Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

A prominent member of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle, Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico in April 1929 with Paul Strand’s wife, Rebecca.  O’Keeffe returned to the region in the summer of 1934, by which time her reputation as one of America’s foremost modernist painters was already well established.  The stark simplicity of the desert landscape appealed strongly to O’Keeffe’s artistic sensibilities, and she moved permanently to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu in 1949.

Painted in 1944, Black Place No. IV belongs to a distinguished series of pictures O’Keeffe painted depicting the dramatic terrain located approximately 150 miles northwest of her home at Ghost Ranch.   O’Keeffe writes, “I must have seen the Black Place first driving past on a trip into the Navajo country and, having seen it, I had to go back to paint—even in the heat of mid-summer.  It became one of my favorite places to work.  I had a Model A Ford.  It was the easiest car I ever had to work in.  The windows were high so there was plenty of light.  I could take out the right-hand front seat, unbolt the driver’s seat, turn it around and sit there to paint with a canvas on the back seats.  I could work on a canvas as large as 30”  x 40” . . .The Black Place is about one hundred and fifty miles from Ghost Ranch and as you come to it over a hill, it looks like a mile of elephants—grey hills all about the same size with almost white sand at their feet.  When you get into the hills you find that all the surfaces are evenly cracked so walking and climbing are easy” (Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1976).

One biographer observes, “In the Black Place paintings O’Keeffe produced some of her most powerful work . . . In some of these, over the melting, collapsing formation of the soft hills is superimposed a bold and vigorous pattern of broad, jagged, dark forms, a lightning strip that ricochets down the yielding center of the hills.  As in the earlier pink and blue music and leaf paintings, a central, vertical fissure is prominent.  In the Black Place paintings, however, O’Keeffe has gone beyond the intimate and personal presence of the earlier works.  The majestic Black Place paintings attain a great, somber crescendo of strength and mystery.  Monumental in scope, the works have a dark and thunderous presence that is at once luminous, haunting, and devastating: they are as powerful as anything O’Keeffe painted” (Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, New York, 1989, p. 478).

Often considered O’Keeffe’s last great series of paintings, the Black Place subject preoccupied the artist as flowers, crosses, skulls and pelvises had earlier in her career.  Other versions of Black Place are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (No.I); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (No. II) and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe (No. III, extended loan from a Private collection).