Honolulu Museum of Art
"Black Lava Bridge, Hana Coast No. 1," 1939, by Georgia O'Keeffe.
EARLY in 1939, Georgia O'Keeffe, the artist most famous for depicting the arid Southwest, suddenly decided to paint America's diametrically opposite landscape — the lush tropical valleys of Hawaii. In an era when advertisers often hired fine artists to add a touch of class to their campaigns, the "least commercial artist in the U.S." (as Time Magazine described her) was persuaded by the Dole pineapple company to visit the remote Pacific archipelago and produce two canvases. The offer came at a critical time in O'Keeffe's life. She was 51, her career seemed to be stalling (critics were calling her focus on New Mexico limited, and branding her desert images "a kind of mass production"), and her marriage to Alfred Stieglitz was under serious strain.
Despite initial reservations about the project, her many letters back home show that her experience of the then little-known Territory of Hawaii was a revelation. O'Keeffe ended up spending nine weeks on different islands, of which by far the most productive and vivid period was on Maui, where she was given complete freedom to explore and paint. Back on Oahu, where she had first arrived, she had been incensed that Dole officials refused to let her stay on a working pineapple plantation because it was unseemly for a woman. When they delivered to her hotel a pineapple already peeled and sliced, she tossed it out in disgust. But on Maui she was able to seek out an unfiltered view of nature, and went directly to the most remote, wild and verdant corner of the island: the port of Hana.
She reported back to Stieglitz about Hana's dark rain forests, exuberant flora, black sand beaches and lava washed into "sharp and fantastic shapes." Staying on the Kaeleku sugar plantation, the notoriously prickly artist was given Patricia Jennings, the 12-year-old daughter of the plantation manager, as her private guide, and the two became unlikely friends; for 10 days the pair visited sea caves, ruins and beaches, and later, with Patricia's father, made excursions to the dramatic Iao Valley and Haleakala Crater.
I FIRST stumbled across this exotic biographical interlude in the New York Public Library, where I found a 1990 catalog for an exhibition of O'Keeffe's Hawaii paintings at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. The images of emerald chasms, gleaming waterfalls and brilliantly tinged bird of paradise flowers were the very essence of the tropics. Then, just this past spring, Koa Books released "Georgia O'Keeffe's Hawaii," co-authored by Ms. Jennings (now an octogenarian grandmother) and filled with memories of her time with the artist.
When I returned to Maui recently, I wondered if Ms. Jennings might agree to be a virtual tour guide and help me follow in O'Keeffe's footsteps. She lives far from Hana, on the Big Island of Hawaii, and rarely travels, though her memories of her time with the artist are still vivid. "You never saw a single tourist in the old days," she said over the telephone, as I jotted down their itinerary. "Even at the most beautiful spots, we were always the only ones there."
Today, of course, Hana is one of the most famous destinations in Hawaii, but paradoxically few people spend the night there. Most travelers base themselves in the big beach resorts on the other side of the island, so they rush the 68-mile drive (as much as they can rush considering there are more than 50 bridges, most of them one-lane, and some 600 hairpin bends), and then, pressed for time, are forced to return soon after. But it's quite possible to stay overnight in the eccentric township of Hana and explore every bit of the coastline that so bewitched O'Keeffe.
The Hana Highway is now paved; whether that makes it less hair-raising than it was back in 1939 when O'Keeffe was being driven along it I can't say. What I do know is that it was hard to take in the spectacular views on the three-hour drive, as I joined a parade of cars slowly zigzagging along cliff edges, past cascading waterfalls and vegetation tumbling from above.
TONY PERROTTET, a contributing writer for Smithsonian Magazine, is the author, most recently, of "The Sinner's Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe."
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