O’Keeffe Painting: Which Way Is Up?

Before Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting of the Lawrence Tree left Connecticut on a traveling show for the National Gallery 16 months ago, the trunk had been at the bottom and the branches at the top.

Now it’s going back to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford with the tree standing on its head.

Curators say “on its head” is what the artist intended when she painted the towering pine at author D.H. Lawrence’s ranch north of Taos 60 years ago. Still, one of them admits that the National Gallery’s decision to show it that way has caused “a firestorm of controversy.”

In her last 10 years, O’Keeffe chose at least three times to show the tree upright--on a poster, in a television documentary and in a book of her collected works. The Wadsworth similarly displayed it reaching upward toward a starlit sky.

But her final intentions were never made clear. O’Keeffe, who had lived near Abiquiu since 1940, died in Santa Fe in 1986 at the age of 98.

The Viking Press and Juan Hamilton, a fellow Abiquiu artist who was O’Keeffe’s helper and confidant during her last 13 years, say that her 1976 book version was intentional. “O’Keeffe went over every one of the plates. She approved everything,” says Viking executive editor Amanda Vaill, whose office is in New York.

O’Keeffe and Hamilton also displayed the painting with the tree upright on a WNET-TV Public Broadcasting Service documentary in 1977.

In 1981, she gave the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival the right to use the painting on a poster, again indicating a preference for the upright tree, and the festival last month reprinted 5,000 copies showing it that way.

But Betsy Kornhauser, curator of American painting at the Wadsworth, says the artist left the question of how to hang the work up to the gallery when the Wadsworth acquired it in 1979.

“She said she looked at the tree from several directions and several ways, and she felt that the painting could be hung from any direction,” Kornhauser says.

The Wadsworth chose to hang it with the tree reaching toward the top edge of the canvas. But Kornhauser says she is convinced that National Gallery research is correct, and from now on the Wadsworth will show the painting with the tree pointing downward.

In a 1929 letter to Rebecca Strand, O’Keeffe wrote of her 4-month trip to New Mexico, including a visit to the Lawrence ranch: “I also got a painting of the big pine tree as you see it lying on that table under it at night. It looks as though it is standing on its head with all the stars around--pretty good, for me.”

In a 1931 letter to art critic Henry McBride, O’Keeffe remarked that a picture of the painting in an art magazine lost the point by showing it “standing on its ear. . . . That tree should stand on its head.”

Hamilton says that the artist “was a little more flexible than some of the viewers of this work,” and that either way may be considered correct today. “Probably nothing would have amused Miss O’Keeffe more than people worrying about whether her painting was right side up or right side down,” he added.

The traveling exhibition opens in Los Angeles March 31. However, the Lawrence Tree won’t be included in the Los Angeles visit.