The Georgia O’Keeffe Mystery: Who Made the Fakes?

Georgia O’Keeffe’s story has it all: ambition and celebrity, romance and betrayal, tragedy and triumph. And now, thanks to Amy Von Lintel, it includes a good old unsolved mystery.

In her new book, the esteemed O’Keeffe scholar, who is on faculty at West Texas A & M University (the very same school where the artist taught from 1916 to 1918) in Canyon, Texas, has taken a deep dive into the mystery of the forged O’Keeffe watercolors known as “The Canyon Suite.” It’s one of four chapters in her new book, Art at the Crossroads: The Surprising Aesthetics of the Texas Panhandle (Texas Tech University Press).

The mystery began with an art world scandal, in 1999, when the O’Keeffe catalogue raisonné – the definitive record of the artist’s output – was published, omitting a group of famously lost-then-found early watercolors that were acquired by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. “[O]ne of the biggest art discoveries,” Von Lintel writes, “turned into one of the biggest art disappointments.” The paintings were, essentially, identified as fakes. And the question has ever remained: who made them?

Theories and explanations have been offered over the years, but Von Lintel has taken up the mystery with Holmes-like persistence, using new evidence found in letters donated to West Texas A&M. Her account reads like an episode of “Fake or Fortune.”

She has, of course, the home-court advantage, conducting her research on the very same campus where the fakes were said to be discovered. No spoilers here, but suffice it to say that her sleuthing involves an O’Keeffe devotee and wannabe art star . . .

Von Lintel has been writing, teaching, and speaking about O’Keeffe for more than a decade. It’s always a pleasure to hear what she has to say, so I invited her to tell us more about her life as an O’Keeffe scholar.

1. What prompted you to dive into this story of the fake O’Keeffe’s?

Basically, the same thing that prompted me to dive into O’Keeffe’s time in Texas—the fact that there are so many stories about the artist swirling around the area where I teach, where I began teaching in 2010 knowing very little, and honestly caring very little, about O’Keeffe. Because she had lived and taught at the very institution where I now work, she has become a kind of artistic claim to fame for the region. Everyone has heard and spread stories about this famous, enigmatic abstractionist, this daring and progressive woman who did not fit in the conservative, ranching culture of the region. But as a historian dedicated to archival research, I wanted to dig into the actual evidence about these swirling stories. What did O’Keeffe say and think herself? She wrote thousands of letters in her life, so she left us quite a trail of her own words to draw from. Likewise, I wanted to know: What can we verifiably know about the scandal of those fakes that surfaced in Canyon, Texas, right after her death in the 1980s? And suddenly in 2016, new evidence for this scandal literally walked into my campus office!  So even though this scandal had been extensively covered in the press in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was still new knowledge to be explored. But also, the extent of that knowledge is limited by the fact that the scholars involved in the declaration of inauthenticity for the surfaced works have been held to a strict NDA (non disclosure agreement). What I explored was based on new evidence regarding the context of the sale of the works from a Canyon family to a dealer in Santa Fe, and what studying fakes and forgeries can mean for readers and art historians. But having the last word on the history of these fakes is not and cannot be my project.

2. In the book chapter you talk about the devotees in the Panhandle who have become “obsessed” with O’Keeffe. And you admit that you are one of them. How did it start?

This goes back to what I was saying above about people in my area fetishizing O’Keeffe’s fame and their connection to it. Even though her residence in Texas was short, she produced many striking works of art that she kept in her personal collection for her entire life, and included them in her 1976 autobiography. Clearly Texas was important to her. She returned to memories of Texas often during her life, and maintained friendships with people she met there. Her love of Texas was real, but people in my area—me included—get very excited to have stories to tell about a famous artist who lived here briefly. We want to claim that Texas was foundational for her, a home for her—a claim that is not unfounded. But as with any fetishization, there is a lot of overdetermination to this interest in O’Keeffe by people in the Texas Panhandle. The stakes are high for us to have that connection, her fame matters to us very much. There is a craving to be close to her “genius” that has produced some invented stories and some willingness to bend the truth to claim a special connection to her. Again, as a historian I have tried to bend the truth as little as possible in my work, to stay committed to the evidence of what O’Keeffe said and what was left behind as material culture to tell the story. Oral histories are so very valuable, don’t misunderstand me. But human memory is malleable and needs to be crosschecked with the material archive.

3. You told me a little while back that you’ll never be done writing about O’Keeffe. What is it about her that keeps you going back to do more research?

I stand by this statement. It is the project of a lifetime for me, to explore O’Keeffe. I think what keeps me coming back above all is how rich her art and biography are for historical and cultural studies. Through O’Keeffe’s many letters and works of art we can explore things like women’s history and gender issues across time; attitudes toward social and political changes and moments including WWI; and we can discover profound things about the places where she lived because she was such a careful observer of them. To be sure, I fell in love with my new home in the Texas Panhandle through O’Keeffe’s art and words. She helped me see the unique and raw beauty that was at first hard for me to find. She continues to teach us to see the world and its beauty with fresh eyes, to fall in love with nature over and over again. She can teach us about creativity and dedication—my students always find her inspiring in the ways she would struggle through the production of her art but how she would never give up, how she faced depression and self-doubt but always found the confidence to keep going.  Students today, especially post-Covid, when economic futures are unstable, need to have such inspiration and they respond to it well. I also love that O’Keeffe appeals to a wide public and not just art students and over-educated art historians. O’Keeffe is a crowd-pleaser for good reason. I can connect to broad audiences through teaching and presenting her work and story. I love that!

4. Are you working on some new O’Keeffe research now?

Right now, I am enjoying being continually and consistently asked to share my knowledge on O’Keeffe with different publics. I have recently been involved with the Amarillo Film Society promoting the new documentary on O’Keeffe, “The Brightness of Light,” and we had more than 100 local attendees for a screening of this film in Canyon.  I am enjoying returning to my O’Keeffe letters book with fresh eyes to give a presentation at the Space Between Conference at my alma mater the University of Kansas. The theme of the conference was Peace and Conflict, and I shared O’Keeffe’s very complicated attitudes on WWI with that audience. I am hoping to publish that work as an article. So, no new book project at this time, but I am still promoting the Art at the Crossroads book, which I am very proud of. O’Keeffe features prominently in that, but I also hope with that book that readers discover that art in the Panhandle is about more than just O’Keeffe. She looms large, but she is in very good company with many other artists who have shaped the regional artistic identity of my adopted home.

5.  If you could ask O’Keeffe one question, what would it be?

I think I would ask her about being a teacher. She clearly loved teaching but abruptly stopped teaching in 1918 when she left Canyon for San Antonio to recuperate from an illness, and then moved to New York City on Stieglitz’s invitation. He convinced her to focus on her career as a studio artist, and she took that chance—how could she not? And it paid off. Soon she was financially independent based on her art sales, and she never needed to teach again for money. But did she miss it? I have worked pretty extensively on women artists as teachers, and I find the topic very rich and interesting. Women in O’Keeffe’s era got so much out of teaching: financial independence and money, yes, but also professional clout and respect from their students and colleagues. O’Keeffe’s own sister Ida continued to teach her whole career, unlike O’Keeffe. But O’Keeffe’s students from her brief educational tenure in Canyon remembered her vividly as an educator, as they conducted interviews with the PPHM many decades later, where they shared how inspiring she was as a mentor. And O’Keeffe wrote often from Texas about how she loved teaching, loved her students—students of all ages and genders. She loved teaching young children in the West Texas Training School; she loved teaching young women in her drawing and fashion classes; she loved lecturing in front of the students and faculty at Chapel on topics like Cubism and modern art; she loved traveling to teaching conferences with her colleagues; and she loved chaperoning school dances and getting to know the male students at West Texas who found her intriguing and clearly very sexy. This passion that she found for being an educator was so suddenly truncated in 1918. So, I want to know if she missed it. I would want to have a conversation with O’Keeffe about teaching, a passion of mine that I know she shared, even if she chose to give it up to pursue another path.

(For more about von Lintel’s research, click here for my review of her book Georgia O’Keeffe’s Wartime Letters.)