As one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe left an indelible mark on modernism—and American culture at large. In the exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore,” you can discover how nature in its many forms—most notably flowers and desert landscapes—influenced her art. But the way she approached her work carried through to how she approached life in general, from the way she dressed to how she decorated her home.

The common thread connecting O’Keeffe’s art and her lifestyle is, in fact, nature. She revered its soft lines and organic forms while also highly valuing the abstraction and simplicity found throughout. The result is a unified aesthetic that dictated how she lived, worked, dressed, designed, and even cooked.

Nobody knows this connection better than art historian Wanda M. Corn, the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (Prestel, 2017). In her book, Corn explores how O’Keeffe lived her life “steeped in modernism.” Here, I talked with Corn about how O’Keeffe’s modernist sensibilities transcended her art into her lifestyle.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Madeline Bilis: Tell me about what you call O’Keeffe’s “holistic aesthetic.”

Wanda Corn: What makes O’Keeffe such an interesting study—if you go beyond her art and look at her life and the material culture that she left behind—is that you find the same modern aesthetic at every turn. There’s a kind of simplification, a distillation, even an abstraction, whether it's the way she puts together a plate of food, the way she dresses herself, or the way she organizes the furniture in a room. So when I use that word “holistic,” I really mean that it is a lived aesthetic as well as an aesthetic that guides her art making.

I don’t think we can say that about all modernist artists. They don’t necessarily carry their modernism, as she did, into domestic life. That’s what I find so interesting about her, and what I’ve tried to define in a way, to make her kind of a standard bearer, if you will, for living modernism, not just painting modernism.

You’ve often said O’Keeffe “dressed like she painted.” How does that translate?

We have unusual amounts of information about how O’Keeffe dressed. First, we have deep photographic evidence. Beginning with Alfred Stieglitz who made her his camera subject for many years, she modeled for professional photographers throughout her life. Sometimes she wore something special for the photographer, but very often she dressed the same way she might dress that day for any activity. And then we have what was found in her closets after she died in 1986. She not only left behind clothes that she would have been still wearing in her 80s and 90s, her last decades of life, but she had saved beautifully made garments made for her in the 1920s and the ’30s. She kept these early pieces, I would argue, because they were well designed silk and cotton garments that she had helped customize and stylize, and sometimes even made. What she left behind has an extraordinary aesthetic consistency.

She almost always was more concerned with the way a garment asserted its overall shape and outer lines. She always thought of herself in a dress as something like a walking abstraction. The contours of her dresses and blouses are usually soft and flowing, rounded and organic, just like the forms in her paintings.

I think the fact that we can talk about her dress is because she valued self-presentation enough to save her favorite outfits. She took a certain amount of pride in the way she pulled herself together, as if she herself was part of the aesthetic she was leaving to the world.

She also employed minimal jewelry and accessories in her personal style.

O’Keeffe really under-used all forms of additive decorations like scarfs and jewelry. In the Southwest, women wear a great deal of jewelry, but not O’Keeffe. She did, however, have one favorite piece, a pin made for her by the artist Alexander Calder, that she wore over and over and over again. The pin has a beautiful spiral form, and she herself used the spiral in her art and sculpture. It has a repeated, rounded form, and it’s pounded metal so it has a nice soft texture to it. She liked to wear the pin on its side, rather than spelling out OK, the first two letters of her last name. She wore it in such a way that the O was on top and the K was on the bottom. That makes it even more of an abstraction than a reference to her name.

Did her use of color follow the same principles?

The dominant colors in her dress were black and white. She seldom used other colors, but she did have a bigger palette than we once thought. Her third favorite color was blue, particularly after she began to spend time in the Southwest, where the skies are so vast. She loved the blue of denim shirts and jeans, in particular. Every once in a while there’s a bold red piece of clothing in her wardrobe. Once, she wore a red coat to a theater in New York and a journalist remarked that the woman they always associated with black and white had done something shocking; she had shown up in red. She used other colors sparingly, often to surprise people. She did the same thing in her homes. She’d paint a bathroom floor red or blue when everything else was white, cream, or tan.

Can you talk about O’Keeffe’s philosophy on—and rejection of—interior decoration?

In her interior decorating, she valued simplicity and minimalism. She rejected decorations—little things that might get in the way of seeing the whole. She rejected drapery, fancy bed covers, wallpapers, or lampshades as decorations. For window coverings, she fashioned plain white cotton curtains for privacy and protection from the sun.

She really was a modernist very early on in decorating her spaces. She’d use one chair where others might have four, or one picture for an entire wall rather than 10 pictures to fill the space. If anything looked fussy or crowded to her, out it went. She was always trying to get a room down to basics and beautiful lines. She knew what looked good to her eye, as if a wall or a room was a painting—some kind of abstraction that she had control over. She often described her aesthetic as “filling space in a beautiful way.”

She does eventually hang a skull on the wall and arrange seashells on a windowsill, for example, incorporating natural elements into her space.

These were things that were very beautiful to her, and they were pieces of art in nature. She didn’t see them only as visual decorations, but as sensuous things to pick up, hold, and feel. I think she realized she was running against the grain of domestic traditions of decorating home surfaces with photographs or ceramics or tchotchkes. None of that interested her.

Nature was her religion. The lines of nature, the lines of growing things, or even things that had dried and died, like skulls. The patina of a skull, almost porcelain-like, but also the lovely irregularities of the line of a bone or a rock and so on. She liked the surfaces of tree trunks and water smoothed stones, of berries, flowers, and leaves.

Does her furniture echo that as well?

She did fall in love with mid-century furniture when she came upon it later in life. Her Abiquiú house and, to some degree, her Ghost Ranch house have beautiful chairs and tables by named mid-century designers. Noguchi made some of her paper lamps, for example. It isn’t that she was buying them from the artists and designers, necessarily, but she was buying them from Knoll and other firms that were handling mid-century furniture. Sometimes pieces came to her as gifts. She enjoyed Calder because he had a similar organic aesthetic to hers. She also came to love works designed by Breuer, Saarinen, and Eames.

This unified modern aesthetic clearly spills into her home and her fashion—but also her lifestyle. How does her early adoption of the farm-to-table movement fit into this?

O’Keeffe grew up on a dairy farm, so her youth gave her an appreciation for growing your own produce, drinking your own cow’s milk, and so on. She loved growing things. She didn’t often have the space to do it, but it was important to her. So whenever she could, she would grow herbs, have a small vegetable garden and grow fruit trees. In the 1940s, she worked very hard to find a place in New Mexico that was not only going to give her the space she needed for a beautiful studio and for a substantial home, but would provide her with enough land for gardens and for water rights, which are very hard to come by in New Mexico. The home she created in Abiquiú had what she needed to grow fruit trees and have gardens that would supply her with lettuce, corn, vegetables, peppers, and herbs. Although she didn’t do this work herself, she supervised it, and many a visitor to O’Keeffe in New Mexico will remember having a meal there that was drawn entirely from her garden.

With her meals, she would sprinkle a freshly cut herb, for instance, on a bowl of homemade soup, or place two or three things that nicely went together on a plate. There was always a simplicity to her cuisine. It was clear what you were eating and that it had just been freshly picked and simply prepared. O’Keeffe liked to cook. She taught other people how she liked to eat, so that even when she wasn’t doing her own cooking, it was to her taste. She canned things, she froze things, she dried herbs. She was a real follower of organic growing and eating long before it became popular.

O’Keeffe’s design principles truly touch every part of her existence.

She really doesn’t divide things into categories—she just takes the same aesthetic into each aspect of life as if it was a rule of law. One of her everyday lessons was that everything you place in a domestic space or on your body, you’re making a presentation to others. And it should be as simple and beautiful as possible.