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Like all her magnified views, the hills of O'Keeffe's New Mexico landscapes threaten to burst the bounds of the frame.

O'Keeffe painted this canvas during a trip to a desolate region of New Mexico.

The artist was a modernist painter associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his New York galleries.

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Georgia O’Keeffe

Grey Hills, 1941

oil  on canvas

20 x 30 in.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James W. Fesler

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Georgia O’Keeffe was born on a farm in Wisconsin the second of seven children.  Her mother sent the girls to art classes and encouraged O’Keeffe to continue her training. She attended Town Hall School in Wisconsin and continued her art training with a watercolorist.  O’Keeffe then enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Art Students League in New York, where she studied under William Merritt Chase.  Her first art job was as a commercial artist, and she also taught art in an elementary school in Texas.  O’Keeffe attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School where she was introduced to the work of Arthur Wesley Dow.  His free thinking opinions on creating are were a major influence on her.  Without O’Keeffe’s permission, a friend took her drawings to the New York art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 gallery showed the work of the most advanced abstract artists.  Stieglitz exhibited her drawings.  When O’Keeffe learned of this display, she confronted Stieglitz but let the drawings hang. Although Stieglitz was much older than O’Keeffe, he divorced his wife and the two were married.  O’Keeffe began making large-scale compositions containing highly magnified natural forms, which became her signature style.  Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent each year working in New Mexico and the area became a major theme in her art.  After Stieglitz died, O’Keeffe moved to a home she had purchased in Abiquiu, New Mexico and made the area around it a theme for many of her paintings.  The Georgia O’Keeffe museum was established in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1997 and her home and studio in Abiquiu became a National Historic landmark in 1998.

Grey Hills was painted during a November trip to a desolate region of New Mexico.  Although the eroded hills and scattered clumps of dry, yellowed sage present a remarkably barren scene, the painting has a stark, elemental beauty.  The softly rounded topography and colored bands of soil form a graceful composition that gradually leads the eye up the massive slope to the top of the canvas.  Like the magnified views of O’Keeffe’s flower and bone paintings, the hills of her New Mexico landscapes threaten to burst the bounds of the frame. 

Reference

Barbara Buhler Lyons, Leslie Polling-Kempes, Frederick W. Turner.  Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0691116594