![]() ![]() In 1934, O'Keeffe discovered Ghost Ranch, an isolated "dude ranch" to the west of Taos, set up for the entertainment of wealthy East Coast holidaymakers such as the Rockefellers. O'Keeffe long aspired to make, as she put it, "the Great American Painting" and this series is often interpreted as her response to the Great Depression. She sent a barrel of them back to New York, where she painted them the following winter.Ī major retrospective of O'Keeffe's work that opened at Tate Modern in London this week,on July 6, includes several pictures of these bones, burnished by the wind and bleached by the sun. ![]() She would return to New Mexico in 1930 and again in 1931, when she became fascinated with the sand-blasted cattle bones that she encountered in the desert. Above all, though, it was New Mexico's harsh, awe-inspiring landscape that she found so thrilling. Initially, perhaps, her love for the west was tied up with a sense of liberation from Stieglitz – there is speculation that O'Keeffe had affairs with both "Beck" and Mabel that summer of 1929. The artist ended up staying with Luhan for five months, before settling permanently in the region for the final 37 years of her life. Finally, someone will paint the country."Īnd, boy, did she – so much so, in fact, that this area of New Mexico is now known, colloquially, as "O'Keeffe Country". Luhan had been badgering O'Keeffe to visit New Mexico for years and, anticipating her friend's arrival the previous month, had written to her Jungian psychiatrist in triumph: "O'Keeffe is coming out in May. The two women were met there by the wealthy arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, who persuaded them to travel with her to the desert town of Taos, 112km north. She was accompanied by her friend Rebecca "Beck" Strand, wife of the modernist photographer Paul. Getty ImagesĪppalled at the prospect of spending the summer as usual surrounded by her husband's family in upstate New York, O'Keeffe instead set off by train for Santa Fe. In the years leading up to her trip, O'Keeffe had been living in the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue in New York City, painting the skyscrapers she could see from her window rather than the brightly coloured (and slyly erotic) flowers for which she would later become best known.ĭuring this period, Stieglitz, 23 years senior and increasingly overbearing, had started an affair with Dorothy Norman, the beautiful young wife of an heir to the Sears, Roebuck & Co department store fortune – and O'Keeffe had found out.Īmerican artist Georgia O'Keeffe poses outdoors beside an easel with a canvas from her series, "Pelvis Series Red With Yellow", in New Mexico in 1960. By then, with the help of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz – an influential photographer and manager of the first modern art gallery in the United States – she had long outgrown her roots as a Wisconsin dairy farmer's daughter, and established herself as America's pre-eminent modernist painter. In 1929, aged 41, Georgia O'Keeffe took a trip to New Mexico. ![]()
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