Purity is the essence of knowing
—Frannie D.
As Georgia O’Keeffe was travelling back to her husband in late august 1929, the stock market in New York was rapidly approaching it’s break down with severe consequences for the world-wide economic system.
Paul Strand had ‘said it all’ — 15 years earlier — with his legendary Wall Street Photo, elegantly depicting the modern vision of life: urban, linear, one-way, busy, individual, competitive, separated from nature, etc.
Wall Street, by Paul Strand, 1915
In the 1930s, New Mexico and the Southern part of the United States were hit by a severe draught, and thousands of people lost their home and livelihood. Animals died for lack of water and food, and bones and skulls lay scattered throughout the dessert.
Then came the Dust Bowl moving huge clouds of pulverised soil into the cities and creating devastating chaos all across the vast plains. It was the results of excessive cultivation of the prairielands, originally covered by grasses with roots appropriate for keeping the soil grounded.
Artists, like many others, had difficulties making their living in the 1930s because few people had money to buy art. The US government created a New Deal which gave people means of survival by providing jobs. Painters were granted modest payments for creating murals on buildings for example.
As mentioned, the planet Pluto was discovered in 1930. The discovery coincided, among other things, with the splitting of the atom which lead to the beginning of the nuclear age in the 1940s with its catastrophic events. Pluto revealed its symbolism to be about power or empowerment, and when operating unconsciously in the collective, fascist movements would emerge, holding masses of people in their grip and leading them to war and destruction.
The Plutonic archetype, however, also revealed its potential for healing through individuals’ deliberate descent into their unconscious where liberation from complexes, neuroses, and obsessions etc. took place, facilitated by depth psychology. Eventually the planet was observed by astrologers to be associated with transformative forces of nature, with Dionysian ecstasy, and with gods and goddesses of death, rebirth, and resurrection.
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When in New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe began picking up bones and skulls from the dessert. She brought them back to New York and Lake George for the winter-time, where she would now create utterly different paintings.
Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose
1931, Georgia O’Keeffe
Her paintings of skyscrapers were also different after the Wall Street crash.
Manhattan, 1932, Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia’s personal life was not affected by the global crises with regard to finances. Her paintings were generally selling well, and she and Alfred would increasingly make their living from her works.
A power balance between the two was slowly shifting. The Moon-Neptune opposition, which they both had in their birth charts, was perhaps the archetype that had pulled them into a mutual attraction, if not infatuation, in the first place.
With a Moon-Neptune aspect, we can, like unborn children held in the benign waters of the womb, rest and rejoice in absolute faith that everything is taken care of, and when in love, we can float in oceanic feelings of oneness. Such experiences are deeply healing in themselves and provide a cellular memory that can keep us psychologically healthy our whole life. They are the reminders of our universal oneness.
The birth into form of a relationship may, however, be painful, and it can change our perception to such a degree that we want to cling to our memories of the blissful oneness instead of being (re)born. Then we will try to keep the ‘other’ idealised, we create an illusion, and if the other no longer mirrors that illusion, we may look elsewhere for our ideal. We can become addicted to ‘falling in love’.
According to Roxana Robinson’s nuanced biography, Georgia O’Keeffe’s esteem for Stieglitz became less coloured by her initial admiration, as her independence, self-confidence, and strength was growing. Yet her love for him remained unaltered; ‘she loved him without qualification, but also without idealization’.1Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, By Roxana Robinson (1999) – Kindle Edition p. 317
Stieglitz perceived her fading admiration as a loss. He kept regarding Georgia O’Keeffe as ‘finer’2Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, By Roxana Robinson (1999) – Kindle Edition p. 317 than himself, and the adulation he received from the other woman, the ‘Child-Woman’ Dorothy Norman3as Stieglitz called her in a letter Ibid. p. 372 — who, by the way, was never mentioned between Georgia and Alfred — would then provide the mirror he still needed.
Georgia was obviously not happy with the presence of the other woman, but what was most painful for her was the loss of her husband’s love and, at that time, also his professional support. She did not express her feelings openly, though. She felt that the freedom she chose, had to be equally granted to him. ‘Georgia recognized that … in asking Stieglitz to let her live her own life, she must let Stieglitz live his.’4 Ibid. p. 340
Bleeding Heart, 1932
by Georgia O’keeffe
What went unsaid between them developed into disagreements and quarrels about minor and major issues. In 1932 Georgia O’Keeffe had accepted an offer to paint an interior mural in a newly built New York Music Hall. For a long time, she had wanted to paint something big.
Her husband was enraged. The payment she was offered was much lower than what she would normally receive for a painting. As her agent, he felt betrayed by her for having made the agreement without his participation. He mobilised their friends to try persuade her to give up the project, and at the same time turn more friendly towards Dorothy Norman.
Georgia came under severe pressure, and because of delays in the building project, she ended up assessing there would be too little time for her to carry out the task, and she was released from the contract. According to Roxana Robinson, Alfred’s antagonism towards her was a cover for the guilt he felt underneath for having left her emotionally and turned his affections towards another woman.
And Georgia began to feel she had failed as a wife and that her public image was endangered too. She stopped painting entirely5O’Keeffe Museum.org Timeline. Eventually she had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised to be treated for psychoneurosis.6Ibid. p. 385
Shortly after, her sister, who with generous support and encouragement from Georgia had also become a talented painter, was given an exhibition in New York. She received fine reviews, and her works were generally considered ‘purer’, also by Georgia, because they were ‘less besmirched by the emotions, ambitions, and rivalries that affected O’Keeffe’s world’.7Ibid. p.388
While still in hospital, Georgia wrote a devastating letter in which she threatened to tear her sister’s paintings to pieces. ‘[T]he enraged letter was a bolt from the blue’ — said her sister who had not known of Georgia’s illness. The two sisters did not communicate for four years, and the sister never painted again, although their relationship was mended later on with apologies and forgiveness.8Ibid. p. 388
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The myth of Inanna comes to mind. The queen of Heaven and Earth who goes to the underworld, is stripped of all her garments and outer identities, then killed by her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the Great Below, who during her own birth pangs is transformed by the empathy of Inanna’s helpers. Ereshkigal is finally able to surrender, and in her gratitude, she wants to give back to the compassionate helpers whatever they choose. They wish for Inanna’s return to the light which opens the gates for her resurrection.9These are deeply archetypal themes, and the myth of Inanna has been connected to the Venus cycle in the heavens with the planet’s changing phases as morning- and evening star. The movie ‘Barbie’ is a contemporary version of the Inanna myth, and it was premiered when Venus went retrograde in July 2023.
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During her crises Georgia O’Keeffe developed a ‘hypersensitivity to noise and a morbid fear of water’10Ibid. p. 382 — both associated with the Neptune archetype. The water element was strongly accentuated in her chart with the stellium in Scorpio including the Moon and its opposition to Neptune.
‘… her perception of the nature of water was radically altered. While she was in hospital, water took on a peculiar horror, threatening and terrifying, as did Stieglitz. The yielding, soothing, beneficent element, intimacy and sensuality, had betrayed her. Thereafter, most of the landscapes she painted were arid.11Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (1990), by Roxana Robinson, Kindle edition p. 420
In 1933-34 transit Saturn would square her planets in Scorpio and the Neptune-Pluto conjunction in Taurus and Gemini, an aspect challenging the form of her long-term relationships. Saturn was also conjunct her South Node (themes from previous lifetimes) in the Spring of 1933 when she was hospitalised. It would transit the South Node again in July-August during its retrograde phase, and then reach the final conjunction in December when she was finally recovering.
There is the sense of a mother-wound. The fact that she would avoid speaking to her mother about ‘things they would disagree about’, and that she felt unapproved of in the family, may also have left her feeling on her own and vulnerable during crises in her close relationships.
Her Moon was opposite Pluto in her natal chart, though the aspect was not as close as the opposition to Neptune. Moon-Pluto aspects provide the possibility of being consciously held, supported, and nourished by the archetypal Mother, Mother Earth, and other great maternal goddesses in the collective psyche, and personal mother-wounds are a threshold for us to pass. Through feeling our feelings, we can awaken to the power of the divine feminine love.
The archetypal Mother seemed to speak through her paintings — through what Georgia O’keeffe ‘could not express in any other way’.
Black Hills with Cedar, 1941
by Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia’s crises in the early 1930s also, and not least, coincided with transit Uranus opposing its natal position — the midlife crises with its potential for break-down-break-through. The aspect was moving into alignment, as mentioned earlier, in 1929-30 when she left her husband for the first time to go to New Mexico. The opposition was closest around 1932, where she stopped painting for more than a year.