論 文

Messages from the Far-away: Willa Cather’s andGeorgia O’Keeﬀe’s Visionary Landscapesof the American Southwest

Martha Robertson

要

旨アメリカ合衆国のアイデンタテイ形成には大自然がずっと深く関ってきた。20世紀はじめに，最後のフロンテイアがなくなろうとしているころ，作家のWilla Catherと画家のGeorgia OʼKeefeは砂漠地帯の南西地区を訪れた。人気が少なく、広々としたこの土地に彼女たちが新たな刺激を受けた。本稿ではCatherとOʼKeefeがどのようにこの砂漠地帯をみて、表現したかを論じる。そしてそれぞれの作品をとおして、
アメリカと大自然との関係がどのように変化してきたかを探る。
Keywords: Georgia OʼKeefe, Willa Cather, desert, American identity, nature, andfrontier

Abstract
The American wilderness played a central role in shaping the American identity. In theearly years of the 20th century, when the last frontiers were being settled, the writer
Willa Cather and the painter Georgia O’Keeﬀe traveled to the Southwestern desert
precincts and found renewed artistic inspiration in the vast expanse of this sparsely
inhabited landscape. This paper will discuss the artists’ contrasting visions of the desert
and show how their work reﬂects America’s evolving relationship with wild nature.

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Messages from the Far-away: Willa Cather’s and Georgia O’Keeﬀe’s
Visionary Landscapes of the American Southwest
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understandit are the people who own it –for a little while– Willa Cather
America’s faith in the wilderness as a source of purity and spiritual renewal isreﬂected in the work of the writer Willa Cather and the painter Georgia O’Keeﬀe,
who spent their childhoods in farming communities on the Midwestern plains and,later in life, found a lasting inspiration for their art in the Southwestern desert precincts.
For these two artists, the encounter with the Southwestern desert was a transformative
experience, coming at a time when each was in need of both personal and artistic
rejuvenation.
In Cather’s writing and O’Keeﬀe’s paintings of New Mexico, the desert landscapeis portrayed as a living thing, integral to the formation of the American character andspirit. For O’Keeﬀe, the Southwestern desert precincts oﬀered the freedom andintimacy of vast space that allows an independent spirit to thrive. O’Keeﬀe used thenatural features and desert artifacts to paint a portrait of a vanishing America. Her
techniques were modern, but the results speak of a primal connection to the land thattranscends time. For both artists, an unmediated experience of the natural world draws
out what is best in the human spirit, and their respective visions convey a uniquely
American experience of untamed nature.
Although the transcendent power of the landscape dominates the work of bothartists, their perception of humanity’s place in nature diﬀers greatly. For Cather,humanity is as natural and as essential part of the landscape as are the mountains,
rocks, rivers, and trees. Civilization grows naturally from the loving care of humanbeings who live reverently upon the land. O’Keeﬀe, on the other hand, is concernedwith primordial features untouched by human endeavors. Few life forms ﬁnd theirway into her primal landscape. The topography is a work in progress, captured either
before the creation of human life or after humanity has been extinguished forever. Yet,despite this fundamental diﬀerence, Cather and O’Keeﬀe share a similar primal
relationship with nature. Whether cultivated by human hand or untouched by humanfootsteps, the landscape is a repository of ancient mystery and a source of inexhaustible― 80 ―

MESSAGES FAR-AWAYenergy that transforms lives.
This paper will ﬁrst explore the relationship of New Mexico’s diverse culturalgroups to the land in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Then it will examine
O’Keefe’s rendering of the same geographical areas. Death Comes for the Archbishop(1927) was Cather’s last novel set in the American southwest, whereas O’Keeﬀecontinued to live and work in New Mexico until her death in 1986. Each artist found
her own way, standing apart from the artistic trends and fashions of her time. Each, in
her own way, reﬂects the evolution of America’s relationship with the wilderness.

Willa Cather’s Landscape of “Love and Yearning”
Willa Cather is best known for her pioneer novels set in the Midwestern plains.
Death Comes for the Archbishop is a departure from her previous work, both in its
modern style and in its focus upon a pair of itinerant priests who do not till the soil,
but instead bring God’s mercies to the Mexican peasants, Spanish colonists, Native
Americans, and American adventurers who populate the vast diocese of the recently
annexed territory of New Mexico. The missionary assigned to recruit the new priest
who will unify this territory is quite frank about the dissenting elements in the new
diocese. “The old mission churches are in ruins. The few priests are without guidanceor discipline. They are lax in religious observance, and some live in open concubinage”(6). He is equally frank about the country:
The desert there has a particular horror; I do not mean thirst, nor Indianmassacres, which are frequent. The very ﬂoor of the world is cracked
open into countless canyons and arroyos, ﬁssures in the earth which aresometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand.” (7)The missionary echoes the thoughts of the ﬁrst European colonists to arrive inNorth America who associated wild nature with sin, evil, and the devil. The vast forests
stretching halfway across the continent appeared uninhabitable. They were ﬁlled withdangerous beasts and untrustworthy savages who seemed only partially human. “Safety,
happiness, and progress seemed dependant upon rising out of a wilderness situation,”
writes Nash in Wilderness and the American Mind. “It became essential to gain control
over nature” (9). Nash claims the ﬁrst colonists dreamed of a Garden of Eden in whichhumankind could be fruitful and multiply, and where every plant, animal, and naturalfeature oﬀered some beneﬁt for human beings (chap. 1 & 2). However, an arid desert― 81 ―

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No. 16on the scale of the New Mexican territory could never be transformed into a pastoral
landscape. Hence, the horror the missionary-priest felt for the place in which the heroof the novel would live out his life.
When the new Vicar Apostolic, Father Jean Latour, ﬁnally arrives in his new
home, one of his ﬁrst duties is to make missionary journeys to all parts of his diocese.
On one of these journeys, he discovered that the Mexican peasants have indeed createdminiature Gardens of Eden in the irrigated valleys between the mountain ranges.
These settlers, like so many of Cather’s pioneers, live in a harmonious and respectfulreciprocity with their natural surroundings. They do not conquer nature, but, like
Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia, they discover a part of themselves in the soil thatthey till and, from their relationship with the land, they sustain families and foundcommunities. Both civilization and the land reach their highest potential through aloving, respectful, and reciprocal communion between humanity and nature.
The peasant farmers’ simple faith charms Father Latour, who has been rescued
from almost certain death by his chance discovery of one of these hidden villages afterlosing his way in the mountains. In his imagination, the village is overlaid with Biblicalreferences. The threshing of wheat reminds him of the Children of Israel; the frolicking
goats remind him of “the whiteness of them that were washed in the blood of theLamb” (31). “Goats,” Father Latour reminds himself, “had always been symbols of
pagan lewdness.” However, he remembers also that “their ﬂeece had warmed many agood Christian and their rich milk nourished sickly children” (31), thus he banishes
evil from this pastoral scene. Even the stream that nourishes the valley is beatiﬁed.
Released from its dark origins in the subterranean depths, the stream rises “miraculously
out of the parched and thirsty sea of sand,” and from it comes “household order andhearths from which the smoke of burning piñon logs rose like incense to Heaven” (31).
As with the early European pioneers, hard work and simple piety cleanse the natural
world of evil, order is imposed upon chaos, and the wild landscape is made fruitfuland hospitable for humankind
Yet, the isolated Mexican villages remain virtually inaccessible, nestled in protectedvalleys among the pitiless red hills and mountains that comprise most of the landscape.
The Mexican farmers do not seek to extend their domain. Rather, they deepen theirconnection with the place in which they dwell until they have achieved an almost
mystical connection with the land. Even their saints are localized and shaped by the― 82 ―

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environment. Saint Santiago, the protector of horses in New Mexico, is dressed as a
Mexican ranchero and rides a ﬁne horse. “Oh, yes,” says Latour, inspecting Santiago’s
image. “He was a missionary, like me. In our country we call him St. Jacques, and hecarries a staﬀ and a wallet — but here he would need a horse, surely” (28). Santiago’srole in blessing mares is new to Latour, but he accepts the villagers’ need to transformthe holy into something tangible and compatible with their surroundings.
Another cultural group living in the diocese, the American adventurers, receives
ambivalent treatment in Cather’s novel. Traveling through the mountains, Father
Latour and his companion, Father Joseph Vaillant, take shelter from a storm at thehome of an opportunistic reprobate, Buck Scales. “He was tall, gaunt and ill-formed,
with a snake-like neck, terminating in a small bony head. . . . [T]his repellant head
showed a number of thick ridges, as if the skull joinings were overgrown by layers ofsuperﬂuous bone” (66–67). This reptilian creature would have murdered the two priests
but for the intervention of his abused wife who warns the men of their impending
doom in time for them to escape. The association of an opportunistic and greedy
American who has no sympathy for the land with a loathsome reptile contrasts sharply
with the idyllic Biblical allegories assigned to the Mexican farmers.
On the other hand, the historical ﬁgure, Kit Carson, is portrayed as a noble
frontiersman despite Cather’s admission that the “misguided” Carson was responsiblefor driving the Navahos of Canyon de Chelly from their land (291). However, Carson
knows and respects nature. His mind contained “the most reliable map” of the land
between the Rocky Mountains and the Paciﬁc Ocean (76). Carson lives simply in an
adobe hut with a devout Mexican wife, and throughout his life had “preserved a cleansense of honour and a compassionate heart” (77). In her portrayal of Carson, Cather’s
admiration for the pioneer spirit is in conﬂict with the loss of the wilderness that gave
rise to the traits she admired. Nash observes that, “[In the early days of Westward
expansion] . . . it was generally assumed that because the frontiersman was good, thewilderness, as his primary adversary, was bad — the villain of the national drama”(145). However, the vanishing frontier caused Cather and other Americans to reconsider
the value of uninhabited space. As westward expansion pushed on, Nash says, “Many
Americans came to understand that the wilderness was essential to pioneering: without
the wild country, the concepts of frontier and pioneer were meaningless” (145). By theend of the novel, Americans have built railroads, conﬁned the Native Americans to― 83 ―

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reservations, and colonized the far reaches of the diocese. Cather expresses her sense ofloss through Latour’s Navaho friend, Eusabio, who, looking back upon the changes
that have taken place, reﬂects, “Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go tobetter things” (289).
As Carson represents the noble aspect of the Americans, Eusabio embodies allthat is noble in the Native American people. Through his long friendship with Eusabio,
Latour gains understanding and respect for Native American ways. “Travelling with
Eusabio was like travelling with the landscape made human. He accepted chance andweather as the country did, with sort of a grave enjoyment.” Father Latour observes
that Eusabio buries their garbage and covers the embers of their ﬁre. “When they left
the rock or tree or sand dune that had sheltered them for the night, . . . [Eusabio]“unpiled any stones he had piled together, ﬁlled up the holes he had scooped in thesand” (232).
Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man’s way to assert
himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to
leave some mark of his sojourn), it was the Indian’s way to pass througha country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, likeﬁsh through the water, or birds through the air. (232–3)
Eusabio’s humility recalls the words of Edward Abbey, “. . . out there is a diﬀerent
world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds andsustains the little world of men” (qtd in Nash 254).
After vanquishing the Native Americans and banishing them to reservations,
America began to look back nostalgically upon the virtues of primitivism. The Native
American way of living lightly on the land and their tremendous vitality and courage was
eulogized. Ironically, this shift in thinking came only at “that great moment” celebrated
by Ralph Waldo Emerson when “the savage is just ceasing to be a savage” (qtd. in Nash93). Henry David Thoreau extended that idea to a “sort of border life” for Americans inwhich they would draw upon the hardiness and virtues of the Native Americans while
also exhibiting all the intellectual virtues of western civilization. Like Thoreau’s idealizedsavage, Eusabio stands “free and unconstrained in nature, is her inhabitant and not her
guest, and wears her easily and gracefully.” (qtd. in Nash 91–92).
Latour embraces the harmony and beauty of Eusabio’s world. However, he leaves
his own mark on the vicarage and on the little “country estate” that he purchases just― 84 ―

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outside Santa Fe. Here he grows lettuces, apricots, and other exotic fruits and vegetablesin the parish gardens. He does this for the sake of his parishioners, whom, he believes,need “to add fruit to their starchy diet.” However, his vocation also enters into hisdesire to bring alien fruit and vegetables to New Mexico. He admonishes his students,“Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees andvegetables and ﬂowers” for “Man was lost and saved in a garden.” (265).
The identiﬁcation of human beings with a sentient landscape is a recurrent theme
in Cather’s novels. Hiroko Sato in “Willa Cather in Japan” notes, “Willa Cather thinksof nature as an object of ‘love and yearning’ and as something that will respond tothese emotions.” (89). In Cather’s pioneer novels, it is the assimilation of human beingsand nature that makes civilization possible, as in My Antonia when Antonia becomesthe Earth Mother, ﬁnding her true expression in the soil (70). In Death Comes for the
Archbishop, the identiﬁcation of human beings with the features of the landscape isoften concrete as with Eusabio, “the landscape made human” and the Indians of Acoma
pueblo, whom Cather describes as “a tribe of ancient rock-turtles.” Other times, natureand human emotion are equivalencies, as when Father Latour gazes out over the snowcovered mountains, and “The peace without seemed all one with the peace in his own
soul” (218). These images convey a seamless integration of humankind and the natural
world that occurs only when human desire is brought into harmony with the laws ofnature.
In the chapter called “Stone Lips,” the landscape literally replicates the humanbody. When Father Latour and his Indian guide, Jacinto, take refuge in a sacred cave,they enter by way of “a mouthlike opening,” and slide through “two great stone lips,
slightly parted and thrust outward” into “the throat of the cave” (126–7). The wombof the cave is reputed to shelter a great snake, an ancient symbol of both female power
and immortality. An underground river runs deep beneath the cave, ﬁlling the dank
air with “an extraordinary vibration” that “hummed like a hive of bees”, anotherarchaic symbol closely associated with women (129). The preponderance of female
imagery recalls the archetypal Great Mother. Caves themselves were formerly regarded
as places where the Great Earth Mother gestated life, as well as being the place where
ancient people buried their dead. Divine births take place in caves and great mysteries
are revealed during initiation ceremonies. The cave is Father Latour’s introduction into
an archaic belief system in which all nature is regarded as sacred and imbued with― 85 ―

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In a less frightening encounter with the primal forces of nature, Father Latour
retreats to Eusabio’s village to reﬂect in solitude upon diﬃcult decisions he must makeon behalf of the diocese. As Eusabio’s guest, he huddles in a Navaho Hogan for threedays during a sand storm, experiencing the natural world in the way of archaic people,
whose shelters were temporary and living was done primarily out of doors. “The Hogan
was isolated like a ship’s cabin on the ocean, with the murmuring of great winds aboutit” and Latour is left in alone to meditate (229). He penetrates to the heart of themysteries of nature as he searches his soul:. . . All day long the sand came in through the cracks in the walls andformed little ridges on the earth ﬂoor. It rattled like sleet upon the deadleaves of the tree-branch roof. The house was so frail a shelter that one
seemed to be sitting in the heart of a world made of dusty earth andmoving air. (229)
In the isolation of the hut, Father Latour participates in an act of consecration thatplaces him at the Centre of the World, or the point of intersection between humanity
and the gods. Eliade tells us the heart of the world is a holy place that draws every
human to its center (Images, 51–6). In such sacred space, the forces and features of thenatural world become “transparent to transcendence, . . . the whole sense of which is
harmony and well-being” (Campbell, 20). Whether created by ritual intention or
spontaneous transformation, such holy places become forever after places of spiritual
renewal and rejuvenation.
Hereafter, Latour ﬁnds divine miracles are replicated in the topographical featuresof the earth and in the sky. As he watches the sun set over the Sangre de Christo
Mountains, Latour is transported beyond the beauty of the red hills into a far distant
past. The mountain range, Sangre de Christo, or “Blood of Christ,” becomes virtuallysaturated with the blood of ancient martyrs in Latour’s imagination:
Yes, Sangre de Christo; but no matter how scarlet the sunset, those redhills never became vermillion, but a more and more intense rosecarnelian; not the colour of living blood, the Bishop often reﬂected, but
the colour of the dried blood of saints and martyrs preserved in oldchurches in Rome, which liqueﬁes upon occasion. (270)
Latour now travels freely through time and space, linking the present physical reality― 86 ―

MESSAGES FAR-AWAYwith the more sacred and immediate reality of the miracle. He has broken throughlinear time and enters into an archaic apprehension of sacred space in which thespiritual is embodied in the landscape.
In his retirement, Bishop Latour renounces the comforts of his native Puy-deDôme, and returns to “the bright edges of the world,” where “old age did not weigh soheavily on a man.” He realizes that “[in] New Mexico, he always awoke a young man;not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older” (272–273).
The past lies too heavily over the cultivated lands and reﬁned cities; he can breathe
only in the “the light-hearted mornings” of the desert. In Santa Fe, the very air
carries:
Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the earon the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly, picked the lock, slid thebolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into theblue and gold, into the morning, into the morning. (273)
The sky, earth, and air have the power to transcend time, and the Bishop has “comeback to die in exile for the sake of it” (273).

O’Keeﬀe’s “Luminous Aﬃrmations”
Georgia O’Keeﬀe found a refuge that nourished her creative spirit in the solitudeof the New Mexico desert. Although she maintained a home in NYC with her husband,
photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the land she called “The Faraway” drew her back again
and again. For 30 years of her life, she divided her time between New Mexico and
New York City. When Stieglitz died in 1946, she moved permanently to Abiquiu
where she found her deepest inspiration and her most enduring source of subject
matter.
In contrast to Cather’s concern with a reciprocal relationship between humans
and the nature, O’Keeﬀe was drawn to the primordial vitality of uninhabited space.
Her paintings reveal a transcendent natural world existing in self-contained splendor.
No trace of humanity mars the pristine vistas. The desert ﬂoor is alive with bones,
stones, and shells, which she gathered and painted, and the sky is ﬁlled with stars thattell ancient stories. The processes of nature are laid bare in the horizontal bands of theundulating hills, and the natural rhythms and music of the earth ﬁnd their way into
her art. There is something profoundly elemental and deeply moving in her vision of― 87 ―

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No. 16the primal voices of the earth.
For Cather, the plains and mesas “had an appearance of great antiquity andincompleteness.” Without some evidence of civilization, past or present, she felt the
topography was “still waiting to be made into a landscape” (94–95). In the eyes of
O’Keeﬀe, the red hills and rock cliﬀs are complete and self-contained. O’Keeﬀe might
be the woman Griﬃn describes in her dialogic poem, Woman and Nature: “He saysthat woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That windblows in her ears and trees whisper to her” (Griﬃn qtd. in Lippard, 179). As Cather
cherished human endeavor and the “constantly reﬁned tradition” of enduring
civilizations, O’Keeﬀe found her inspiration in a land beyond human time in which
the features of the natural world are the source of great power, meaning, andtranscendence.
“It was the shapes of the hills there that fascinated me,” wrote O’Keeﬀe, and she
painted the same mountain ranges again and again, reaching for “the feeling of inﬁnity
on the horizon line or just over the next hill” (Turner 19). In one painting, Grey Hills(1942), the undulating dark shapes of the eroded hills ﬁll almost the entire canvas.
Only a narrow strip of sky can be seen above the mountain range. Colourful bands ofpink, yellow, and grey earth hidden in the heart of the mountain are laid bare, exposing
geological forces in process since the beginning of creation. The mountains remain
untouched by humankind. There are no welcoming paths or hidden trails that invite
ascension. The sprawling mound placed front and center blocks entry into the further
reaches of the mountain range. The mound itself appears to creep slowly forward,
melting into rivulets of sand that sift between the massive rounded toes of what could
be some giant prehistoric mammal. The rounded hills seem soft to the touch; theundulating lines recall the curves of a woman’s body. The mountain pulsates with thegenerative power of the Great Mother, enduring, but untouched by human emotion.
In an earlier landscape from the same period, Red Hills and Bones (1941), O’Keeﬀeemploys the same primordial treatment of the mountains. This time, however, the redhills bring forth a few sparse clumps of vegetation. The hills in the background glow
with an inner light. A suggestion of rippling water or a ﬁne mist emerges from thecrevice between the mountains. In the foreground of the painting, distorted in scale,lie the bones of some giant mammal. The association with the archetypal feminine isstrengthened by the presence of life forms and the blood red color of the eroded hills.
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The painting speaks of a sentient, passionate earth that, at its center, is “burning –meltingly hot” (O’Keeﬀe qtd. in Greenough, 188), and of an ancient, cyclical, and sacredtime ﬂowing eternally beneath the surface of mundane reality.
Many have remarked upon the close correspondence between the forms of natureand the female body in O’Keeﬀe’s work. Her close-up view of ﬂowers caused morethan one critic to associate their vaginal forms with repressed sexuality. However,Estella Lauter reminds us the identiﬁcation of women with nature is not a new idea,
and that, whatever O’Keeﬀe’s forms suggest to the viewer, her artistic concern wasalways the objective rendition of the physical world. If line and form suggest a female
body, then it is because this idea is inherent in the natural object. In calling uponfeminine intuition to portray nature, O’Keeﬀe was not “inventing a vocabulary” forexpressing physical love, “. . . she was inventing a vocabulary for envisioning nature”(151).
In Western art and literature, women have long been equated with nature, usuallyto the detriment of both. In colonial America, both women and nature were seen as athreat to a godly, ordered civilization. Both were subject to uncontrollable forces that
could destroy all that man had created. As wild nature was subordinated to the purposesof mankind, so was woman tamed, her mind, heart, and deeds relegated to the family
and the continuity of cultural traditions. Lauter claims that O’Keeﬀe challenges theseassumptions. “As she consciously revalued the ﬂower, she subconsciously revalued thefemale; neither was to be seen as an object for human use” (152).
The animal bones that littered the desert ﬂoor appear in many variations in
O’Keeﬀe’s paintings. A series of almost surrealistic compositions involving skulls,
ﬂowers, and other desert artifacts ﬂoating above a miniaturized landscape resulted
from O’Keeﬀe’s early pilgrimages to New Mexico. Summer Days (1936) is a happy
conjunction of a deer’s skull, red cannas, sunﬂowers, blue sky, white clouds, and red
hills. Like the skull, which occupies the upper and center parts of the canvas, theviewer feels suspended in space over distant red hills. The colourful summer ﬂowers
emerge from a misty cloud cover and rise up toward the skull. The clouds form an
opaque grey background for the skull and ﬂowers, but below is a layer of intense bluesky. The red hills at the bottom of the canvas are familiar from so many other paintings.
The painting captures O’Keeﬀe’s lighthearted mood as she walked through the desert
gathering bones, stones, and ﬂowers for future paintings. In answer to critics who― 89 ―

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found her fascination with bones disturbing, O’Keeﬀe writes, “I have used these things
to say what is to me the wideness and the wonder of the world as I live in it.”
A subsequent painting, From the Faraway Nearby (1937) centers upon anenormous deer skull hovering just above a range of pink and white mountains.
Alterations of perspective and scale cause the viewer to again feel suspended in the air,ﬂoating beside the skull. The skull’s unseeing eye and the subdued blue, rose, and grey
colour scheme evoke a sense of harmony and well-being. Marjorie Balge-Crozier
observes that the many-antlered deer is not a real animal, but a “mythic beast, a poetic
evocation of all the animals that have lived on that land. . . . It is a statement about
what endures, what transcends, what is eternal” (65). Although many viewers equatedO’Keeﬀe’s paintings of skulls and bones with thoughts of mortality, O’Keeﬀe herself
stated emphatically that this was not the case. “To me, they are strangely more living
than the animals walking around. . . . The bones seem to cut sharply to the center ofsomething that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and empty anduntouchable — and knows no kindness with all its beauty” (qtd. in Messinger 72).
In these paintings, the artist uses her powerful imagination to concentrate theimmediacy and intimacy of vast space into a knowable, tangible form. O’Keeﬀe’sfriend and fellow artist, John Marin, explains, “The one with the full imagination loses
the far away and he immediately begins peopling it with his imaginings. Those things
near too he pushes into the far away & brings them back with an added seeing” (qtd.
in Balge-Crozier 65). What Marin calls “added seeing” is Black Elk’s “seeing in a sacredmanner” or Blake’s cleansing of the “doors of perception,” which allows “everything toappear to man as it is, inﬁnite.” This way of seeing leads to “the realm that lies beyond
beauty”, the Romantic concept of the Sublime. (Campbell 125, 20–21).
The Transcendentalists valued the American wilderness for its attributes of theSublime, or the capacity to evoke “sentiments of awe and reverence and a sense ofvastness and power outreaching human compression” (Campbell 122). During the ﬁrst
half of the 19th century, the Ralph Waldo Emerson and H. D. Thoreau were key
ﬁgures in disseminating the ideas of literary Romanticism and Transcendental
philosophy to Americans. Within nature, Transcendentalists believed, could be foundhard evidence of God’s divinity and his plan for the universe. Man was of the physicalworld, but possessed intellect and a soul, which gave him the potential to transcendmaterial reality and experience the divine (Nash chap. 5). Thoreau, in particular,― 90 ―

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encouraged Americans to revalue the wilderness as a place of communion with God
and as a repository of “vigour, inspiration, and strength.” Without regular intercoursewith nature, mankind and civilization itself would become “eﬀete, sterile, andmoribund because ‘the wild man in her became extinct’” (Nash 88, 90). Thoreau’s
writings returned to prominence in the early years of the 20th century, and the Stieglitz
circle found themselves in harmony with Thoreau’s views, especially with his paciﬁsm.
O’Keeﬀe’s apprehension of nature is in accord with Transcendentalist principles;
however, O’Keeﬀe, as one critic noted, was “a Transcendentalist without God” (Baker
qtd. in Elderedge 194).
O’Keeﬀe’s unmediated Transcendental vision is best expressed in her Pelvis series,
a group of some dozen paintings that display a smoothly contoured pelvis bone set
against the sky. In some Pelvis paintings, the bone ﬂoats over the landscape; in others,a full moon appears in the background. In Pelvis With Blue (Pelvis 1) (1944), a fragmentof the bone ﬁlls the foreground, its open bone socket opening into a brilliant blue sky.
In the absence of a context, the rounded blue form in the center of the canvas could
be either concave or convex. The intense blue dominates the canvas, and the smoothly
sculpted bone becomes a graceful frame for the sky. The opening is a visual metaphor
for the passage from time to inﬁnity. The sky beckons, and the viewer is transported
through the opening “. . . to lose oneself together with the world, in transcendence, ...
to the loss of the psyche itself ” (Campbell 69). Curator Daniel Catton Rich calls thePelvis series a “luminous aﬃrmation,” and he concludes that, “once again, transformation
has triumphed over observation” (qtd. in Elderedge 205). O’Keeﬀe’s explanation of thepainting is far more down-to-earth: “[I was] . . . most interested in the holes in thebones — what I saw through them — particularly the blue from holding them up in
the sun against the sky . . . The blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s
destruction is ﬁnished” (qtd. in Elderedge 205).
O’Keeﬀe was greatly inﬂuenced by Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritualin Art. In Kandinsky’s system of symbolic correlations between colour and emotions,blue is “a call to the inﬁnite, a desire for purity and transcendence” (Elderedge 164). For
Kandinsky, the colour blue corresponded to feelings of spaciousness, tranquility, andpeace. Elderedge, in light of O’Keeﬀe’s paciﬁsm and the fact that the composition waspainted during the Second World War, calls Pelvis With Blue “a pictorial appeal forpeace.” (205). Whatever the interpretation, Pelvis With Blue remains an example of― 91 ―

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No. 16O’Keefe’s ability to reduce a subject to its essential elements while creating acomposition with multiple layers of meaning.
O’Keeﬀe’s art was always localized. Each place or object she painted had a personal
association, and her intent was to capture the emotion her subject engendered. “You
paint from your subject,” she wrote, “not what you see. . . . I rarely paint anything I
don’t know well” (qtd. in Elderedge 179). In one painting, The Lawrence Tree (1929),
O’Keeﬀe immortalizes the ponderosa pine behind Dorothy Brett’s house. D. H.
Lawrence had enjoyed sitting under this tree when he lived in New Mexico. O’Keeﬀe,
who painted the canvas while lying on a wooden bench and looking up into the tree’s
branches, invites the viewer to share in a primal vision of a harmonious, sacred cosmos.
The Lawrence Tree rises into the star-studded heavens, its great trunk bisecting thecanvas. However, the unconventional placement of the tree causes the crown to appear
to be plunging into the depths of the earth. The tree’s tangled branches might well be
its roots, and its crown a shrouded allusion to a dark realm below. The displacementof customary points of orientation charges the tree with symbolic meaning. It istransformed into the sacred Tree at the Center of the World, the tree that allows
human beings to commune with the gods.
In most mythologies, the crown of the cosmic Tree supports the heavens andshelters the world, while its roots extend into the nether world to the ultimate sourceof being. In Egyptian mythology and in the Bhavagad Gita, the tree is reversed,
representing the emergence of the universe from the sacred ground of all- being. Eitherway, the tree is the symbol for the Tree of Life, from which all consciousness ﬂows, andthe means by which the soul ascends to heaven.
O’Keeﬀe’s intent, however, was not to repeat a tradition of great antiquity, but totransform our vision. Joseph Campbell speaks of the artist’s fundamental purpose asthat of “reawakening the eye and heart to wonder” (130). “Art, he claims, “is the mirror
at the interface. So too is ritual; so also myth. These, too, ‘bring out the grand lines ofnature,’ and in so doing, reestablish us in our own deep truth, which is at one with thatof all being” (132). In this, the artist is like the shaman whose way is to see “the shapesof all things in the spirit, and the shape of all things as they must live together like one
being” (Black Elk qtd. in Campbell 125). O’Keeﬀe’s work is infused with her intense love
for the New Mexico landscape, and her feeling ﬁnds its truest expression in a primal
integration of humankind and nature.
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When O’Keeﬀe ﬁrst came to New Mexico, she was fascinated by the darker
symbols of the Catholic Church. The Penitentes, a secret, forbidden sect that practices
ﬂagellation and mock cruciﬁxion, held meetings near Ghost Ranch. At Easter, she
could hear their chants as processions of devotees wound through the hills in thedarkness to enact the Passion of Christ. She writes, “I saw the crosses so often — andoften in unexpected places — like a thin dark veil of the Catholic church spread over
the New Mexican landscape. . . . Painting the crosses was a way of painting thecountry.”
In Black Cross with Red Sky (1929), a simpliﬁed black cross stands in a starklandscape. A pyramid of deep blue hills stands on the horizon, and the sky and earth
in the foreground are stained blood-red. The “carnelian sky” recalls Father Latour’svision of the dried blood of “saints and martyrs” as well as the agonies of the cruciﬁxion.
In a second painting, Black Cross, New Mexico (1929) a partial view of a heavy black
cross ﬁlls the foreground. The cross stands above a range of mounded hills illuminatedby the setting sun. The cross is heavy and solid, and the hand-hewn pegs supporting
the arms are barely visible in its center. Sunset is the time when the Penitentes began
their procession through the hills to the place of mock cruciﬁxion. The somber moodis conveyed through the simpliﬁed form of the cross and the intensity of the darkcolours. Through the elimination of extraneous detail and the abstraction of only themost essential forms, the passion of the Penitentes’ dark rituals is realized in a mostpowerful way, even though the penitents and their ritual are not seen. “We may notknow that [O’Keeﬀe] is referring to the presence of Catholicism in the Hispanic
culture of the region, but we do know how she felt about it,” observes Elizabeth Hutton
Turner. “Her radical simpliﬁcation . . . of the cross raises it to the plane of universal
meaning where it functions in the continual present” (71).
During the 1930’s, when O’Keeﬀe began her paintings of skulls, American artists
and writers were engaged in quest of an indigenous, wholly American art form.
Photographer Paul Strand complained, “Just now it is the fashion to bow the head inwonder before anything European, even before a tenth rate example of a second rate
worker. . . .” Arthur Steiglitz raged, “Haven’t we any of our own courage in matters‘aesthetic’?” (qtd. in Elderedge 159). For Americans, the wilderness had already become
a symbol of national pride. As Nash notes, “While other nations might have a wild
peak or patch of heath, there was no equivalent of a wild continent. And if, as many
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No. 16suspected, the wilderness was the medium through which God spoke most clearly,
then America had a distinct moral advantage over Europe, where centuries ofcivilization had deposited a layer of artiﬁciality over His works” (69). However, mostartists of O’Keeﬀe’s time turned not to the wilderness, but to sterile urban settings or
bucolic rural themes to express their vision of America.
As a sarcastic comment on the soulless canvases produced by the Regionalist andthe Social Realist movements, O’Keeﬀe painted a cow’s skull against a red, white, andblue background. Entitled simply Cow’s Skull Red, White, and Blue (1931), thecomposition can be read on many levels. It is symbolic of New Mexico’s past, with its
struggling ranchers, dead cattle, and the numerous wars that took place in the desert
precincts before New Mexico became a state. It also represents the death of the frontier
and the loss of a crucible for the nurturing of American virtues. The horns of the cow
extend toward the frame of the canvas. A vertical black line (presumably the support
holding the skull against the red, white, and blue banner) runs through the center ofthe canvas Together, line and skull form a cross, transforming the skull into “an imageof great mystical power, almost a sacred relic” (Messinger 76). Despite the painting’s
religious and nationalistic connotations, O’Keeﬀe claims the composition was simply
a response to her contemporaries’ subject matter and style:. . . some of the current ideas about the American scene struck me as
pretty ridiculous. . . . For goodness’ sake, I thought, the people who talkabout the American scene don’t know anything about it. So, in a way,that cow’s skull was my joke on the American scene, and it gave me
pleasure to make it in red, white, and blue. (qtd. in Messinger 76)
Still, there is no doubt that O’Keeﬀe’s choice to paint what others thought was “awasteland” was, in part, an attempt to present her own vision of the American
experience. In so doing, she immortalized a unique American landscape and opened
our eyes to a new way of seeing.

Conclusion
The art of Willa Cather and Georgia O’Keeﬀe is a product of America’s uniquerelationship with the landscape. From a limitless expanse of forest, American colonists
built a civilization. In the process, a set of particular American values emerged– a love
for freedom, a veneration of wide, open spaces, a belief in social equality, a talent for― 94 ―

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innovation, an unquenchable optimism, and a deeply ingrained habit of self-reliance.
From their childhood on the Wisconsin prairie, the artists would naturally haveabsorbed these frontier values along with the rhythms of the seasons and the cycles ofplanting and harvest. The Transcendentalists’ philosophy of the natural world would
also have been part of their heritage, reﬁned by hours of solitude spent in communionwith the wilderness. In this way, what Greenough says of O’Keeﬀe, that “she draws not
only her subjects, but her very artistic being from the soil” applies equally to Cather(qtd. in Elderedge 187).
It was the primordial vitality of the Southwestern desert wilderness, however,
that, in later life, revitalized Cather and O’Keeﬀe’s lives and played a crucial role in thedevelopment of their style as mature artists. America’s wilderness not only was
responsible for the evolution of a distinctly American identity, but it also has been themuse and crucible for much of America’s art and literature. John Muir, writer andnaturalist, wrote, “There is a love of wild nature in everybody, an ancient mother-loveshowing itself whether recognized or no, and however covered by cares and duties”(qtd. in Nash 128). Cather and O’Keeﬀe were particularly attuned to the song of thismuse, and their distinctive evocation of the Southwestern desert in their art has
awakened a new generation of Americans to the transformative power inherent in thewilderness landscape. Americans owe much to Cather and O’Keeﬀe’s transcendental
vision. Their art is a testimony to the necessity of preserving the remaining tracts ofwild nature as a wellspring for future innovation and as a place to experience ﬁrsthandthe indigenous wilderness that shaped American culture.

References
Balge-Crozier, Marjorie P. “Still Life Deﬁned.” Turner 41–74.
Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and Religion. NY: Haper &Row, 1986.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Vintage Classics Edition. NY and Toronto: Vintage
Books. Random House, 1990. (Original work published 1927).
Cather, Willa. “The Novel Démeublé.” Stories, Poems, and Other Writings. Ed. Sharon O’Brien. NY:
The Library of America, 1992. 834–37.
Cowart, Jack, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough. Georgia O’Keeﬀe: Arts and Letters. Exhibition― 95 ―

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Catalogue. Washington: Bullﬁnch Press and Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1987.
Cowart, Jack. “Georgia O’Keeﬀe: Art and Artist.” Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough 1–6.
Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeﬀe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.
Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Trans. Phillip Mairet. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991. (Original work published 1952).
----. “The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion.” Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The
Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Trans. Phillip Mairet. London:
Harvill Press, 1960. 116– 132.
Greenough, Sarah. “From the Faraway.” Cowart, Hamilton, and Greenough 135–273.
Hamiliton, Juan. “In O’Keeﬀe’s World.” Cowart, Hamilton and Greenough 7–12.
Lippard, Lucy R. Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. NY: The New Press, 1983.
Lauter, Estella. Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women.
Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 1984.
Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O’Keeﬀe. New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1988.
Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind.” 4th ed. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
Sato, Hiroko. “Willa Cather in Japan.” The Art of Willa Cather. Eds. Bernice Slote and Virginia
Faulkner. Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. 84–97.
Turner, Elizabeth Hutton. Georgia O’Keeﬀe: The Poetry of Things. Washington, DC: The Phillips
Collection and Princeton: Yale University Press, 1999.

Grey Hills 1942

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Red Hills with Bones 1941

Summer Days 1936

From Faraway Nearby 1937

Pelvis with Blue 1944

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The Lawrence Tree 1929

Black Cross Red Sky 1929

Cow’s Skull; Red, White, and Blue 1931
Black Cross NM 1929

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