Georgia O'Keeffe and the Bruton Sisters

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. What I saw there got me thinking about the connections between O'Keeffe and the Brutons, who were contemporaries. O'Keeffe visited Taos for the first time in the summer of 1929, at the same time Margaret and Esther Bruton were there.

I wrote about the Brutons' time in Taos in this blog post. Since O'Keeffe and the Brutons were in the same place at the same time, it seems likely that these modernist women artists connected. Unfortunately, I haven't found any definitive proof that they met.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum featured a few paintings from her first year in Taos. She seemed especially interested in religious subjects, such as crosses and the the adobe church at Rancho de Taos. 

Georgia O'Keeffe
Black Cross with Red Sky, 1929
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe
Black Cross with Stars and Blue, 1929
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Like O'Keeffe, Margaret Bruton was fascinated by the mud-brick adobe church in Rancho de Taos. Her painting of this church is currently on view in The Bruton Sisters: Modernism in the Making exhibition at the Monterey Museum of Art:

Magaret Bruton

At Ranchos, ca. 1929

The Buck Collection at UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson 

Institute and Museum of California Art

Another interesting connection is that both Esther Bruton and Georgia O'Keeffe were hired by the Dole Pineapple Company to create illustrations for their advertising campaigns. Esther worked for Dole from 1936-37, while O'Keeffe stepped in to take the job just two years later. O'Keeffe had been commissioned to paint a pineapple, but she was much more interested in Hawaiian flowers such as these:

Georgia O'Keeffe
Bella Donna, 1939
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

Georgia O'Keeffe
Pink Ornamental Banana, 1939
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

O'Keeffe failed to produce a painting of a pineapple during her three months in Hawaii. After she returned to New York, Dole sent her a pineapple so she could paint it in her studio.

While O'Keeffe visited Hawaii, Esther Bruton relied heavily on her 1924 visit to Tahiti as inspiration for her work. Bruton also took a completely different approach with her illustrations for Dole.  As a muralist, she was interested in depicting Hawaiian scenes on a larger scale. She painted several screens that appeared in the background of print ads for Dole:

Esther Bruton painting a mural for the 

Dole Pineapple Company, ca. 1936

One of the screens Esther painted for Dole, Three Graces, currently resides at Michael D. Horikawa Fine Arts gallery in Honolulu.

My next step is to read O'Keeffe's correspondence to her husband Alfred Stieglitz with the hope that there will be a mention of "Esther" or "Margaret". I hope that eventually I can shed more light on the Bruton-O'Keeffe connection.