Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

Gihon Foundation, Works by Women: Paintings and Sculpture from the Gihon Foundation, traveling 1980-1988

Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico with Paul Strand’s wife, Rebecca, in April 1929.  The brilliant light, imposing mountains and bleached bones of the desert elicited a strong reaction from the artist, and O’Keeffe soon began to focus her attention on this newfound landscape. She described it:  “Taos is a high, wide, sage-covered plain.  In the evening, with the sun at your back, it looks like an ocean, like water.  The color up there is different . . . the blue-green of the sage and the mountains, the wildflowers in bloom.  It’s a different kind of color from any I’d ever seen—there’s nothing like that in north Texas or even in Colorado.  And it’s not just the color that attracted me, either.  The world is so wide up there, so big” (Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, New York, 1989, p. 327).

In the present work, O’Keeffe places clumps of feathery green sage brush against vividly hued horizontal bands representing the mountains, sky and desert.  While the work is small in scale, its luminous colors and emphatic horizontality convey the broad sweep of the desert, extending infinitely beneath the sky.

Of O’Keeffe’s New Mexico, Lloyd Goodrich observed, “She never tires of painting it.  The Southwest has been painted often—but often badly, by artists who believe that a beautiful subject produces a beautiful picture.  But O’Keeffe translates this landscape into the language of art.  She models the hills so that they possess substance and weight.  She carves their intricate folded and furrowed forms into powerful sculptural creations.  The unbelievable colors of the desert are recorded, without sweetening, in full-bodied earthly harmonies.  Always her desert poetry is embodied in robust physical language, speaking to the senses (Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 1970, p.22).