Falling in love with Mt. Fuji

Not long ago I returned from a few weeks in Japan. At so many turns on the journey between Tokyo and Kyoto, I had Georgia on my mind.

We know that O’Keeffe was tuned into Japanese (and Chinese) art early on, as a student of Arthur Wesley Dow. And that her trip to see the remarkable Asian art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1922 confirmed what became a lifelong admiration.

I remember reading a story about how O’Keeffe corrected someone’s way of pouring tea. It wasn’t precise enough. I found that same mindful aesthetic was everywhere in Japan: the temples and shrines, the traditional art, certainly in the tea ceremony.

I thought often about O’Keeffe. How she liked empty walls to think on. How she arranged (and rearranged) her collection of rocks just so. (She played a game with her longtime gardener, Estiben Suazo, who teased her by moving the rocks around. Each time she restored their composition, he’d move them again.) Mostly, I thought about how O’Keeffe rejected western perspective in her paintings. Instead, she chose to collapse foreground and background, developing a way of carefully composing a puzzle-like (and often confounding) arrangement of space and mass. Like the pelvis bones and the leaves, for example.

When I got to Mt. Fuji in Japan, I flashed back to the very start of O’Keeffe book, when I stood speechless in front of one of her two pictures of the iconic volcano at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. I had visited the museum several times, as well as her home, and read a few of the biographies. And I was intrigued. But I wasn’t hooked until I discovered Mt. Fuji.

There she stood, the misty pink Mt. Fuji, so serene and solitary and silent, so magnificently self-possessed. Just like O’Keeffe once said: A painting is like a person. You either like it or you don’t. I was immediately taken by Mt. Fuji—feeling rapt, strangely emptied-out and elated at the same time. I was stopped dead in my tracks, and I wanted to find out why.

O’Keeffe made two trips to Japan in 1960, in February and November. “The first time I saw Fuji,” she later recalled, “it was white, over water. It was glorious.” About the second time, she wrote to her sister Anita: “Lovely drives through the mountains – past lakes[.] Mount Fuji has no snow on it yet this year. When I was here in February it was white with snow.”

Standing in front of the real Mt. Fuji (sans snow), I realized something. Much of what makes the mountain so visually memorable are her sloping shoulders. (Yes, in Japan Mt. Fuji is a “she.”) Not unlike those stunning white shoulders of John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X.”

The O’Keeffe Mt. Fuji that I fell in love with is the larger of the two. For a long while it was missing from the museum on my annual research trips, replaced by the much smaller sibling. At first resistant to the substitution, I ended up falling in love with her, too: so quiet and so still and encompassing all of eternity.

She is a wonderful example of what philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “intimate immensity.” The painting is only 10 x 18 inches, but its reach is enormous. If I owned it, I would give it as big an empty wall as I could.

Then, in 2019, the larger Mt. Fuji reappeared. It had undergone conservation and come back looking wonderfully refreshed, her whites whiter and her pink truer to the original.

Whichever one of O’Keeffe’s Mt. Fuji pictures you may be lucky enough to encounter at the museum, it’s a stunner.