“The Space Within” Gallery Talk

That looks like a cool person who did high school speech and debate.

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). First-floor plan, Frank Lloyd Wright desert house (Mohave, California). Unbuilt project, 1924–25. Pencil on paper, 151/4 x 183/4 inches. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York) , 2107.001

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986). Pelvis with Shadows and the Moon, 1943. Oil on canvas, 40 x 48 inches. Private collection. Photographed by Yosi Pozeilov.

Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867–1959). Interior, general view toward ramp, V. C. Morris Gift Shop, San Francisco, 1948. Photographed 1981 by Jet Lowe. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

I gave this short gallery talk on Friday, October 3 at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The text for this talk and the research in it comes mostly from the chapter Vessel & Void. I’ve left it largely as I delivered it with only light editing.

Let’s start tonight’s gallery talk with an informal poll. We’re sitting here in front of O’Keeffe’s Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, from 1945.

What do we see? A pelvis bone and a sky, both in really exaggerated, unnatural hues. If you have been to this museum at other times or know O’Keeffe, you probably know that she did a lot of paintings in this series, most of which are white bones with blue sky. Sometimes she’ll put some other elements in the picture like a desert landscape. But they all have a kind of similar structure and theme - the two main components are the pelvis bone and the sky.

But let’s get back to the one we’re looking at here on the wall.

Who thinks this painting is about the pelvis bone?

Who thinks it’s about the sky?

I’m going to give you a really Zen answer to sit with for a second. All of you are right, and all of you are also wrong.

So the theme of this First Friday is O’Keeffe and tea. I’m betting that when most of us think tea, we think mainly of the drink. But tea is also a ritual, right? We have our demonstrator Satori out in the courtyard showing some different tea preparations and really highlighting the ceremonial aspects of tea.

Now, I am not entirely sure if Wright drank tea. But something that unites Wright and O’Keeffe is a shared love of this little book - Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea. This was one of the first books written in English by a Japanese author about Japanese culture and aesthetics. What Okakura does so brilliantly in this long essay is use the Japanese tea ceremony as a way to introduce more complicated philosophical concepts out of historical Zen and Taoist traditions. So the book is about tea, and it’s not about tea. Are you sensing a theme?

Wright and O’Keeffe both were reading and connecting to this book and related ideas in the early 1940s. They were also in touch and sharing what they had learned with each other.

Wright starts to play with this idea of architecture as a kind of literal vessel for holding space in the 1920s. A client asked him to design this really fantastical ranch in Death Valley, California. So here’s Wright, who at the time has an office in Los Angeles, who has mostly spent time in the midwest and in Japan, now out in maybe the most open and unremitting landscape he’s ever experienced. For his client he ends up designing this really grand set of buildings inspired by the landscape, a kind of lush, desert oasis that’s all about responding to the site’s natural topography.

But he is apparently also moved to design a potential home for himself. He ends up designing this very strange octagonal house that centers around an atrium with a pool. Looking up, that atrium is designed to frame that vividly blue Death Valley sky. I want to stress that this is a radically different building than anything Wright has done in his career to date. If you’re familiar with Wright’s work you can think back to his early Prairie Houses in Oak park, or to the intricate concrete block buildings he has just been designing in Los Angeles. But here he is, essentially proposing to build himself a house that looks like an oversized ceramic pot in the middle of the desert, exploring new relationships between inside and out as a continuous surface that wraps and encloses space.

Unfortunately, Wright’s client ends up deciding to ditch Wright’s wildly inventive design in favor of a more traditional Spanish hacienda style mansion and Wright never gets his desert dwelling.

So this idea is in Wright’s mind long before he returns to it and starts developing it further. O’Keeffe and Wright are similar in that respect - they will pick up an idea, put it down, and return to it a decade or more later. You get the sense that that idea is germinating, gestating, and getting ready to be actualized. O’Keeffe’s friend, Maria Chabot, who lived with the painter at Ghost Ranch in the early 1940s, remembered that O’Keeffe started to pick up pelvis bones on their walks through the desert years before the artist actually started depicting them on canvas.

In an oral history interview, Chabot recalled: “Well, you see, she had pelvises sitting around on the patio, dry ones, for years before she started that. When did that series begin? She knew, and I knew, that she would start painting them once she had had them fully imbibed."

O’Keeffe actually starts painting these forms around 1943 and continues the bulk of the series through about 1945—years that overlap with the United States’s involvement in WWII. So it’s easy to look at O’Keeffe’s pelvis series and see maybe see what art historians call momento mori, a symbolic reminder of mortality in a painting. That’s true and I do think the World War II backdrop of these paintings is important. But there’s more to it than that.

Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to Alfred Stieglitz on June 28, 1943: “Then after breakfast I read a little book I’ve wanted to read for years The Book of Tea… I enjoyed it.”

But O’Keeffe doesn’t reference The Book of Tea when she starts talking about her Pelvis paintings. For her, this was something intuitive that she had been doing all along. In her catalog text explaining these paintings, she says:

“I was the sort of child that ate around the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut saving either the raisin or the hole for the last and best. . . . When I started painting the pelvis bones I was most interested in the holes in the bones—what I saw through them—particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world.”

Frank Lloyd Wright felt much the same—for him, The Book of Tea was not so much new information as it was an affirmation and validation of the philosophy he had put into buildings from the start. In his 1954 book, The Natural House, Frank Lloyd Wright recalled reading The Book of Tea and feeling a little let down that he had not actually invented this way of thinking about space:

“I received a little book by Okakura Kakuzo, entitled The Book of Tea, sent to me by the ambassador from Japan to the United States. Reading it, I came across this sentence: ‘The reality of a room was to be found in the space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. Well, there I was. Instead of being the cake I was not even the dough. Closing the little book I went out to break stone on the road, trying to get my interior self together. I was like a sail coming down; I had thought of myself as an original, but was not. It took me days to swell up again. But I began to swell up again when I thought, ‘After all, who built it? Who put that thought into buildings? Laotse nor anyone had consciously built it.’ When I thought of that, naturally enough I thought, ‘Well then, everything is all right, we can still go along with head up.’ I have been going along—head up—ever since.”

So in the 1940s, Wright picks up this idea of the building as a vessel again, likely inspired by his reading of works like The Book of Tea but also… and here we’re going to get a bit speculative…  by O’Keeffe and her pelvis series; responding to similar ideas and texts at the same time.

At the end of 1943, O’Keeffe executes what is perhaps her most ambitious pelvis painting, entitled Pelvis with Shadows and the Moon. Lots going on in this painting, right? This is a pretty compositionally far cry from the painting you see here in the museum. We’ve got the whole pelvis arrayed across the canvas, casting shadows that seem to meld ambiguously into the color fields behind it - are they shadows? Are they sky? Is this a landscape? O’Keeffe draws in a couple of other motifs, including her beloved pedernal, and an oversized moon - a feature of many Japanese woodblock prints.

O’Keeffe gives this painting to Wright in 1946. She has to keep it in New York because it’s being considered for inclusion in her big MoMA retrospective. And then of course she wants to reframe to get rid of the gaudy gold one that had been on it and replace that with one of the minimalist chrome ones she preferred.

When Wright receives it in 1947, he drops her a note: “The masterpiece arrived properly framed - that is to say, none showing!”

Wright hangs the painting in a small building at Taliesin West - his winter home and studio in Scottsdale. The next year, Wright starts work on the V.C. Morris Gift shop in San Francisco.

Now, it’s always hard to prove these things, but Wright’s building seems more than just coincidentally similar to O’Keeffe’s painting. Emerging from the building’s air lock into the atrium, Wright’s store feels like stepping into an architectural rendition of O’Keeffe’s painting. The circular openings that line the curved wall of the ramp echo the four small holes in the underside of the sacrum.

And Wright is also playing with spatial ambiguity: the ramp that circles the periphery of the store manages to both simultaneously enclose space and transcend it. Perhaps most importantly, this marks Wright’s transition back to this idea of thinking about the building as a kind of vessel.

He continues to develop this idea over the final decade of his career in works including both the Marin County Civic Center in California’s Bay Area and of course, in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

All of these buildings share this idea of really thinking of space as the inside of a cup or a vessel; the space itself becomes a very palpable part of the structure; the rounded articulated walls in each of these three projects really highlight the void of the building in a very comparable way to O’Keeffe’s pelvis paintings.

So let’s return then to the painting at hand and that first question I posed. Is it about the sky or about the pelvis bone? What can we take from The Book of Tea and from Wright to better understand this composition?

Well we’ve heard from O’Keeffe that she’s fundamentally interested in the blue sky that can be seen through this anatomical aperture. But without this framing device, this vessel that holds the sky and gives it form, the sky is nothing but an infinite expanse. In other words we don’t understand the interior as space unless there is something to give it definition. The sky without the pelvis would be the equivalent of pouring tea out onto the table rather than into a cup - it is the cup which gives the tea definition and meaning, that makes it something we can appreciate and enjoy.