How Georgia O'Keeffe left her cheating husband for a mountain: 'God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it'

The two women were met there by the wealthy arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, who persuaded them to travel with her to the desert town of Taos, 70 miles north. Luhan had been badgering O’Keeffe to visit New Mexico for years and, anticipating her friend’s arrival the previous month, had written to her Jungian psychiatrist in triumph: “O’Keeffe is coming out in May. Finally, someone will paint the country.”

And, boy, did she – so much so, in fact, that this area of New Mexico is now known, colloquially, as “O’Keeffe Country”. The artist ended up staying with Luhan for five months, before settling permanently in the region for the final 37 years of her life.

Initially, perhaps, her love for the west was tied up with a sense of liberation from Stieglitz – there is speculation that O’Keeffe had affairs with both “Beck” and Mabel that summer of 1929. Above all, though, it was New Mexico’s harsh, awe-inspiring landscape that she found so thrilling. She would return to New Mexico in 1930 and again in 1931, when she became fascinated with the sandblasted cattle bones that she encountered in the desert. She sent a barrel of them back to New York, where she painted them the following winter.

A major retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work that opens at Tate Modern next month will include several pictures of these bones, burnished by the wind and bleached by the sun. O’Keeffe long aspired to make, as she put it, “the Great American Painting” and this series is often interpreted as her response to the Great Depression.

In 1934, O’Keeffe discovered Ghost Ranch, an isolated “dude ranch” to the west of Taos, set up for the entertainment of wealthy East Coast holidaymakers such as the Rockefellers. O’Keeffe, however, kept clear of the tourists, with their butlers and bodyguards, and spent her days in remote parts of the ranch, painting its sandstone rock formations.

In 1940, she bought a house at Ghost Ranch and added large plate-glass windows to its adobe walls, so that she could enjoy views of the parched red landscape from her bed. In the distance she could see Pedernal Mountain, a flat-topped mesa almost 9,865ft high. As Mont Sainte-Victoire was to Cezanne, so Pedernal was to O’Keeffe, who painted it, obsessively, almost 30 times. “It’s my private mountain,” she once said. “It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

At the end of 1945, a few months before she became the first woman to be honoured with a full retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, O’Keeffe bought a second property in New Mexico – a ruined hacienda, with parts dating from the 18th century, in the village of Abiquiu. This ancient settlement occupies a bluff overlooking the Chama River as it flows towards the Rio Grande and O’Keeffe took advantage of the access to fresh water by cultivating a private garden, covering around an acre. She grew fresh fruit and vegetables as well as flowers including roses, lilies, poppies and bleeding hearts.

She was also attracted to the property’s internal patio, a peaceful, atrium-like space surrounded by adobe walls, one of which contained an austere-looking door that she painted many times. “That wall with the door in it was something I had to have,” she said. A number of paintings from her Patio series will be on display at Tate Modern.

Today, O’Keeffe’s sparsely decorated home at Abiquiu, where, from 1949, she spent every winter and spring, is open by appointment to the public. Its fragile mud floors are intact, as is her collection of rocks from Oaxaca, which she placed on the windowsills. Everything is maintained, on behalf of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, by Agapita Lopez, who worked for the artist from 1974 until her death 12 years later. Lopez’s grandfather, Estiben, who died in 1980, was O’Keeffe’s gardener. “He was very old school – women didn’t tell him what to do,” recalls Lopez, 61, whose mother was also the artist’s housekeeper and cook. “Ms O’Keeffe enjoyed having rocks strewn throughout her house. She put a number of rocks on the well cover, and whenever my grandfather walked by, he’d switch one or two, just to tickle her. But Ms O’Keeffe was very independent, and she’d always put them back. She used to call him Old Steven – even though she was 13 years older than he was.”

At first, Lopez worked casually as a “companion” for O’Keeffe, while training to become an accountant. “She had just turned 87,” she recalls, “and decided that she didn’t want to be in that large house by herself with her two chow chows”.

One of her duties was to accompany O’Keeffe on walks into the desert. “She loved the landscape, loved the light,” Lopez says. “At Ghost Ranch, for example, we’d take walks from the house to the cliffs. But I didn’t hold her hand or her shoulder: she carried a cane. Most of the time, it was swinging by her side. Once in a while she’d tap it on the ground, because I was deathly afraid of rattlesnakes.”

By this stage of her life, O’Keeffe was becoming increasingly reclusive. “I do not wish to try to live among many people – they tire me more than anything,” she once said. But Lopez got on well with her: “I was extremely shy and quiet when I started,” she says, “and so we always seemed to have a good relationship.”

Eventually O’Keeffe made Lopez her secretary. Despite becoming close, Lopez says she “never felt comfortable calling her Georgia. It just didn’t fit. And people called her Mrs Stieglitz, which she didn’t like.”

According to Lopez, when O’Keeffe first settled in Abiquiu, “People didn’t know what to make of her. She was so odd. She was a single woman. She was independent. She always dressed in black. And she loved to do all these strange things – like walk and paint trees.”

In time, though, the locals warmed to her. They also respected her desire for privacy. By the Sixties, O’Keeffe was an international celebrity. In 1968, Life magazine put her on the cover. People started turning up unannounced to her house in Abiquiu, hoping to meet the great artist.

Mostly, villagers pretended that they didn’t know where she lived. Occasionally, though, a well-wisher would slip through the net. Once, one of Lopez’s acquaintances took a stranger to see her. O’Keeffe appeared at the door, realised what was happening, turned around on the spot, and announced: “Now you’ve seen me,” before disappearing back inside.

Yet Lopez believes that the popular perception of O’Keeffe as a recluse is wrong. Was she a misanthrope?

“That’s not what I remember,” she says. “In her portraits, she looks very stern, but she really wasn’t. She loved a good joke. She loved to laugh.”

Moreover, Lopez continues, when deteriorating eyesight blighted her final years, O’Keeffe didn’t become depressed. Instead, she just got on with everyday life – and even took up pottery. “She never complained. She always adjusted. She was still extremely independent.”

After failing health forced her to relocate to Santa Fe – where she died, a year and a half later, on March 6 1986, aged 98 – O’Keeffe still remained curious about other people. “I used to bring her news about what was going on in Abiquiu,” Lopez says. “She was always interested.”

Before she died, O’Keeffe gave Lopez a watercolour, which she eventually sold in order to buy a house. (The value of the artist’s paintings have risen exponentially since the Eighties and, in 2014, her Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 sold for $44 million at Sotheby’s in New York, setting a record for a work by a female artist.)

Lopez still misses O’Keeffe “a lot”. “It’s been many years now that she’s gone,” she says softly. “But sometimes, going into a room [in the artist’s Abiquiu home], I feel she could easily be behind me.” She pauses. “I hope she’d be pleased with everything that’s going on.”

Georgia O’Keeffe is at Tate Modern, London SE1 (020 7887 8888), from July 6 until Oct 30; tate.org.uk