Georgia O'Keeffe

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Georgia O'Keeffe
O'Keeffe in 1918, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz
Born	Georgia Totto O'Keeffe November 15, 1887 Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, U.S.
Died	March 6, 1986 (aged 98) Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	School of the Art Institute of Chicago Columbia College Teachers College, Columbia University University of Virginia Art Students League of New York
Known for	Painting
Movement	American modernism, Precisionism
Spouse(s)	Alfred Stieglitz ​ ​ (m. 1924; died 1946)​
Family	Ida O'Keeffe (sister)
Awards	National Medal of Arts (1985) Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977) Edward MacDowell Medal (1972)

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".

In 1905, O'Keeffe began her serious formal art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then the Art Students League of New York, but she felt constrained by her lessons that emphasised the recreation or copying of nature. In 1908, unable to fund further education, she worked for two years as a commercial illustrator and then taught in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina between 1911 and 1918. During that time, she studied art during the summers between 1912 and 1914 and was introduced to the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation of subjects, rather than trying to copy or represent them. This caused a major change in the way she felt about and approached art, as seen in the beginning stages of her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in the charcoal drawings that she produced in 1915 that led to total abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1917. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University in 1914 and 1915.

She moved to New York in 1918 at Stieglitz's request and began working seriously as an artist. They developed a professional relationship and a personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924. O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent female genitalia, although O'Keeffe consistently denied that intention. The imputation of the depiction of women's sexuality was also fueled by explicit and sensuous photographs that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited of O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls, such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. After Stieglitz's death, she lived permanently in New Mexico at Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú, until the last years of her life when she lived in Santa Fe. In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist. After her death, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.

Early life

Georgia O'Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887, in a farmhouse located at 2405 Hwy T in the town of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Her parents, Francis Calyxtus O'Keeffe and Ida (Totto) O'Keeffe, were dairy farmers. Her father was of Irish descent. Her maternal grandfather George Victor Totto, for whom O'Keeffe was named, was a Hungarian count who came to the United States in 1848.

O'Keeffe was the second of seven children. She attended Town Hall School in Sun Prairie. By age 10, she had decided to become an artist, and with her sisters, Ida and Anita, she received art instruction from local watercolorist Sara Mann. O'Keeffe attended high school at Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, as a boarder between 1901 and 1902. In late 1902, the O'Keeffes moved from Wisconsin to the close-knit neighborhood of Peacock Hill in Williamsburg, Virginia. The family apparently relocated to Virginia so O'Keeffe's father could start a business making rusticated cast concrete block in anticipation of a demand for the block in the Peninsula building trade, but the demand never materialized. O'Keeffe stayed in Wisconsin with her aunt attending Madison Central High School until joining her family in Virginia in 1903. She completed high school as a boarder at Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia (now Chatham Hall), and graduated in 1905. At Chatham, she became a member of Kappa Delta Sorority when it had a chapter at the school in the early 1900s.

O'Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College and watched over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother's request. In 1917, she visited her brother, Alexis, at a military camp in Texas before he shipped out for Europe during World War I. While there, she created the painting, The Flag, which expressed her anxiety and depression about the war.

Career

Education and early career

Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled, 1908, Art Students League of New York collection

O'Keeffe studied and ranked at the top of her class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1905 to 1906, studying with John Vanderpoel. Due to typhoid fever, she had to take a year off from her education. In 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied under William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox and F. Luis Mora. In 1908, she won the League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for her oil painting Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot. Her prize was a scholarship to attend the League's outdoor summer school in Lake George, New York. While in the city, O'Keeffe visited galleries, such as 291, co-owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The gallery promoted the work of avant-garde artists from the United States and Europe and photographers.

In 1908, O'Keeffe found out that she would not be able to finance her studies. Her father had gone bankrupt and her mother was seriously ill with tuberculosis. She also was not interested in creating a career as a painter based upon the mimetic tradition which had formed the basis of her art training. She took a job in Chicago as a commercial artist and worked there until 1910, when she returned to Virginia to recuperate from a case of the measles and later moved with her family to Charlottesville. She did not paint for four years, and said that the smell of turpentine made her ill. She began teaching art in 1911. One of her positions was her former school, Chatham Episcopal Institute in Virginia.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Untitled, The Rotunda at University of Virginia, 1912–14, watercolor on paper, 11 ⁷⁄₈ by 9 inches (30 cm × 23 cm)

She took a summer art class in 1912 at the University of Virginia from Alon Bement, who was a Columbia University Teachers College faculty member. Under Bement, she learned of innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow, a colleague of her instructor. Dow's approach was influenced by principles of Japanese art regarding design and composition. She began to experiment with abstract compositions and develop a personal style that veered away from realism. From 1912 to 1914, she taught art in the public schools in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle, and was a teaching assistant to Bement during the summers. She took classes at the University of Virginia for two more summers. She also took a class in the spring of 1914 at Teachers College of Columbia University with Dow, who further influenced her thinking about the process of making art. Her studies at the University of Virginia, based upon Dow's principles, were pivotal in O'Keeffe's development as an artist. Through her exploration and growth as an artist, she helped to establish the American modernism movement.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Drawing XIII, 1915, Charcoal on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art

She taught at Columbia College, Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions, based on her personal sensations. In early 1916, O'Keeffe was in New York at Teachers College, Columbia University. O'Keeffe mailed the charcoal drawings to a friend and former classmate at Teachers College, Anita Pollitzer, who took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery early in 1916. Stieglitz found them to be the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while", and said that he would like to show them. In April that year, Stieglitz exhibited ten of her drawings at 291.

Georgia O'Keeffe as a teaching assistant to Alon Bement at the University of Virginia in 1915

After further course work at Columbia in early 1916 and summer teaching for Bement, she was the chair of the art department beginning the fall of 1916 at the West Texas State Normal College, in Canyon. She began a series of watercolor paintings based upon the scenery and expansive views during her walks, including vibrant paintings she made of Palo Duro Canyon. O'Keeffe, who enjoyed sunrises and sunsets, developed a fondness for intense and nocturnal colors. Building upon a practice she began in South Carolina, O'Keeffe painted to express her most private sensations and feelings. Rather than sketching out a design before painting, she freely created designs. O'Keeffe continued to experiment until she believed she truly captured her feelings in the watercolor, Light Coming on the Plains No. I (1917). She "captured a monumental landscape in this simple configuration, fusing blue and green pigments in almost indistinct tonal graduations that simulate the pulsating effect of light on the horizon of the Texas Panhandle," according to author Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall. After her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz started, her watercolour paintings ended quickly. Stieglitz heavily encouraged her to quit because the use of watercolour was associated with amateur women artists.

New York

Stieglitz, twenty-four years older than O'Keeffe, provided financial support and arranged for a residence and place for her to paint in New York in 1918. They developed a close personal relationship while he promoted her work. She came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of artists, including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand, and Edward Steichen. Strand's photography, as well as that of Stieglitz and his many photographer friends, inspired O'Keeffe's work. Also around this time, O'Keeffe became sick during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Blue and Green Music, 1921, oil on canvas

O'Keeffe began creating simplified images of natural things, such as leaves, flowers, and rocks. Inspired by Precisionism, The Green Apple, completed in 1922, depicts her notion of simple, meaningful life.

O'Keeffe said that year, "it is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things." Blue and Green Music expresses O'Keeffe's feelings about music through visual art, using bold and subtle colors.

O'Keeffe, most famous for her depiction of flowers, made about 200 flower paintings, which by the mid-1920s were large-scale depictions of flowers, as if seen through a magnifying lens, such as Oriental Poppies and several Red Canna paintings. She painted her first large-scale flower painting, Petunia, No. 2, in 1924 that was first exhibited in 1925. Making magnified depictions of objects created a sense of awe and emotional intensity. On November 20, 2014, O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 (1932) sold for $44,405,000 in 2014 at auction to Walmart heiress Alice Walton, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist.

Art historian Linda Nochlin interpreted Black Iris III (1926) as a morphological metaphor for female genitalia, but O'Keeffe rejected that interpretation, claiming they were just pictures of flowers.

After having moved into a 30th floor apartment in the Shelton Hotel in 1925, which, in 2019, was added to the list of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, O'Keeffe began a series of paintings of the city skyscrapers and skyline. One of her most notable works, which demonstrates her skill at depicting the buildings in the Precisionist style, is the Radiator Building—Night, New York. Other examples New York Street with Moon (1925), The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1926), and City Night (1926). She made a cityscape, East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel in 1928, a painting of her view of the East River and smoke-emitting factories in Queens. The next year she made her final New York City skyline and skyscraper paintings and traveled to New Mexico, which became a source of inspiration for her work.

In 1924, Stieglitz arranged a simultaneous exhibit of O'Keeffe's works of art and his photographs at Anderson Galleries and arranged for other major exhibits. The Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of her work in 1927. In 1928, he announced to the press that six of her calla lily paintings sold to an anonymous buyer in France for US$25,000, but there is no evidence that this transaction occurred the way Stieglitz reported. However, due to the press, O'Keeffe's paintings sold at a higher price from that point onward. By the late twenties she was noted for her work as an American artist, particularly for the paintings of New York city skyscrapers and close-up paintings of flowers.

Taos

O'Keeffe traveled to New Mexico by 1929 with her friend Rebecca Strand and stayed in Taos with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who provided the women with studios. From her room she had a clear view of the Taos Mountains as well as the morada (meetinghouse) of the Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno aka the Penintentes. O'Keeffe went on many pack trips, exploring the rugged mountains and deserts of the region that summer and later visited the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch, where she completed her now famous oil painting, The Lawrence Tree, currently owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. O'Keeffe visited and painted the nearby historical San Francisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos. She made several paintings of the church, as had many artists, and her painting of a fragment of it silhouetted against the sky captured it from a unique perspective.

New Mexico and New York

Georgia O'Keeffe, Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills, 1935, The Brooklyn Museum

O'Keeffe then spent part of nearly every year working in New Mexico. She collected rocks and bones from the desert floor and made them and the distinctive architectural and landscape forms of the area subjects in her work. Known as a loner, O'Keeffe explored the land she loved often in her Ford Model A, which she purchased and learned to drive in 1929. She often talked about her fondness for Ghost Ranch and Northern New Mexico, as in 1943, when she explained, "Such a beautiful, untouched lonely feeling place, such a fine part of what I call the 'Faraway'. It is a place I have painted before ... even now I must do it again."

O'Keeffe did not work from late 1932 until about the mid-1930s as she endured various nervous breakdowns and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. These nervous breakdowns were the result of O'Keeffe learning of her husband's affair. She was a popular artist, receiving a number of commissions while her works were being exhibited in New York and other places. In 1936, she completed what would become one of her best-known paintings, Summer Days. It depicts a desert scene with a deer skull with vibrant wildflowers. Resembling Ram's Head with Hollyhock, it depicted the skull floating above the horizon.

Pineapple Bud, 1939, oil on canvas

In 1938, the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son approached O'Keeffe about creating two paintings for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company) to use in advertising. Other artists who produced paintings of Hawaii for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company's advertising include Lloyd Sexton, Jr., Millard Sheets, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Miguel Covarrubias. The offer came at a critical time in O'Keeffe's life: she was 51, and 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"). She arrived in Honolulu February 8, 1939, aboard the SS Lurline and spent nine weeks in Oahu, Maui, Kauai, and the island of Hawaii. By far the most productive and vivid period was on Maui, where she was given complete freedom to explore and paint. She painted flowers, landscapes, and traditional Hawaiian fishhooks. Back in New York, O'Keeffe completed a series of 20 sensual, verdant paintings. However, she did not paint the requested pineapple until the Hawaiian Pineapple Company sent a plant to her New York studio.

O'Keeffe's "White Place," the Plaza Blanca cliffs and badlands near Abiquiú

During the 1940s, O'Keeffe had two one-woman retrospectives, the first at the Art Institute of Chicago (1943). Her second was in 1946, when she was the first woman artist to have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan. Whitney Museum of American Art began an effort to create the first catalogue of her work in the mid-1940s.

In the 1940s, O'Keeffe made an extensive series of paintings of what is called the "Black Place," about 150 miles (240 km) west of her Ghost Ranch house. O'Keeffe said that the Black Place resembled "a mile of elephants with gray hills and white sand at their feet." She made paintings of the "White Place," a white rock formation located near her Abiquiú house.

Abiquiú

In 1946, she began making the architectural forms of her Abiquiú house—patio wall and door—subjects in her work. Another distinctive painting was Ladder to the Moon, 1958. O'Keeffe produced a series of cloudscape art, such as Sky above the Clouds in the mid-1960s that were inspired by her views from airplane windows.

Worcester Art Museum held a retrospective of her work in 1960 and ten years later, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted the Georgia O'Keeffe Retrospective Exhibition.

In 1972, O'Keeffe lost much of her eyesight due to macular degeneration, leaving her with only peripheral vision. She stopped oil painting without assistance in 1972. In the 1970s, she made a series of works in watercolor. Her autobiography, Georgia O'Keeffe, published in 1976 was a best seller.

Judy Chicago gave O'Keeffe a prominent place in her The Dinner Party (1979) in recognition of what many prominent feminist artists considered groundbreaking introduction of sensual and feminist imagery in her works of art. Although feminists celebrated O'Keeffe as the originator of "female iconography", O'Keeffe refused to join the feminist art movement or cooperate with any all-women projects. She disliked being called a "woman artist" and wanted to be considered an "artist."

She continued working in pencil and charcoal until 1984.

Awards and honors

In 1938, O'Keeffe received a honorary degree of "Doctor of Fine Arts" from The College of William & Mary. Later, O'Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1966 was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among her awards and honors, O'Keeffe received the M. Carey Thomas Award at Bryn Mawr College in 1971 and two years later received an honorary degree from Harvard University.

In 1977, President Gerald Ford presented O'Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American civilians. In 1985, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Personal life and death

Marriage

In June 1918, O'Keeffe accepted Stieglitz's invitation to move to New York and accept his financial support. Stieglitz, who was married to a woman named Emmeline Obermeyer, moved in with her in July.

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, platinum print, 1920

In February 1921, Stieglitz's photographs of O'Keeffe were included in a retrospective exhibition at the Anderson Galleries. Stieglitz started photographing O'Keeffe when she visited him in New York City to see her 1917 exhibition, and continued taking photographs, many of which were in the nude. It created a public sensation. When he retired from photography in 1937, he had made more than 350 portraits and more than 200 nude photos of her. In 1978, she wrote about how distant from them she had become, "When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives."

In 1924, Stieglitz was divorced from his wife Emmeline, and he married O'Keeffe. For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, "a collusion... a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O'Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union," according to biographer Benita Eisler. They primarily lived in New York City, but spent their summers at his family home, Oaklawn, in Lake George in upstate New York.

My Shanty, Lake George, 1922, oil on canvas, 20 × 27 1/8 in., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Mental health

In 1928, Stieglitz had an affair with Dorothy Norman and O'Keeffe lost a project to create a mural for Radio City Music Hall. She was then hospitalized for depression. O'Keeffe began to spend the summers painting in New Mexico in 1929. She traveled by train with her friend Rebecca Strand to Taos, where Mabel Dodge Luhan moved them into her house and provided them with studios.

Hospitalization

In 1933, O'Keeffe was hospitalized for two months after having suffered a nervous breakdown, largely because she was heartbroken over Stieglitz's continuing affair with Dorothy Norman. She did not paint again until January 1934. In early 1933 and 1934, O'Keeffe recuperated in Bermuda, and she returned to New Mexico in mid-1934. That August she visited Ghost Ranch, north of Abiquiú for the first time, and decided immediately to live there; in 1940, she moved into a house on the ranch property. The varicolored cliffs of Ghost Ranch inspired some of her most famous landscapes. In 1977, O'Keeffe wrote: "[the] cliffs over there are almost painted for you—you think—until you try to paint them."

Among guests to visit her at the ranch over the years were Charles and Anne Lindbergh, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, poet Allen Ginsberg, and photographer Ansel Adams. She traveled and camped at "Black Place" often with her friend, Maria Chabot, and later with Eliot Porter.

Cerro Pedernal, viewed from Ghost Ranch. This was a favorite subject for O'Keeffe, who once said, "It's my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it"

New beginning

In 1945, O'Keeffe bought a second house, an abandoned hacienda in Abiquiú, which she renovated into a home and studio. Shortly after O'Keeffe arrived for the summer in New Mexico in 1946, Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis. She immediately flew to New York to be with him. He died on July 13, 1946. She buried his ashes at Lake George. She spent the next three years mostly in New York settling his estate, and moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949, spending time at both Ghost Ranch and the Abiquiú house that she made into her studio.

Todd Webb, a photographer she met in the 1940s, moved to New Mexico in 1961. He often made photographs of her, as did numerous other important American photographers, who consistently presented O'Keeffe as a "loner, a severe figure and self-made person." While O'Keeffe was known to have a "prickly personality", Webb's photographs portray her with a kind of "quietness and calm" suggesting a relaxed friendship, and revealing new contours of O'Keeffe's character.

Travels

O'Keeffe enjoyed traveling to Europe, and then around the world, beginning in the 1950s. Several times she took rafting trips down the Colorado River, including a trip down the Glen Canyon, Utah, area in 1961 with Webb and photographer Eliot Porter.

Career end/death

In 1973, she hired 27-year-old John Bruce (Juan) Hamilton, a potter, as a live-in assistant and then a caretaker. Hamilton taught O'Keeffe to work with clay and helped her write her autobiography. He worked for her for 13 years. O'Keeffe became increasingly frail in her late 90s. She moved to Santa Fe in 1984, where she died on March 6, 1986 at the age of 98. Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered, as she wished, on the land around Ghost Ranch.

Legal issues

Following O'Keeffe's death, her family contested her will because codicils made to it in the 1980s had left most of her $76 million estate to Hamilton. The case was ultimately settled out of court in July 1987. The case became famous as a precedent in estate planning.

Paintings

• 

  O'Keeffe, Untitled - vase of flowers, 1903–05, watercolor on paper, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum

• 

  O'Keeffe, Red Canna, 1915, watercolor on paper, 19.4 by 13.0 inches (49.2 cm × 33.0 cm), Yale University Art Gallery

• 

  O'Keeffe, Drawing No. 2 - Special, 1915, charcoal on laid paper, 23.6 by 18.2 inches (60 cm × 46.3 cm), National Gallery of Art

• 

  O'Keeffe, Blue #1, 1916, watercolor and graphite on paper, Brooklyn Museum

• 

  O'Keeffe, Sunrise', 1916, watercolor on paper

• 

  O'Keeffe, No. 8 - Special, 1916, Whitney Museum of Art

• 

  O'Keeffe, Light Coming on the Plains No. II, 1917, watercolor on newsprint paper, 11 ⁷⁄₈ by 8 ⁷⁄₈ inches (30 cm × 23 cm), Amon Carter Museum of American Art

• 

  O'Keeffe, Series 1, No. 8, 1918, oil-painting on canvas, 20.0 by 16.0 inches (50.8 cm × 40.6 cm), Lenbachhaus, Munich

• 

  O'Keeffe, Red Canna, 1919, oil on board, High Museum of Art, Atlanta

• 

  O'Keeffe, A Storm, 1922, pastel on paper, mounted on illustration board, 18.3 by 24.4 inches (46.4 cm × 61.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art

Legacy

O'Keeffe was a legend beginning in the 1920s, known as much for her independent spirit and female role model as for her dramatic and innovative works of art. Nancy and Jules Heller said, "The most remarkable thing about O'Keeffe was the audacity and uniqueness of her early work." At that time, even in Europe, there were few artists exploring abstraction. Even though her works may show elements of different modernist movements, such as Surrealism and Precisionism, her work is uniquely her own style. She received unprecedented acceptance as a woman artist from the fine art world due to her powerful graphic images and within a decade of moving to New York City, she was the highest-paid American woman artist. She was known for a distinctive style in all aspects of her life. O'Keeffe was also known for her relationship with Stieglitz, in which she provided some insight in her autobiography. The Georgia O'Keeffe museum says that she was one of the first American artists to practice pure abstraction.

Mary Beth Edelson's Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper (1972) appropriated Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, with the heads of notable women artists collaged over the heads of Christ and his apostles. John the Apostle's head was replaced with Nancy Graves, and Christ's with Georgia O'Keeffe. This image, addressing the role of religious and art historical iconography in the subordination of women, became "one of the most iconic images of the feminist art movement."

A substantial part of her estate's assets were transferred to the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, a nonprofit. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe in 1997. The assets included a large body of her work, photographs, archival materials, and her Abiquiú house, library, and property. The Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998, and is now owned by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

In 1996, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32-cent stamp honoring O'Keeffe. In 2013, on the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, the USPS issued a stamp featuring O'Keeffe's Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie's II, 1930 as part of their Modern Art in America series.

A fossilized species of archosaur was named Effigia okeeffeae ("O'Keeffe's Ghost") in January 2006, "in honor of Georgia O'Keeffe for her numerous paintings of the badlands at Ghost Ranch and her interest in the Coelophysis Quarry when it was discovered".

In November 2016, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum recognized the importance of her time in Charlottesville by dedicating an exhibition, using watercolors that she had created over three summers. It was entitled, O'Keeffe at the University of Virginia, 1912–1914.

O'Keeffe holds the record ($44.4 million in 2014) for the highest price paid for a painting by a woman.

In 1991, the PBS aired the American Playhouse production A Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, starring Jane Alexander as O'Keeffe and Christopher Plummer as Alfred Stieglitz.

Lifetime Television produced a biopic of Georgia O'Keeffe starring Joan Allen as O'Keeffe, Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz, Henry Simmons as Jean Toomer, Ed Begley Jr. as Stieglitz's brother Lee, and Tyne Daly as Mabel Dodge Luhan. It premiered on September 19, 2009.

Comparison of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_Amundsen_and_Scott_expeditions 

 

The routes to the South Pole taken by Scott (green) and Amundsen (red), 1911–1912.

Between December 1911 and January 1912, both Roald Amundsen (leading his South Pole expedition) and Robert Falcon Scott (leading the Terra Nova Expedition) reached the South Pole within five weeks of each other. But while Scott and his four companions died on the return journey, Amundsen's party managed to reach the geographic south pole first and subsequently return to their base camp at Framheim without loss of human life, suggesting that they were better prepared for the expedition. The contrasting fates of the two teams seeking the same prize at the same time invites comparison.

Overview

The outcomes of the two expeditions were as follows.

• Priority at the South Pole: Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole by 34 days.
• Fatalities: Scott lost five men including himself returning from the pole, out of a team of 65. Amundsen's entire team of 19 returned to Norway safely.
• Some authors (including Huntford and Fiennes) associate up to two further deaths (the drowning of Robert Brissenden and the suicide of Hjalmar Johansen) with the two expeditions, but these happened outside the Antarctic Circle.

Historically, several factors have been discussed and many contributing factors claimed, including:

• Priority at the pole: Scott wrote that Amundsen's dogs seriously threatened his own polar aspirations, because dogs, being more cold-tolerant than ponies, would be able to start earlier in the season than Scott's mixed transport of dogs, ponies, and motors.
• Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World agreed but added that in his experience, dogs would not have been able to ascend the Beardmore Glacier.
• With regards to the causes of the deaths of Scott and his companions, Cherry-Garrard devotes chapter 19 in his book to examine the causes. Among several other factors, he surmised that the rations of Scott's team were inadequate and did not provide enough energy for the men.
• Much of Scott's hauling was to be done by ponies, which are ill-suited to work on snow and ice without snow-shoes. Their relatively small hooves and large weight caused them to sink into anything other than very firm snow or ice. Oates was opposed to snow-shoes and had left most of them at base camp.
• Ponies' coats easily became soaked with perspiration during exertion, thus necessitating constant attention with blankets to avoid hypothermia through evaporation. Dogs in contrast do not have sweat glands—they cool themselves via panting, making them less vulnerable to the cold. With ponies, Scott acknowledged he could not depart until 1 November 1911 when the weather would be warmer, leaving him less time to complete the journey.
• The loss of ponies, several of which had drowned on disintegrating sea-ice, limited the supplies that could be hauled to the depots. Of 19 ponies brought south to aid in laying depots on the Ross Ice Shelf (traversed during the first and final quarters of the trek) nine were lost before the journey began. Further, unlike dogs which could eat the abundant seal and penguin meat found in Antarctica, the ponies' food had to be carried forward from the ship, vastly increasing the stores that had to be transported as Scott's expedition moved towards the pole.
• Had the one-ton depot been placed at latitude 80° S., as planned, Scott and his two surviving companions could have reached it on their return march. Instead, because Scott refused to drive the ponies to their deaths, despite Oates' urgent advice to do so, the depot was placed some 31 miles short of there. Scott's party died 11 miles south of the depot.
• The last-minute addition of Lieutenant Henry R. Bowers to the planned four-man pole party may have strained the rationing plan, although the death of Petty Officer Evans weeks later reduced the party to four again.
• The rations were deficient in B and C vitamins. The party became weaker a few weeks after reaching the pole, despite Scott's racing ambitions before the return march, writing "Now for a desperate struggle to get the news through first [before Amundsen reaches the cablehead in Australia]. I wonder if we can do it."
• The tins of cooking fuel cached along the return route were found to be partly empty, which forced the men to eat frozen food. Shortage of fuel to melt water likely caused the men to become dehydrated. Apparently the heat of the sun had vaporised part of the fuel, enabling it to escape past the cork stoppers. Amundsen knew about this "creep", and had had the fuel tins soldered shut on the voyage to Antarctica, see below.
• The weather on the return march seems to have been unusually bad. In particular, when the party reached the Great Ice Barrier, the temperature was much lower than expected for the season, making the surface much less suitable for the sledge runners. Furthermore, the tailwind which they had expected to aid them home did not appear. Scott wrote, in his final "Message to the Public": "...our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather...."
• The complexity of the transportation plan made it vulnerable. It depended in part on motor-sledges, ponies, dogs, and southerly winds to assist the sledges (which were fitted with sails). Half of the distance was intended to be covered by man-hauling (and sails whenever conditions permitted). Scott's daily marches were limited to the endurance of the slowest team, the man-haulers who were instructed to advance 15 miles a day. The ponies marched by night and rested when the sun was warmer, Meares remained idle in camp with the much faster dogs for many hours, before catching up at the end of the day.

Sullivan states that it was the last factor that probably was decisive. He states:

Man is a poor beast of burden, as was shown in the terrible experience of Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson in their thrust to the south of 1902–3. However, Scott relied chiefly on man-hauling in 1911–12 because ponies could not ascend the glacier midway to the Pole. The Norwegians correctly guessed that dog teams could go all the way. Furthermore, they used a simple plan, based on their native skill with skis and on dog-driving methods that were tried and true. The moon will be reached by burning up a succession of rocket stages and casting them off. This, in effect, is what the Norwegians did with their dogs, the weaker animals being sacrificed to feed the other animals and the men themselves.

Objectives of the expeditions

Scott and his financial backers saw the expedition as having a scientific basis, while also wishing to reach the pole. However, it was recognised by all involved that the South Pole was the primary objective ("The Southern Journey involves the most important object of the Expedition" – Scott), and had priority in terms of resources, such as the best ponies and all the dogs and motor sledges as well as involvement of the vast majority of the expedition personnel. Scott and his team knew the expedition would be judged on his attainment of the pole ("The ... public will gauge the result of the scientific work of the expedition largely in accordance with the success or failure of the main object" – Scott). He was prepared to make a second attempt the following year (1912–13) if this attempt failed and had Indian Army mules and additional dogs delivered in anticipation. In fact the mules were used by the team that discovered the dead bodies of Scott, Henry Robertson Bowers, and Edward Adrian Wilson in November 1912, but proved even less useful than the ponies, according to Cherry-Garrard.

Amundsen's expedition was planned to reach the South Pole. This was a plan he conceived in 1909.

Amundsen's expedition did conduct geographical work under Kristian Prestrud who conducted an expedition to King Edward VII Land while Amundsen was undertaking his attempt at the pole.

Base camps

Amundsen camped on the Ross Ice Shelf at the Bay of Whales at approx. 78°30′S, which is 52 nautical miles (96 km) closer to the pole than Scott's camp (at 77°38′S) which was 350 nautical miles west of Amundsen, on Ross Island. Amundsen had deduced that, as the Trans-Antarctic Mountains ran northwest to southeast then if he were to meet a mountain range on his route then the time spent at the high altitude of the Antarctic plateau would be less than Scott's. Scott's base was at Cape Evans on Ross Island, with access to the Trans-Antarctic mountain range to the west, and was a better base for geological exploration. He had based his previous expedition in the same area. However, he knew it to be poor as a route to the pole as he had to start before sea ice melted and had suffered delay in returning while waiting for the sea ice to freeze. They also had to make detours around Ross Island and its known crevassed areas which meant a longer journey. The crossing of the Ross Ice Shelf was an onerous task for the ponies. Scott had advanced considerable stores across the ice shelf the year before to allow the ponies to carry lighter loads over the early passage across the ice. Even so, he had to delay the departure of the ponies until 1 November rather than 24 October when the dogs and motor sledges set off.

Consequently, the Motor Party spent 6 days at the Mount Hooper Depot waiting for Scott to arrive.

Methods of transport

Motor sledges

William Lashly by a motor sledge in November 1911.

The major comparison between Scott and Amundsen has focused on the choice of draft transport —dog versus pony/man-hauling. In fact Scott took dogs, ponies and three "motor sledges". Scott spent nearly seven times the amount of money on his motor sledges than on the dogs and horses combined. They were therefore a vital part of the expedition. Unfortunately, Scott decided to leave behind the engineer, Lieutenant Commander Reginald William Skelton who had created and trialled the motor sledges. This was due to the selection of Lieutenant E.R.G.R. "Teddy" Evans as the expedition's second in command. As Evans was junior in rank to Skelton, he insisted that Skelton could not come on the expedition. Scott agreed to this request and Skelton's experience and knowledge were lost. One of the original three motor sledges was a failure even before the expedition set out; the heavy sledge was lost through thin ice on unloading it from the ship. The two remaining motor sledges failed relatively early in the main expedition because of repeated faults. Skelton's experience might have been valuable in overcoming the failures.

Ponies vs dogs

Terra Nova's sled dogs.

 

The ponies in the stable, March 28th 1911.

Scott had used dogs on his first (Discovery) expedition and felt they had failed. On that journey, Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson started with three sledges and 13 dogs. But on that expedition, the men had not properly understood how to travel on snow with the use of dogs. The party had skis but were too inexperienced to make good use of them. As a result, the dogs travelled so fast that the men could not keep up with them. The Discovery expedition had to increase their loads to slow the dogs down. Additionally, the dogs were fed Norwegian dried fish, which did not agree with them and soon they began to deteriorate. The whole team of dogs eventually died (and were eaten), and the men took over hauling the sleds.

Scott's opinion was reinforced by Shackleton's experience on the Nimrod expedition, which got to within 97.5 nautical miles (180.6 km; 112.2 mi) of the pole. Shackleton used ponies. Scott planned to use ponies only to the base of the Beardmore Glacier (one-quarter of the total journey) and man-haul the rest of the journey. Scott's team had developed snow shoes for his ponies, and trials showed they could significantly increase daily progress. However, Lawrence Oates, whom Scott had made responsible for the ponies, was reluctant to use the snow shoes and Scott failed to insist on their use.

There was plenty of evidence that dogs could succeed in the achievements of William Speirs Bruce in his Arctic, Antarctic, and Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, Amundsen in the Gjøa North West passage expedition, Fridtjof Nansen's crossing of Greenland, Robert Peary's three attempts at the North Pole, Eivind Astrup's work supporting Peary, Frederick Cook's discredited North Pole expedition, and Otto Sverdrup's explorations of Ellesmere Island. Moreover, Scott ignored the direct advice he received (while attending trials of the motor sledges in Norway) from Nansen, the most famous explorer of the day, who told Scott to take "dogs, dogs and more dogs".

At the time of the events, the expert view in England had been that dogs were of dubious value as a means of Antarctic transport. Broadly speaking, Scott saw two ways in which dogs may be used—they may be taken with the idea of bringing them all back safe and sound, or they may be treated as pawns in the game, from which the best value is to be got regardless of their lives. He stated that if, and only if, the comparison was made with a dog sledge journey which aimed to preserve the dogs' lives, 'I am inclined to state my belief that in the polar regions properly organised parties of men will perform as extended journeys as teams of dogs.' On the other hand, if the lives of the dogs were to be sacrificed, then 'the dog-team is invested with a capacity for work which is beyond the emulation of men. To appreciate this is a matter of simple arithmetic'. But efficiency notwithstanding, he expressed "reluctance" to use dogs in this way: "One cannot calmly contemplate the murder of animals which possess such intelligence and individuality, which have frequently such endearing qualities, and which very possibly one has learnt to regard as friends and companions."

Amundsen, by contrast, took an entirely utilitarian approach. Amundsen planned from the start to have weaker animals killed to feed the other animals and the men themselves. He expressed the opinion that it was less cruel to feed and work dogs correctly before shooting them, than it would be to starve and overwork them to the point of collapse. Amundsen and his team had similar affection for their dogs as those expressed above by the English, but they "also had agreed to shrink from nothing in order to achieve our goal". The British thought such a procedure was distasteful, though they were willing to eat their ponies.

Amundsen had used the opportunity of learning from the Inuit while on his Gjøa North West passage expedition of 1905. He recruited experienced dog drivers. To make the most of the dogs he paced them and deliberately kept daily mileages shorter than he need have for 75 percent of the journey, and his team spent up to 16 hours a day resting. His dogs could eat seals and penguins hunted in the Antarctic while Scott's pony fodder had to be brought all the way from England in their ship. It has been later shown that seal meat with the blubber attached is the ideal food for a sledge dog. Amundsen went with 52 dogs, and came back with 11.

What Scott did not realise is a sledge dog, if it is to do the same work as a man, will require the same amount of food. Furthermore, when sledge dogs are given insufficient food they become difficult to handle. The advantage of the sledge dog is its greater mobility. Not only were the Norwegians accustomed to skiing, which enabled them to keep up with their dogs, but they also understood how to feed them and not overwork them.

Walking vs skiing on snow

Amundsen on skis, March 7th, 1909.

Scott took the Norwegian pilot and skier Tryggve Gran to the Antarctic on the recommendation of Nansen to train his expedition to ski, but although a few of his party began to learn, he made no arrangements for compulsory training for the full party. Gran (possibly because he was Norwegian) was not included in the South Pole party, which could have made a difference. Gran was, one year later, the first to locate the deceased Scott and his remaining companions in their tent just some 18 km (11 miles) short of One Ton depot, that might have saved their lives had they reached it.

Scott would subsequently complain in his diary, while well into his journey and therefore too late to take any corrective action and after over 10 years since the Discovery expedition, that "Skis are the thing, and here are my tiresome fellow countrymen too prejudiced to have prepared themselves for the event".

Amundsen, on his side, recruited a team of well experienced skiers, all Norwegians who had skied from an early age. He also recruited a champion skier, Olav Bjaaland, as the front runner. The Amundsen party gained weight on their return travel from the South Pole.

Weather conditions

Scott and Shackleton's experience in 1903 and 1907 gave them first-hand experience of average conditions in Antarctica. Simpson, Scott's meteorologist 1910–1912, charted the weather during their expedition, often taking two readings a day. On their return to the Ross Ice Shelf, Scott's group experienced prolonged low temperatures from 27 February until 10 March which have only been matched once in 15 years of current records. The exceptional severity of the weather meant they failed to make the daily distances they needed to get to the next depot. This was a serious position as they were short of fuel and food. When Scott, Wilson, and Bowers died (Petty Officer Edgar Evans and Lawrence Oates had died earlier during the return from the South Pole) they were 18 kilometres (11 mi) short of One-Ton Depot, which was 230 kilometres (140 mi) from Corner Camp, where they would have been safe.

On the other hand, Cherry-Garrard had travelled nearly 500 kilometres (300 mi) in the same area, during the same time period and same temperatures, using a dog team. Scott also blamed "a prolonged blizzard". But while there is evidence to support the low temperatures, there is only evidence for a "normal" two- to four-day blizzard, and not the ten days that Scott claims.

Route marking and depot laying

One of Amundsen's depots.

During depot laying in February 1911, Roald Amundsen had his first (and last) 290 kilometres (180 mi) of his route marked like a Norwegian ski course using marker flags initially every eight miles. He added to this by using food containers painted black, resulting in a marker every mile. From 82 degrees on, Amundsen built a 6 ft (1.8 m) cairn every three miles with a note inside recording the cairn's position, the distance to the next depot, and direction to the next cairn. In order not to miss a depot considering the snow and great distances, Amundsen took precautions. Each depot laid out up to 85 degrees (laid out every degree of latitude) had a line of bamboo flags laid out transversely every half-mile for five miles on either side of the depot, ensuring that the returning party could locate the designated depot.

Scott relied on depots much less frequently laid out. For one distance where Amundsen laid seven depots, Scott laid only two. Routes were marked by the walls made at lunch and evening stops to protect the ponies. Depots had a single flag. As a result, Scott has much concern recorded in his diaries over route finding, and experienced close calls about finding depots. It is also clear that Scott's team did not travel on several days, because the swirling snow hid their three-month-old outward tracks. With better depot and route marking they would have been able to travel on more days with a following wind which would have filled the sail attached to their sledge, and so travel further, and might have reached safety.

Food and fuel

Evans, Bower, Wilson and Scott have a meal.

By the time they arrived at the pole, the health of Scott's team had significantly deteriorated, whereas Amundsen's team actually gained weight during the expedition. Although Scott's team managed to maintain the scheduled pace for most of the return leg, and hence was virtually always on full rations, their condition continued to worsen rapidly. (The only delay occurred when they were held for four days by a blizzard, and had to open their summit rations early as a consequence.)

Apsley Cherry-Garrard in his analysis of the expedition estimated that even under optimistic assumptions the summit rations contained only a little more than half the calories actually required for the man-hauling of sledges. A carefully planned 2006 re-enactment of both Amundsen's and Scott's travels, sponsored by the BBC, confirmed Cherry-Garrard's theory. The British team had to abort their tour due to the severe weight loss of all members. The experts hinted that Scott's reports of unusually bad surfaces and weather conditions might in part have been due to their exhausted state which made them feel the sledge weights and the chill more severely.

Scott's calculations for the supply requirements were based on a number of expeditions, both by members of his team (e.g., Wilson's trip with Cherry-Garrard and Bowers to the Emperor penguin colony which had each man on a different type of experimental ration), and by Shackleton. Apparently, Scott didn't take the strain of prolonged man-hauling at high altitudes sufficiently into account.

Since the rations contained no B and C vitamins, the only source of these vitamins during the trek was from the slaughter of ponies or dogs. This made the men progressively malnourished, manifested most clearly in the form of scurvy.

Scott also had to fight with a shortage of fuel due to leakage from stored fuel cans which used leather washers. This was a phenomenon that had been noticed previously by other expeditions, but Scott took no measures to prevent it. Amundsen, in contrast, had learned the lesson and had his fuel cans soldered closed. A fuel depot he left on Betty's Knoll was found 50 years later still full.

Dehydration may also have been a factor. Amundsen's team had plenty of fuel due to better planning and soldered fuel cans. Scott had a shortage of fuel and was unable to melt as much water as Amundsen. At the same time Scott's team were more physically active in man-hauling the sledges.

Clothing and goggles

Amundsen in fur.

 

Scott in polar gear, April 13th, 1911.

Present-day explorer Ranulph Fiennes and others have asserted that Scott's team was appropriately dressed for man-hauling in their woolen and wind-proof clothing and that Amundsen's, because they were skiing, was appropriately dressed in furs. Skiing at the pace of a dog team is a strenuous activity, yet Amundsen never complained about the clothing being too hot. That is because the furs are worn loosely so air circulates and sweat evaporates. Scott's team, on the other hand, made regular complaints about the cold.

Amundsen's team did initially have problems with their boots. However, the depot-laying trips of January and February 1911 and an abortive departure to the South Pole on 8 September 1911 allowed changes to be made before it was too late.

Scott's team suffered regularly from snow blindness and sometimes this affected over half the team at any one time. By contrast, there was no recorded case of snow blindness during the whole of Amundsen's expedition. On the return journey, Amundsen's team rested during the "day" (when the sun was in front of them) and travelled during the "night" (when the sun was behind them) to minimise the effects of snow blindness.

Delay in meeting Scott's returning party

In 1921, 'Teddy' Evans wrote in his book South with Scott that Scott had left the following written orders at Cape Evans.

About the first week of February I should like you to start your third journey to the South, the object being to hasten the return of the third Southern unit [the polar party] and give it a chance to catch the ship. The date of your departure must depend on news received from returning units, the extent of the depot of dog food you have been able to leave at One Ton Camp, the state of the dogs, etc ...It looks at present as though you should aim at meeting the returning party about March 1 in Latitude 82 or 82.30.

He did however place a lesser importance upon this journey than that of replenishing the food rations at One Ton Depot.

He continued his instructions in the next paragraph "You will of course understand that whilst the object of your third journey is important, that of the second is vital. At all hazards three X.S. units of provision must be got to One Ton Camp by the date named (19th January), and if the dogs are unable to perform this task, a man party must be organised." with that qualification he closed his notes regarding his instructions for the dogs.

Expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard did not mention Scott's order in his 1922 book The Worst Journey in the World. However, in the 1948 preface to his book, he discusses Scott's order. Cherry-Garrard writes that he and Edward Atkinson reached Cape Evans on 28 January. Scott had estimated Atkinson would reach camp by 13 January. Atkinson, now the senior officer discovered that the dog handler Cecil Meares had resigned from the expedition and that neither Meares nor anyone else had resupplied dog food to the depots. Cherry-Garrard also wrote "In my opinion he [Atkinson] would not have been fit to take out the dogs in the first week of February".

On 13 February, Atkinson set off on the first lap southwards to Hut Point with the dog assistant, Dimitri Gerov, and the dogs to avoid being cut off by disintegrating sea ice. Atkinson and Gerov were still at Hut Point when, on 19 February, Tom Crean arrived on foot from the Barrier and reported that Lt Edward Evans was lying seriously ill in a tent some 55 kilometres (35 mi) to the south, and in urgent need of rescue. Atkinson decided that this mission was his priority, and set out with the dogs to bring Evans back. This was achieved; the party was back at Hut Point on 22 February.

Atkinson sent a note back to the Cape Evans base camp requesting either the meteorologist Wright or Cherry-Garrard to take over the task of meeting Scott with the dogs. Chief meteorologist Simpson was unwilling to release Wright from his scientific work, and Atkinson therefore selected Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It was still not in Atkinson's mind that Cherry-Garrard's was a relief mission, and according to Cherry-Garrard's account, told him to "use his judgement" as to what to do in the event of not meeting the polar party by One Ton, and that Scott's orders were that the dogs must not be risked. Cherry-Garrard left with Gerov and the dogs on 26 February, carrying extra rations for the polar party to be added to the depot and 24 days' of dog food. They arrived at One Ton Depot on 4 March and did not proceed further south. Instead, he and Gerov, after waiting there for Scott for several days, apparently mostly in blizzard conditions (although no blizzard was recorded by Scott some 100 miles further south until 10 March), they returned to Hut Point on 16 March, in poor physical condition and without news of the polar party.

On the return journey from the pole, Scott reached the 82.30°S meeting point for the dog teams three days ahead of schedule, around 27 February 1912. Scott's diary for that day notes "We are naturally always discussing possibility of meeting dogs, where and when, etc. It is a critical position. We may find ourselves in safety at the next depot, but there is a horrid element of doubt." By 10 March it became clear that the dog teams were not coming: "The dogs which would have been our salvation have evidently failed. Meares [the dog-driver] had a bad trip home I suppose. It's a miserable jumble."

Around 25 March, awaiting death in his tent at latitude 79.40°S, Scott speculated, in a farewell letter to his expedition treasurer Sir Edgar Speyer, that he had overshot the meeting point with the dog relief teams, writing "We very nearly came through, and it's a pity to have missed it, but lately I have felt that we have overshot our mark. No-one is to blame and I hope no attempt will be made to suggest that we had lacked support." (Farewell letter to Sir Edgar Speyer, cited from Karen May 2012.)

Other reasons for Scott's failure

Geology samples

Scott's team continued to haul over 14 kg (30 lb) of rock samples. This would appear to be a major handicap when pulling a sledge in a race against the weather and a shortage of food and fuel. Scott could have left the samples at one of the cairns along the way to be picked up later. However, Ranulph Fiennes has suggested that the extra weight would not have been a major handicap. Tryggve Gran on the other hand thought "they might have saved themselves the bother".

Final five-man team

Scott's planning, equipment and rations had been based on three sledge teams of four men ascending the Beardmore, with a team turning back every 10 days or so as rations required finally leaving one four-man team to attempt the pole. At the last moment when down to two teams (Scott's and Evans's) Scott decided to send a returning party of three, and take on five. This increased the cooking time for the team of five and affected the fuel supply. It also meant the Evans party of three had to try to split the ration pack (at a time when they were cold and tired and later when one member was suffering from scurvy) to leave an allowance for the fifth man in Scott's party. This also will have affected the seepage of fuel from cans which were opened and then re-closed and left for several weeks before Scott's team got to them. Moreover, for some unexplained reason Scott had ordered Evans's team to cache their skis a week before so Bowers (the fifth man) walked to the pole and back to the cached skis (360 miles) while the rest of Scott's team skied.

Misuse of the dog team

For no clear reason Scott took the dogs on 140 miles further than originally planned. This meant killing the ponies early (and starting man-hauling earlier) to feed the dogs for no obvious benefit to the overall expedition. Scott also gave conflicting and changing orders for their use to each returning party. It was only in late February 1912 that it was discovered that the final supplies needed by Scott's returning party had not been delivered to One Ton Depot. Cherry-Garrard was sent with these supplies on 25 February 1912 and he was relieved to discover that he had beaten Scott's team to the depot. He also found that promised supplies of dog food were not in place. Cherry-Garrard remained at the depot, within 100 kilometres (60 mi) of Scott, 4–10 March 1912 when he could possibly have saved Scott, Wilson, Bowers, and Oates if the management of the dog team had been better.

Navigation

Amundsen's crew taking an observation.

 

Evans with a theodolite.

Amundsen used prepared navigation sheets that simplified the calculations for his team when they were tired and cold. Four out of his team of five were qualified navigators. Amundsen's expedition also used a sextant during the journey, which is a relatively light and simple piece of equipment. He also attended a symposium that reviewed how to fix position at high latitudes. Scott used a theodolite which is heavier and requires more mental arithmetic. Scott also lacked navigators having only one per team. Scott dismissed Cherry-Garrard's request for navigational training and Wilson only attempted to learn how to read latitudes at the last moment.

Camp routine

Amundsen used canisters that left his sledges permanently lashed and loaded. Scott's team had to unload, and load and relash their sledge at every camp, no matter what the weather.

Roald Amundsen

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen 

Roald Amundsen
Amundsen circa 1923
Born	Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen 16 July 1872 Borge, Østfold, Norway
Disappeared	18 June 1928 (aged 55) Barents Sea
Nationality	Norwegian
Occupation	Explorer
Known for	First to reach the South Pole First to navigate the Northwest Passage
Parent(s)	Jens Amundsen Hanna Sahlqvist
Awards	Hubbard Medal (1907) Charles P. Daly Medal (1912) Vega Medal (1913)
Signature

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (UK: /ˈɑːmʊndsən/, US: /-məns-/; Norwegian: [ˈruːɑɫ ˈɑmʉnsən] (listen); 16 July 1872 – c. 18 June 1928) was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions and a key figure of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. He led the first expedition to traverse the Northwest Passage by sea, from 1903 to 1906, and the first expedition to the South Pole in 1911. He led the first expedition proven to have reached the North Pole in a dirigible in 1926. He disappeared while taking part in a rescue mission for the airship Italia in 1928.

Early life

Amundsen was born into a family of Norwegian shipowners and captains in Borge, between the towns Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg. His parents were Jens Amundsen and Hanna Sahlqvist. Roald was the fourth son in the family. His mother wanted him to avoid the family maritime trade and encouraged him to become a doctor, a promise that Amundsen kept until his mother died when he was aged 21. He promptly quit university for a life at sea.

When he was fifteen years old, Amundsen was enthralled by reading Sir John Franklin's narratives of his overland Arctic expeditions. Amundsen wrote "I read them with a fervid fascination which has shaped the whole course of my life".

Polar treks

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Belgian Antarctic Expedition

RV Belgica frozen in the ice, 1898

Amundsen joined the Belgian Antarctic Expedition as first mate. This expedition, led by Adrien de Gerlache using the ship the RV Belgica, became the first expedition to overwinter in Antarctica. The Belgica, whether by mistake or design, became locked in the sea ice at 70°30′S off Alexander Island, west of the Antarctic Peninsula. The crew endured a winter for which they were poorly prepared.

By Amundsen's own estimation, the doctor for the expedition, the American Frederick Cook, probably saved the crew from scurvy by hunting for animals and feeding the crew fresh meat. In cases where citrus fruits are lacking, fresh meat from animals that make their own vitamin C contains enough of the vitamin to prevent scurvy, and even partly treat it. This was an important lesson for Amundsen's future expeditions.

Northwest Passage

Roald Amundsen, around 1908.

In 1903, Amundsen led the first expedition to successfully traverse Canada's Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He planned a small expedition of six men in a 45-ton fishing vessel, Gjøa, in order to have flexibility. His ship had relatively shallow draft. His technique was to use a small ship and hug the coast. Amundsen had the ship outfitted with a small 13 horsepower single-screw paraffin engine.

They traveled via Baffin Bay, the Parry Channel and then south through Peel Sound, James Ross Strait, Simpson Strait and Rae Strait. They spent two winters at King William Island, in the harbor of what is today Gjoa Haven. During this time, Amundsen and the crew learned from the local Netsilik Inuit about Arctic survival skills, which he found invaluable in his later expedition to the South Pole. For example, he learned to use sled dogs for transportation of goods and to wear animal skins in lieu of heavy, woolen parkas, which could not keep out the cold when wet.

Leaving Gjoa Haven, he sailed west and passed Cambridge Bay, which had been reached from the west by Richard Collinson in 1852. Continuing to the south of Victoria Island, the ship cleared the Canadian Arctic Archipelago on 17 August 1905. It had to stop for the winter before going on to Nome on Alaska's Pacific coast. The nearest telegraph station was 500 miles (800 km) away in Eagle. Amundsen traveled there overland to wire a success message on 5 December, then returned to Nome in 1906. Later that year he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society.

At this time, Amundsen learned of the dissolution of the union between Norway and Sweden, and that he had a new king. The explorer sent the new king, Haakon VII, news that his traversing the Northwest Passage "was a great achievement for Norway". He said he hoped to do more and signed it "Your loyal subject, Roald Amundsen." The crew returned to Oslo in November 1906, after almost three-and-a-half years abroad. Gjøa was returned to Norway in 1972. After a 45-day trip from San Francisco on a bulk carrier, she was placed on land outside the Fram Museum in Oslo, where she is now situated inside her own dedicated building at the museum.

South Pole Expedition

Norwegian flag at the South Pole

Amundsen next planned to take an expedition to the North Pole and explore the Arctic Basin. Finding it difficult to raise funds, when he heard in 1909 that the Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had claimed to reach the North Pole as a result of two different expeditions, he decided to reroute to Antarctica. He was not clear about his intentions, and Robert F. Scott and the Norwegian supporters felt misled. Scott was planning his own expedition to the South Pole that year. Using the ship Fram, earlier used by Fridtjof Nansen, Amundsen left Oslo for the south on 3 June 1910. At Madeira, Amundsen alerted his men that they would be heading to Antarctica, and sent a telegram to Scott: "Beg to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic – Amundsen."

Nearly six months later, the expedition arrived at the eastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf (then known as "the Great Ice Barrier"), at a large inlet called the Bay of Whales, on 14 January 1911. Amundsen established his base camp there, calling it Framheim. Amundsen eschewed the heavy wool clothing worn on earlier Antarctic attempts in favour of adopting Inuit-style furred skins.

Using skis and dog sleds for transportation, Amundsen and his men created supply depots at 80°, 81° and 82° South on the Barrier, along a line directly south to the Pole. Amundsen also planned to kill some of his dogs on the way and use them as a source for fresh meat. A small group, including Hjalmar Johansen, Kristian Prestrud and Jørgen Stubberud, set out on 8 September, but had to abandon their trek due to extreme temperatures. The painful retreat caused a quarrel within the group, and Amundsen sent Johansen and the other two men to explore King Edward VII Land.

A second attempt, with a team of five made up of Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, Oscar Wisting and Amundsen, departed base camp on 19 October. They took four sledges and 52 dogs. Using a route along the previously unknown Axel Heiberg Glacier, they arrived at the edge of the Polar Plateau on 21 November after a four-day climb. The team and 16 dogs arrived at the pole on 14 December, a month before Scott's group. Amundsen named their South Pole camp Polheim. Amundsen renamed the Antarctic Plateau as King Haakon VII's Plateau. They left a small tent and letter stating their accomplishment, in case they did not return safely to Framheim.

The team arrived at Framheim on 25 January 1912, with 11 surviving dogs. They made their way off the continent and to Hobart, Australia, where Amundsen publicly announced his success on 7 March 1912. He telegraphed news to backers.

Amundsen's expedition benefited from his careful preparation, good equipment, appropriate clothing, a simple primary task, an understanding of dogs and their handling, and the effective use of skis. In contrast to the misfortunes of Scott's team, Amundsen's trek proved relatively smooth and uneventful.

North Polar Expeditions and Northeast Passage

Northeast Passage

Maud in June 1918

In 1918, an expedition Amundsen began with a new ship, Maud, lasted until 1925. Maud was carefully navigated through the ice west to east through the Northeast Passage. With him on this expedition were Oscar Wisting and Helmer Hanssen, both of whom had been part of the team to reach the South Pole. In addition, Henrik Lindstrøm was included as a cook. He suffered a stroke and was so physically reduced that he could not participate.

The goal of the expedition was to explore the unknown areas of the Arctic Ocean, strongly inspired by Fridtjof Nansen's earlier expedition with Fram. The plan was to sail along the coast of Siberia and go into the ice farther to the north and east than Nansen had. In contrast to Amundsen's earlier expeditions, this was expected to yield more material for academic research, and he carried the geophysicist Harald Sverdrup on board.

The voyage was to the northeasterly direction over the Kara Sea. Amundsen planned to freeze the Maud into the polar ice cap and drift towards the North Pole – as Nansen had done with the Fram – and he did so off Cape Chelyuskin. But, the ice became so thick that the ship was unable to break free, although it was designed for such a journey in heavy ice. In September 1919, the crew got the ship loose from the ice, but it froze again after eleven days somewhere between the New Siberian Islands and Wrangel Island.

During this time, Amundsen suffered a broken arm and was attacked by polar bears. As a result, he participated little in the work outdoors, such as sleigh rides and hunting. He, Hanssen, and Wisting, along with two other men, embarked on an expedition by dog sled to Nome, Alaska, more than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) away. But they found that the ice was not frozen solid in the Bering Strait, and it could not be crossed. They sent a telegram from Anadyr to signal their location.

After two winters frozen in the ice, without having achieved the goal of drifting over the North Pole, Amundsen decided to go to Nome to repair the ship and buy provisions. Several of the crew ashore there, including Hanssen, did not return on time to the ship. Amundsen considered Hanssen to be in breach of contract, and dismissed him from the crew.

During the third winter, Maud was frozen in the western Bering Strait. She finally became free and the expedition sailed south, reaching Seattle, in the American Pacific Northwest in 1921 for repairs. Amundsen returned to Norway, needing to put his finances in order. He took with him two young indigenous girls, a four-year-old he adopted, Kakonita, and her companion Camilla. When Amundsen went bankrupt two years later, however, he sent the girls to be cared for by Camilla's father, who lived in eastern Russia.

In June 1922, Amundsen returned to Maud, which had been sailed to Nome. He decided to shift from the planned naval expedition to aerial ones, and arranged to charter a plane. He divided the expedition team in two: one part, led by him, was to winter over and prepare for an attempt to fly over the pole in 1923. The second team on Maud, under the command of Wisting, was to resume the original plan to drift over the North Pole in the ice. The ship drifted in the ice for three years east of the New Siberian Islands, never reaching the North Pole. It was finally seized by Amundsen's creditors as collateral for his mounting debt.

Aerial Expeditions to the North Pole

Roald Amundsen in Svalbard (1925)

The 1923 attempt to fly over the Pole failed. Amundsen and Oskar Omdal, of the Royal Norwegian Navy, tried to fly from Wainwright, Alaska, to Spitsbergen across the North Pole. When their aircraft was damaged, they abandoned the journey. To raise additional funds, Amundsen traveled around the United States in 1924 on a lecture tour. Although he was unable to reach the North Pole, the scientific results of the expedition, mainly the work of Sverdrup, have proven to be of considerable value. Much of the carefully collected scientific data was lost during the ill-fated journey of Peter Tessem and Paul Knutsen, two crew members sent on a mission by Amundsen. The scientific materials were later retrieved by Russian scientist Nikolay Urvantsev from where they had been abandoned on the shores of the Kara Sea.

In 1925, accompanied by Lincoln Ellsworth, pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, flight mechanic Karl Feucht and two other team members, Amundsen took two Dornier Do J flying boats, the N-24 and N-25, to 87° 44′ north. It was the northernmost latitude reached by plane up to that time. The aircraft landed a few miles apart without radio contact, yet the crews managed to reunite. The N-24 was damaged. Amundsen and his crew worked for more than three weeks to clean up an airstrip to take off from ice. They shovelled 600 tons of ice while consuming only one pound (400 g) of daily food rations. In the end, the six crew members were packed into the N-25. In a remarkable feat, Riiser-Larsen took off, and they barely became airborne over the cracking ice. They returned triumphant when everyone thought they had been lost forever.

In 1926, Amundsen and 15 other men (including Ellsworth, Riiser-Larsen, Oscar Wisting, and the Italian air crew led by aeronautical engineer Umberto Nobile made the first crossing of the Arctic in the airship Norge, designed by Nobile. They left Spitsbergen on 11 May 1926, flew over the North Pole on 12 May, and landed in Alaska the following day.

Controversy over Polar Priority

The three previous claims to have arrived at the North Pole: Frederick Cook in 1908; Robert Peary in 1909; and Richard E. Byrd in 1926 (just a few days before the Norge) are disputed by some, as being either of dubious accuracy or outright fraud. If these other claims are false, the crew of the Norge would be the first explorers verified to have reached the North Pole, floated over it in the Norge in 1926. If the Norge expedition was the first to the North Pole, Amundsen and Oscar Wisting were the first men to have reached both geographical poles, by ground or by air.

Disappearance and death

Amundsen's Latham 47 flying boat

Amundsen disappeared on 18 June 1928 while flying on a rescue mission in the Arctic. His team included Norwegian pilot Leif Dietrichson, French pilot René Guilbaud, and three more Frenchmen. They were seeking missing members of Nobile's crew, whose new airship Italia had crashed while returning from the North Pole. Amundsen's French Latham 47 flying boat never returned.

Later, a wing-float and bottom gasoline tank from the plane, which had been adapted as a replacement wing-float, were found near the Tromsø coast. It is believed that the plane crashed in fog in the Barents Sea, and that Amundsen and his crew were killed in the wreck, or died shortly afterward. The search for Amundsen and team was called off in September 1928 by the Norwegian government, and the bodies were never found.

In 2004 and in late August 2009, the Royal Norwegian Navy used the unmanned submarine Hugin 1000 to search for the wreckage of Amundsen's plane. The searches focused on a 40-square-mile (100 km²) area of the sea floor, and were documented by the German production company ContextTV. They found nothing from the Amundsen flight.

Honours

In 1925, Amundsen was awarded the Hans Egede Medal by the Royal Danish Geographical Society.

Legacy

Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station

Owing to Amundsen's numerous significant accomplishments in polar exploration, many places in both the Arctic and Antarctic are named after him. The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, operated by the United States Antarctic Program, was jointly named in honour of Amundsen and his rival. British novelist Roald Dahl was named after Amundsen, as was Nobel Prize laureate Roald Hoffmann.

The 1969 film The Red Tent tells the story of the Nobile expedition and Amundsen's disappearance. Sean Connery plays the role of Amundsen.

Huntford's book was adapted into the TV serial The Last Place on Earth. It aired in 1985 and featured Sverre Anker Ousdal as Amundsen.

On 15 February 2019, a biographic Norwegian film titled Amundsen, directed by Espen Sandberg, was released.

European-Inuit descendant claims

At least two Inuit people in Gjøa Haven with European ancestry have claimed to be descendants of Amundsen, from the period of their extended winter stay on King Williams Island from 1903 to 1905. Accounts by members of the expedition told of their relations with Inuit women, and historians have speculated that Amundsen might also have taken a partner, although he wrote a warning against this.

Specifically, half-brothers Bob Konona and Paul Ikuallaq say that their father Luke Ikuallaq told them on his deathbed that he was the son of Amundsen. Konona said that their father Ikuallaq was left out on the ice to die after his birth, as his European ancestry made him illegitimate to the Inuit, threatening their community. His Inuit grandparents saved him.

In 2012, Y-DNA analysis, with the families' permission, showed that Ikuallaq was not a match to the direct male line of Amundsen. Not all descendants claiming European ancestry have been tested for a match to Amundsen, nor has there been a comparison of Ikuallaq's DNA to that of other European members of Amundsen's crew.