Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

Georgia O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned five years later for the summer of 1934, by which time her reputation as one of America's foremost modernist painters was already long established.  The stark simplicity of the desert landscape appealed strongly to her artistic sensibilities and she returned to New Mexico every summer thereafter until her move there in 1949.

From Taos she wrote to Henry McBride, "I am having a wonderful time. . . You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here--and finally feeling in the right place again--I feel like myself--and I like it. . . . I have the most beautiful adobe studio--never had such a nice place all to myself--Out the very large window to a rich green alfalfa field--then the sage brush and beyond--a most perfect mountain--it makes me feel like flying--" (Jack Cowat, Juan Hamilton and Sarah Greenough, Georgia O'Keeffe: Art and Letters, Washington, D.C., 1987, pp. 189-190).  While O'Keeffe returned to New York later that summer, New Mexico remained in her consciousness, and three years after Stieglitz's death in 1946, she moved permanently to Abiquiu.

Describing the home she was to settle in, O'Keeffe wrote, "When I first saw the Abiquiu house it was a ruin with an adobe wall around the garden broken in a couple of places by falling trees.  As I climbed and walked about in the ruin I found a patio with a very pretty well house and bucket to draw up water.  It was a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side.  That wall with a door was something I had to have.  It took me ten years to get it--three more years to fix the house so I could live in it--and after that the wall with a door was painted many times" (Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 1976).

O'Keeffe often created series of paintings, examining and reworking her subjects and reducing them to their essential forms.  In the present work, O'Keeffe simplifies the door to a slender black rectangle set against a sand-colored wall, a pale strip on the right edge minimally suggesting the house's three-dimensionality.  A larger version of this painting, also strikingly minimal and nearly abstract, is owned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (fig. 1).  Charles Eldredge writes, "Both as geometric pattern and as poetic allusion, the patio subject expressed the importance of place, of home" (Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 1991, p. 143).