Georgia O’Keeffe, the second of seven children, was born on a farm in Wisconsin. O’Keeffe’s mother encouraged her to pursue art. In 1905, she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, beginning in 1907, she attended the Art Students League in New York, studying there under William Merritt Chase. Her first art job was as a commercial artist. A drawing class taught by Alon Bement at the University of Virginia Summer School introduced O’Keeffe to the work of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose progressive ideas influenced her art. In 1916, the New York art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, first exhibited O’Keeffe’s work in his 291 gallery. The two cultivated a relationship and eventually wed in 1924. O’Keeffe began making compositions of enlarged natural forms, which became her signature style. Between 1929 and 1949, O’Keeffe spent each year working in New Mexico and the region influenced her selection of subject matter. After Stieglitz died, O’Keeffe moved to a home she had purchased in Abiquiu, New Mexico. 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. The eroded hills and scattered clumps of dry, yellowed sage present a remarkably barren scene, giving the painting 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 crowd the frame.

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