman Marcus was getting no credit whatsoever at that point. Last question here. This is a question from Malcolm I saw one of your books where you went out there and took pictures of the mountains that were from that she had used in her paintings and there were some 200 I think pictures or something in that book and I'm wondering did she take you out and walk around with you and show you where she stood with her easel and painted from life of those cliffs and mountains and shadows and all that or did you take the picture of the painting and walk around and look for where she had stood. How did that work out? Well, the book was published long after she died and I took those photographs also long after she died. The book was was written by Barbara Lyons who's an O'Keeffe scholar who was also the chief curator at the O'Keeffe Museum and what they did was they gave me Xeroxes of the paintings that they wanted to show the actual they wanted to show the actual landscape that O'Keeffe did in the paintings and so I had those Xeroxes with me and I went out this is all around Ghost Ranch and I went out there and looked for those exact images and found them including an exact tree and by the way the humidity is so low in the northern New Mexico desert that it seems that nothing ever deteriorates there it also seems that hardly anything grows there and so there was a mountain that O'Keeffe painted which had some pinion trees little clumps of green pinion trees on the mountain and had an old wreck of a carriage somewhere below and when I went out there this was like 70 years later and found that mountain the same pinion trees were there they may have grown an inch but they were tiny and they were in the same place which is how I recognized that I was looking at the same mountain with that piece of destroyed carriage or something that was at the bottom of the mountain and so in answer to the question though she was long dead by the time I went out and did those pictures but I had Xeroxes and that's how I found the places and it's amazing by the way the other thing I'm photographing so many O'Keeffe paintings O'Keeffe had at least I had been told that O'Keeffe was an abstract painter and I guess she's considered a modern abstract painter but when you look at O'Keeffe paintings and you look at what she painting she was extremely literal in what she painted and which is how I was able to find the images which she painted because they looked like her paintings so that was kind of a revelation for me as well to actually see that in person. Yeah I had exactly the same experience when I started to be looking closely at her paintings in New Mexico I grew up in an era that was all about the New York paintings not the New Mexico paintings but there's been a kind of shift now where I think we better understand that she had 40 years after Stieglitz in New Mexico not to mention the 13 summers that she had gone out there so that's a very important chapter but I too was very surprised at how site specific her works are she doesn't necessarily paint them she does sketches pencil sketches and the easel does not go outdoors. Tony's one of the two people that got her to take that easel out of doors and I think the second one was Arnold Newman and I think he knew about it because he knew Tony had gotten her to take that easel out of doors but I don't know how he did that because that easel belongs in the studio at Ghost Ranch that white easel it's there today she did paint out of doors sometimes on her lap or you saw the one picture in Perry's film where Ansel Adams got her painting in a car but it was not like it wasn't as important to her as it was for the impressionists to always paint sur le motif you know at the site but she did start with something and even at the end when she gets a camera or two as gifts including polaroids we have some polaroids upstairs she began to see that that's quicker than making a sketch we don't know how much those polaroids were used but as memory aids perhaps but it is amazing the fact what sets her off is something that she sees in front of her and she I can tell Milankov I'm sure this is the case sometimes it's not easy to find those motifs because she does not take the part of the landscape that sort of says aren't I beautiful aren't I dramatic and so on you have to move over a little bit to find one of her waterfalls or one of her white place stone pillars for instance to get exactly right at all what I call the wow factor in her choice she makes it wow but it comes to her as a set of forms that seem very promising and they aren't necessarily the most beautiful part of the landscape you know I'm going to end with a quote because we've talked all of us about her nature the importance of nature to her and the degree to which being out of doors in that environment was what drove her as an artist finally as a person she once said something and I think this is one part of her character she said if only people were like trees I'd love them more so on that we'll say thank you for coming and being a part of this and thank you to our guests