O’Keeffe’s Big Clouds, John Deere, and Eero Saarinen

In the research process for Through the Long Desert, I occasionally ran across fascinating, untold stories that were tangentially related to the subject matter but didn’t really help advance the narrative of Wright and O’Keeffe. I’ve told this particular one a lot, but I’ve never really described how the research came together or how the story unfolded, or how a generous local historian engineered an opportunity for me to visit the John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois.

The short version of the story goes like this:

In 1964, O’Keeffe gets an invitation from her good friends Alexander and Susan Girard to come out to Moline, Illinois for the opening of the new John Deere headquarters, designed by renowned late modern architect Eero Saarinen. Girard has designed an elaborate multimedia collage illustrating the history of the corporation. While she’s there, Girard apparently pitches the idea that O’Keeffe could also contribute a piece of art to the new building. O’Keeffe seems pretty receptive to the idea, so Girard gets help from Saarinen’s widow, Aline, in pitching the project to the president of John Deere. A couple months after the opening, everyone seems fully on board with this plan.

In the early 1960s, O’Keeffe started painting large canvases with depictions of the sky as seen from the window of an airplane. Her idea for Deere was to execute two large canvases depicting the sky pocked with fluffy clouds, which would hang on opposite sides of the executive dining room in the new headquarters building. She got as far as quoting a price for the commission and executing a full-size sketch, but then the project falls apart.

However, O’Keeffe clearly can’t let go of the idea because the next year, 1965, she spends her entire summer in the garage of her Ghost Ranch house painting Sky Above Clouds IV, the largest painting of her career. The 8 foot by 24 foot canvas now graces a stairwell in the Art Institute of Chicago.

You can read the full story here at Hyperallergic.

The thing that surprised me most about this story is that it hasn’t been told. It doesn’t appear in any biographies of O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe’s creation of Sky Above Clouds IV is usually tied to her long-simmering desire to execute a mural or a very large, architecturally specific canvas. This is true, but misses the all the nuance of her involvement with Deere.

In 2019, I had a research fellowship at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum where I was starting research for Through the Long Desert and addressing a few specific issues related to the Abiquiú home’s then in-progress conservation management plan. It can be hard to know where to start with archival research and so as a beginning exercise, I started pulling all of O’Keeffe correspondence files with the names of architects I recognized. There was Wright, of course, but also names like Nat Owings, principal of the famous firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill. Her friendship with the Girards is widely known, but they also introduced her to their friends: Ray and Charles Eames, Eero and Aline Saarinen. Some of these threads revealed interesting short anecdotes (O’Keeffe jokingly offered to give Nat Owings her hat in exchange for his house in California, which she visited several times and loved). But some led to longer stories, like the John Deere saga. Once I got through the Girard correspondence, with the big pack of John Deere ephemera, I started following the trail, looking up other names. In September, I had the chance to get out to the Beinecke Library at Yale University, which houses both the correspondence of O’Keeffe and the papers of Eero Saarinen. From there, I was able to add color and richness to the story, adding several voices and finding original drawings of the John Deere headquarters. However, I still was unable to answer that tantalizing question of why the project ultimately fell apart.

Even with that piece still missing, I felt like I had a good story to tell. I presented the work at the Southwest Art History Conference in Taos, NM that year and later adapted it into the story for Hyperallergic. A little while later, I got a call from local historian Ellen Shapley in the Quad Cities area that includes Moline, Illinois — an enthusiast of both midcentury design and O’Keeffe. She reached out to the archivists at John Deere to see if we could solve the mystery of the project fell apart. Sadly, the Deere archives had no answers for us either. It was the 1960s and not difficult to place a long-distance phone call and quite likely that once the initial introductions were made, most of our main characters in this story dropped the letter writing and conducted most of their conversations by phone.

But starting this conversation led to a speaking invitation and a rare opportunity to tour the John Deere Headquarters, including Girard’s richly beautiful (and sometimes funny!) collage and the room where O’Keeffe’s paintings would have hung. Having seen the executive dining room, I’m glad that the painting that ultimately became Sky Above Clouds IV ended up in the Art Institute where tens of thousands of visitors can enjoy it every year.

The lobby of the John Deere building in 2022; featuring Alexander Girard’s monumental collage of the company’s history amidst an array of modern and historic Deeres.