From the Lake, 1924
Georgia O’Keeffe.
During 1924-1925 transit Uranus — the planet of liberation and rebellion — was opposing Georgia O’Keefe’s Mars, nudging her instinct for freedom and independent action. Uranus was also transiting (by trine) — initially her Ascendant and Jupiter, and through the following 3-4 years the rest of her stellium in Scorpio.
This was happening while also the transit of Saturn (consolidation) was moving through Scorpio and thus conjunct her natal Jupiter as well as her husband’s Jupiter, her Ascendant, Sun and Moon, his Venus and North Node, her Mercury — and finally opposite her Neptune and Pluto in the 7th house.
She created about 25 drawings and paintings of New York skyscrapers and cityscapes between 1925 and 1929.1Wikipedia. New York Skyscraper Paintings… Saturn and Uranus are symbols of, respectively, tradition and innovation, and her decision to paint skyscrapers was initially met with great scepticism by her husband as well as others.
‘When I wanted to paint New York, the men thought I’d lost my mind. But I did it anyway’, she said proudly.2Quote from Mary Lynn Kotz, “A Day with Georgia O’Keeffe.” ARTnews, Dec. 1977 in Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, by Roxana Robinson. Kindle edition, 1999, p. 293.
East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928
Many modernist artists were preoccupied with city life and with the impact of industrialism on the human soul. Georgia O’Keeffe could immerse herself in whatever was around her — a talent that seems to feel at home in Scorpio, where the sense of shared values can be developed, refined and made conscious. She painted, without judgement, what she saw — or rather felt — from her window high up in the hotel home, she shared with Alfred Stieglitz.
One can’t paint New York as it is but rather as it is felt.
—Georgia O’Keeffe
She moved on and painted skyscrapers
Their play with light and dark
Always beautifully composed
Often she would include
Even emphasize
The Sun, Moon, and Stars
Heavenly bodies illuminating walls or
Peeping through cracks
Between the tall, skyward buildings
Tribute to her husband
In neon written, celebrating
His contribution to science
✩
Fifty years later she said:
I think New York is wonderful. It’s like a dream.
It always makes European cities look like villages to me.
I think of a city going up – don’t you?
Well it has to go to the sky. 3Quote from the documentary: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe’, 1977, written and directed by Perry Miller Adato.
—Georgia O’Keeffe
Her life in New York
Was full of people. Her husband was incessantly surrounded by a circle of friends, protégés, fellow artists, business contacts, etc. ‘He needed an audience’ as she would later describe it. It was said that she never knew how many people he would invite home for dinner.
He organized exhibitions of her works annually from 1923 until his death in 1946, and soon she became a celebrated modernist artist in the US. Her paintings were selling well, and she was growing increasingly independent.
She and Alfred spent their summers at a place called Lake George in upstate New York, where the Stieglitz family, which was very large, had a vacation residence. Here they would be surrounded by his many relatives.
‘It was very pretty, but it wasn’t made for me ‘. 4Ibid. See previous note.
Their marriage was consolidated during the first three years by the Saturn transit through Scorpio.
I had a kind of belief in Alfred that made those days specially fine (…)I had a need of him that I had never seemed to feel for anyone else before. His feeling for music, concerts, books and the outdoors was wonderful. He would notice shapes and colors different from those I had seen and so delicate that I began to notice more. 5From A Woman on Paper, by Anita Pollitzer – p. 168
Transit Saturn’s opposition to her natal Neptune-Pluto conjunction moved into alignment through 1926-27. Saturn-Neptune aspects can show up as plain reality versus our ideals or maybe illusions, and Saturn-Pluto contacts can break our deepest grounds in order for the body-mind to allow for even deeper structures.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were both visionaries in their own unique way. Georgia had her inner visions of the paintings she would create, and Alfred had a vision for the collective and for the culture of the United States.
‘What he really wanted to do was to raise the level of spiritual life in America above what he saw as crass materialism by refining the sensibilities of the American public through the visual arts’.
— Richard Whelan, Stieglitz Biographer 6 Quoted from: Alfred Stieglitz, the Eloquent Eye. Written, produced and directed by Perry Miller Adato
In the sign of Scorpio, sexuality is gifted with the potential of a transcendent or tantric quality. It is less about creating physical children, as in Taurus, and more about letting the divine forces create through us in service of the greater context of civilisation. This, of course, requires equality and balance between the masculine and feminine powers — within people of all genders and thus in the collective mind.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz were steeped in a patriarchal matrix, and when she had moved into the small New York studio, which belonged to one of Alfred’s sisters, she would have increasing difficulty maintaining the independence she had felt when she could walk the open plains of Texas and was earning her own living.
The crowds of people being around all the time, whether in New York or at the Lake George vacation home, made it — as the years went by — necessary for Georgia to take ‘three weeks off to make a painting’. In other words, she had adapted to Alfred’s needs and lifestyle to such an extent that she had difficulty creating space for her own work.
As for children, Georgia had wished for giving birth, but Alfred was very much against this. He feared that a child would drag her attention too much away from her creative work, and furthermore he had painful associations attached to birth. His elder sister had died in childbirth, and his daughter, Kitty, had a psychic break down after giving birth, and from which she never recovered.
At the emotional level this was difficult for Georgia, and she developed a very vulnerable spot. One day she had reacted outright violently to one of Alfred’s small nieces, who inadvertently had called her ‘aunt Georgia’.
During 1927 and through 1928 transit Uranus was opposing her natal Venus, which indicated a disruption and awakening of a need for freedom in her love relationship and creative life, and in 1929 transit Uranus moved into opposition to its natal position in her chart.
She and Alfred Stieglitz had been a couple for about ten years, and soon he would be moving into a second affair with another woman since they got together. This time a young woman 40-plus his junior — an affair that would go on for the rest of his life.
✩
Transit Uranus opposite natal Uranus occurs in everyone’s life between the age of 39-42. Seen from the vantage point of psychology, it is commonly called the midlife crisis, assuming it is something we will eventually ‘get over’. We may renew ourselves, if possible, or settle by coming to terms with our life circumstances as they are.
Through the lens of astrology, however, this transit is an invitation to break free of convention, often it is a break-through or culmination of creative endeavours. Some people meet very important teachers — inner or outer — at that age. It is the ‘Full Moon’ phase of the 84-year Uranus cycle — that is a flowering phase of the Uranian archetypal force available to our Soul, and it is about liberation from form and an openness to the unknown.
During this transit, the psychiatrist Carl Jung had his great journey into the subconscious, which gave him — with the help from Toni Wolff7Toni Wolff was e.g. astrologically informed, and she could help interpret the images and symbols that Jung was encountering in his inner world. — the gift of deep wisdom about the archetypes, and from which he created the Liber Novus, the New Book called the Red Book which was kept hidden from public view until the year 2009 — 48 years after his death.
✩