Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for her enormous, close-up flowers and for the bleached bones and adobe walls of the New Mexico desert. Called the Mother of American Modernism, she is one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. Her landscapes get less attention than the flowers, and we think that is a mistake. They are quieter, stranger, and every bit as radical.
O’Keeffe was born in 1887 on a dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and spent the 1920s painting the hills around Lake George, New York, where she summered with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924. The rounded purples and greens of those early landscapes still carry a hint of Art Nouveau. Then in 1929 she went to New Mexico for the first time, and the work changed for good. She painted at Ghost Ranch from 1934 and bought a house there in 1940, then a second one in the village of Abiquiú in 1945. After Stieglitz died she moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949 and stayed for the rest of her life.
The flat-topped mesa in several of these paintings is Cerro Pedernal, which she could see from her Ghost Ranch window and painted dozens of times. She liked to say that God had told her if she painted it often enough she could have it, and after her death in 1986 her ashes were scattered from its summit. The pale, bulging hills belong to the Black Place and the White Place, badlands near Abiquiú that she visited on camping trips well into her seventies. The very last image in the set comes from a different vantage point altogether. In the mid 1960s, flying often for the first time, she began painting the view from airplane windows, and the Sky Above Clouds series ended with a canvas eight feet tall and twenty four feet wide.
What holds the whole body of work together is restraint. O’Keeffe sanded her surfaces smooth, mixed color in the open air to match what she saw, and edited a landscape down to a few large shapes. Nothing is fussy. That is why these pictures feel calm even when the subject is a wall of red rock in a hard desert light. Here are some of our favorites.
If O’Keeffe’s landscapes appeal to you, the thread continues elsewhere on Moss and Fog. Jess Franks paints the American landscape in near neon, and Laura Bifano breaks mountains into gem-like facets. For the vocabulary of the movement she helped define, there is our glossary of visual culture. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, open since 1997, holds the largest collection of her work anywhere.
