What Georgia O'Keeffe's Recipes Teach Us About the Ordinarily Pleasures of a Sublime Artist (2024)

If John Crowe Ransom and the panjandrums of New Criticism had their way, no one would give two figs about a bunch of yellowed index cards with recipes scrawled on them from the personal archives of a friend of artist Georgia O’Keeffe. That O’Keeffe used a full cup of butter in her Pecan Butter Cookies or made a mean tomato aspic should have, they would aver, no bearing on our appreciation of her wondrously vagin*l flowers and monumental skulls.

And yet, when these items just went for auction—a lot of 300 cards given by Ms. O’Keeffe to her assistant Juan Hamilton—they were immediately snatched up for an undisclosed but no doubt hefty sum by Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. (The whole auction of property from the estates of O'Keeffe and her husband Alfred Steiglitz, which included books, clothes, and other personal effects in addition to artistic works, fetched $17.2 million this week at Sotheby’s.)

For of course, in the skirmish between New Criticism (in which the work and the work alone should be considered) and Post-Structuralism (in which a work should be evaluated not just within its societal context but also with an eye to the person who made it) good ol’ Post-Structuralist Theory has been victorious.

One need only endlessly scroll through Instagram’s parade of influencers to realize its complete domination. The personal has become product itself.

Now, it could just be that O’Keeffe was a tremendous chef. It certainly doesn't hurt that the artist preached and practiced a certain brightly hued, vegetable-forward, whole grain, diet. Her punchy carrot soups, salads of scarlet beets, and homemade yogurt seem ripped from today's Instagram feeds.

Or it might be that the closest we’ll ever get to seeing the world through her singular eyes is peering into an oven as her Pecan Butter Cookies rise like the sun over the Sangre de Christo mountains.

But there does seem to be something slightly more profound in the case of Ms. O’Keefffe and her recipe cards, in particular, and artists and their domestic ephemera in general. Why, for instance, are we mad for Frida Kahlo’s Revlon blush compact, or Michelangelo’s grocery list, or Bob Dylan’s wallet?

It is, I think, perhaps because these objects, so unassuming, so achingly normal, allows us at once to connect with these brilliant bohemian minds—geniuses, they still brush their teeth!—and give us hope that we, who live amongst our mundanity of Casper mattresses and Metrocards, might someday too walk among the ageless legends in the Pantheon.

On one hand, it might seem a wee bit excessive to pay $400,000 for the chair in which JK Rowling wrote the first two installments of Harry Potter. On the other hand, if Rowling sits down to write a $25 billion franchise and you sit too, then it follows that you can also write a billion-dollar franchise. That $400,000 is but a pittance.

Then there's the fact that recipes can actually be used (unlike, for instance, an old compact). And there’s something so personal about savoring the flavors enjoyed by your favorite artist. Surely this is the appeal of these cards—which feature accessible dishes like corn pudding, potato rolls, and whole-wheat pancakes—as well as books devoted to artists and their meals like Picasso’s Kitchen and The Monet Cookbook, The Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook and even Taschen’s sensational Salvador Dali’s Les Diners de Gala. (Though who is going to prepare the Bush of Crayfish with Viking Herbs is beyond me.)

As for the kitchen habits of one of America’s greatest painters, the appetite seems endless. This lot only adds to the growing canon of O’Keeffe culinaria. In addition to these cards, which will undoubtedly be turned into a book, there’s 2009’s A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe by her personal chef, Margaret Wood, and Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe by Robyn Lea.

We look forward to the Yale edition of O'Keeffe's collected recipes and the fun we'll have tasting her brilliance.