Georgia O’Keeffe

Georgia O’Keeffe enters the diaries not through a sustained account of her life, but through brief encounters that reveal how Andy Warhol photographed, judged, and brokered access to her work. She appears first as a subject in a crowded office, then as an artist filtered through Warhol’s dismissive commentary, and finally as the painter Calvin Klein hoped to meet and buy from.

A portrait session at the office

On October 30, 1979, Warhol encountered O’Keeffe and Juan Hamilton at the Mayfair before reaching the office. The office was already crowded with visitors, and several groups were there at once; Warhol found it difficult to understand why everyone else had come. Amid that congestion, he photographed O’Keeffe and Hamilton in the back of the office, then worked with O’Keeffe until four o’clock. The diary records the session as part of a day of overlapping artistic and social encounters, without describing what became of the photographs.

The brief account nonetheless places O’Keeffe within Warhol’s working practice as a photographer of prominent people. His broader portrait process relied on photographs as the starting point for images that he selected, cropped, altered, and translated into silkscreen paintings. The diary does not specify that he used this full procedure for O’Keeffe’s photographs, or that a finished portrait resulted; it records the sitting itself, leaving its outcome unstated.

Warhol’s reading of her art

In August 1981, Warhol visited a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art with Jon Gould and Chris Makos. His response focused on her flowers and slashes, which he interpreted in explicitly sexual terms. He then generalized from O’Keeffe’s work to women artists, describing their art as simple and easy. These remarks document Warhol’s own way of looking, not an objective account of O’Keeffe’s art: his reading reduces her work to a sexual image and places it within a dismissive gendered judgment.

The contrast with the earlier photography session is striking. In the office, O’Keeffe was a person Warhol worked with directly; at the exhibition, her paintings became objects for his blunt interpretation. The diary preserves both views, but offers no reply from O’Keeffe and no evidence that she knew of his comments.

A proposed meeting and purchase

In April 1982, Warhol tried to help Calvin Klein meet O’Keeffe and buy one of her paintings. He called Edmund Gaultney after Klein asked him to make contact, then called Hamilton. Hamilton said Klein could fly to Albuquerque, though he could not promise O’Keeffe would see him. Warhol advised Klein to contact Hamilton himself, concluding that the matter depended on personality.

The exchange shows Warhol acting as an intermediary, but not controlling access: Hamilton was the person who could speak to the likelihood of a meeting, and O’Keeffe’s decision remained uncertain. The diary does not say whether Klein contacted Hamilton, met O’Keeffe, or acquired a painting. Across these episodes, O’Keeffe is presented through distinct forms of proximity—photographic, critical, and commercial—while her own perspective and the eventual outcomes remain outside the record.