New Mexico (1929 – 1984)

In 1917, when O’Keeffe traveled from Texas to vacation in Colorado, she spent several days in New Mexico for which she felt an immediate affinity. She returned twelve years later, in 1929, to spend the first of many summers painting there. In 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death, she made New Mexico her permanent home.

In 1929 O’Keeffe bought a car and learned to drive, but worked primarily in and around Taos, making painting of various architectural, tree, and landscape forms that interested her. By the early 1930s, she had begun to explore areas south of Taos, such as Alcalde, Espanola, and Santa Fe. In the mid-1930s, she discovered regions to the south and west of Taos that were clearly her favorites and served as inspiration for her work over the next forty years. She was particularly drawn to the stark, but brightly colored red and yellow hills and cliffs of the Ghost Ranch area and its flat-topped mountain, Cerro Pedernal; the white jagged cliff formations near the village of Abiquiu; the black hills of the Navajo country, some 150 miles west of Ghost Ranch; the cedar trees surrounding the Ghost Ranch house; and the bleached desert bones she collected as she roamed the desert. All became frequent subjects in her work through the 1940s.

O’Keeffe purchased a house at Ghost Ranch in 1940 and one in the village of Abiquiu in 1945. After 1949 she lived summer and fall at Ghost Ranch and winter and spring in Abiquiu. From the early 1940s through the early 1960s, she often chose as the subject of her work the simple architectural forms of these houses as well as their surrounding landscape configurations and the cottonwood trees of the Chama River valley.

O’Keeffe began the first of several trips around the world in 1959, and the experience of seeing the earth and sky from the window of an airplane inspired a new and last series of paintings in the 1950s and 1960s. The landscape configurations recorded in these works are highly simplified and easily read as pure abstractions, suggesting that her early interest in expression through essentially nonrepresentational means remained an important part of her thinking throughout her career.