Black Cross, New Mexico

Georgia O'KeeffeWW-1929-016250

1929·Oil on canvas·99.4 × 76.2 cm (39 1/8 × 30 in.)

<p>“For me, painting the crosses was a way of painting the country,” recalled Georgia O’Keeffe about the series of compositions featuring Catholic crosses that she created upon visiting the Southwest in 1929. In <em>Black Cross, New Mexico</em>, she contrasted the handmade cross, magnified in scale and isolated flat against the picture plane, with the distant brilliance of the sunset behind the rolling hills. O’Keeffe’s cross paintings helped cement her association with New Mexico, to which she would return every summer until she moved there permanently in 1949. The Art Institute organized her first major museum retrospective in 1943, and purchased this painting at the time.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1929
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 99.4 × 76.2 cm (39 1/8 × 30 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe

Artist

Georgia O'Keeffe

Painting

One of the most successful artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe enjoyed a long and varied artistic career in which she introduced many new aesthetic perspectives and approaches in Modernism. Born in Wisconsin in 1887, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago beginning in 1905 before taking teaching position in South Carolina, Virginia and Texas. She moved to New York City in 1918 at the age of 31 where she became part of the artistic milieu of her future husband photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In these years, she became fascinated with the fast pace of city life and produced paintings highlighting the city’s soaring skyscrapers as symbols of the modern world.

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