Pineapple for Papaya

Least commercial artist in the U. S. is probably lean Georgia O'Keeffe, who paints in luminous colors skulls, flowers, feathers, barns and New Mexico. Last winter Hawaiian Pineapple Co. Ltd. (Dole pineapple) plucked up its courage, asked Artist O'Keeffe to go to Hawaii and paint two pictures for it. She agreed, on condition that she could paint whatever she pleased.

In Hawaii Artist O'Keeffe happily painted fishhooks, tropical flowers, lava bridges, waterfalls--but nary a pineapple. To Dole on her return she presented a vivid red canvas of crab's claw ginger, a lush green papaya tree (Dole's rival is papaya juice).

Tactful Art Director Charles Coiner of N. W. Ayer (Dole advertising agency) took a hand, spouted to Painter O'Keeffe about the beauty of pineapples in bud, urged her to give the pineapple a break. He phoned Honolulu, had a budding plant put aboard the Clipper. Thirty-six hours later the plant was delivered to the O'Keeffe studio in Manhattan. "It's beautiful. I never knew that," exclaimed Artist O'Keeffe. "It's made up of long green blades and the pineapple grows in the centre of them." She promptly painted it, and Dole got a pineapple picture after all (see cut}.

In Alfred Stieglitz' gallery, An American Place, last week opened the result of his wife's trip: 20 paintings, including the two for Dole. The other 18 were for sale, at prices ranging up to $4,000. Best sequence: four glowing canvases of green mountains and black rocks, each held together by thin white wisps of waterfalls. Critics agreed that Georgia O'Keeffe was still tops among U. S. woman painters, mused over her Steinesque catalogue note : "If my painting is what I have to give back to the world for what the world gives to me, I may say that these paintings are what I have to give at present for what three months in Hawaii gave to me."

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