Georgia O’Keeffe’s kitchen artistry
Painter’s artistic talents extended to her home cooking.
Robyn Lea found “a whole world of stories” inside Georgia O’Keeffe’s unassuming black recipe box. Until a fortuitous first visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center in Santa Fe, N.M., she hadn’t known the box existed.
The Melbourne-based writer and photographer was researching the connection between O’Keeffe’s life as an artist and her way with food.
The trip was crucial in determining if she would proceed with the project.
“I didn’t know if there would be the material there. Or even, if it was there, was it interesting? Was it delicious?” Lea says. “I could see immediately that there was this great material that was very compelling and interesting.”
Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe is Lea’s second cookbook exploring the life of an artist through a culinary lens. (Her first focused on painter Jackson Pollock.)
Through examining the contents of that recipe box — handwritten recipes, notes and clippings — O’Keeffe’s cookbooks and garden books, she discovered a new side of the artist.
“This is not the icon. This is not the name. This is not Georgia O’Keeffe burning in the sun of the southwest. This is a woman who loved to think about what she was going to eat the next day and pluck the ingredients from her own garden,” Lea says.
“This is a side of her that also showed the care. It’s not just the independent woman who was caring about herself and her own output. This was a person who wanted to share the meaning behind food and the benefits that good eating could give people.”
As Lea illustrates in the book, O’Keeffe approached the kitchen with the same focus and sensitivity as the canvas.
For her, food was vital to the artistic process and she went to great lengths to procure ingredients: importing tea from Chuan-shang Tea Store in Taipei, foraging for wild plants and tending her own garden.
Food appears as subject matter in some of O’Keeffe’s works, such as Apple with Wild Grapes, circa 1921. And Lea says there was “an absolute interchange” between her growing produce, painting food, and eating well to fuel long days of painting.
After the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz in 1946, O’Keeffe became increasingly interested in longevity and eating for health, Lea writes.
The stack of cookbooks sitting on her bedside table was likely to include titles from her collection such as How to Live to Be 180 by Justine Glass. For O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at the age of 98, food was art but it was also medicine.
She believed that nutritious food could ward off illness, Lea says.
But also, with its vibrant colours, flavours and textures, that the right foods could enable artists to create powerful work.
At a time when convenience and processed foods were just beginning their ascent, the artist made her own yogurt and cooked with whole grains.
“On the one hand, she was ahead of her time in food, dress, interiors and art. And on the other hand, everything she has done has been shown to be quite timeless,” Lea says.
Recipes excerpted from Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe by Robyn Lea (Assouline, 2017)