Paintings that bear fruit Georgia O’Keeffe’s Visions of Hawai’i
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE’S VISIONS OF HAWAI’I
INFebruary 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe disembarked from the luxury liner SS Lurline i n Honolulu, where she was welcomed by locals with fanfare and leis. She had accepted a commission from the advertising firm N.W. Ayer & Son to illustrate ads for t he Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole). During nine weeks, she would t ravel around the i slands, seeking inspiration, sketching impressions, and eventually creating a series of oil paintings of Hawaiian f lowers and landscapes that debuted in 1940 at Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery An American Place.
Two of those paintings did end up becoming pineapple juice ads. “Words cannot describe this glowing crater of color which on the Dole plantations grows and ripens into a luscious big pineapple,” reads the ad copy below O’Keeffe’s depiction of a pineapple bud surrounded by shooting green leaves. The painting was a backup option for the ad; she initially sent a painting of a papaya tree instead, but it was rejected — wrong fruit. (The other ad depicts a red heliconia with a calm Hawaiian seascape in the background.)
Although the reason for the trip was commercial, its outcomes were artistically meritorious, allowing O’Keeffe to extend her work in composition and form into new geographic realms. Paintings of hibiscuses, a bird-of-paradise, a lotus, and other flowers in blossom — flattened close-ups that often take up the entire canvas, sometimes set against a sea background — continued O’Keeffe’s examination of place through a region’s natural elements. Oceanscapes and, in particular, a series of meditations on the ‘ Īao Valley in Maui, documenting the valley’s shifting appearance as time and clouds passed, are striking additions to her corpus of landscapes.
O’Keeffe’s Hawaii paintings are the subject of a new exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, Georgia
O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i, which also showcases Hawaiian flora. An accompanying catalog is edited by Joanna L. Groarke and Theresa Papanikolas — of the New York Botanical Garden and the Honolulu Museum of Art, respectively — with essays on the Hawaii paintings and the islands’ biodiversity. The exhibition is the first in New York since 1940 to bring together most of the Hawaii paintings, writes Gregory Long, the CEO of the New York Botanical Garden, in the catalog’s foreword, and its purposes are multifold: It is not only an opportunity to observe the paintings. It also tells “a compelling, and increasingly urgent, story about conservation.”
The Hawaiian Pineapple Company commission sought to appeal to potential juice- drinkers by highlighting the far- off beauty of their pineapples’ source, a seemingly untouched paradise. But, writes Ohukani‘-SamuelM.‘ohi‘a Gon III, a senior scientist at the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, in a catalog essay on Hawaiian ecology, the islands had been touched: by cattle ranching, Western- style agriculture, and, of course, single-crop sugar and pineapple Ohukani‘-plantations.‘ohi‘a Gon reports that whereas ancient Hawaiians used only 15 percent of the islands’ habitats for agriculture and the like, today, as one
indication of the repercussions of Western entry onto the islands, “85 percent of the native ecosystem cover has been lost on the most populated island, O’ahu.” Ancient Hawaiians were entirely self-sustained by the land; now self-sustainability is at about 15 percent: “Without a constant influx of goods, we are a mere three weeks away from famine.”
In fact, none of the plants O’Keeffe painted are native to Hawaii. With one exception (the banana, a “canoe plant” brought over by early settlers), each is an ornamental or agricultural introduction that arrived in Hawaii from another tropical locale. Even those plants we think of as emblematic of Hawaiian culture, such as the plumerias that may have adorned t he leis O’Keeffe was bequeathed, have foreign origins. In an essay written in 1985 and published for the first time in the catalog, botanists Otto and Isa Degener do not temper their anxiety: “Were we brought blindfolded to many a hotel and its grounds in the Hawaiian Islands, we could hardly tell whether we were in the Atlantic islands, Tasmania, or actually Hawaiian ones with our blindfolds removed.” The Degeners were “convinced that the original Hawaiian f lora is well- nigh doomed to rapid extinction by modern Man’s present overpopulation and l ack of wisdom.”
‘Ohukani‘-ohi‘a Gon notes that O’Keeffe made no mention in her letters of the nonnativeness of the flowers she painted. She may not have known that her representations of place were also representations of what that region had become, because of centuries of foreign ingress. Looking at them now, against a backdrop not of calm tropical seas but of devastating floods in Kauai and Oahu and a cataclysmic eruption of K-ilauea, it is more difficult to be swept away by the skill of the art and the beauty of what it depicts, though no less worthwhile to study it. The land that the Hawaii paintings depict is much more complicated than the simple clichés of a fecund paradise.