Red Hills with Flowers

Georgia O'KeeffeWW-1940-029397

1940·Oil on canvas·30.5 × 76.5 cm (12 × 30 1/8 in.)

<p>Georgia O’Keeffe frequently explored the Southwestern landscape in search of noteworthy views, and in the summer of 1940, she found an inspiring sight: “The places you can go on a horse here always astonish me . . . the most exciting was being on top of a ridge of red hills and seeing the blue flat topped mountains above them—it was very good.” She painted <em>Red Hills with Flowers</em> a month later, depicting bushes of small white flowers growing from the eroded gullies of the red badland, with the blue mesa barely visible to the right. O’Keeffe housed it in a thin strip frame made of a silver metal that she had partially plated with copper to complement the composition’s color scheme.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1940
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 30.5 × 76.5 cm (12 × 30 1/8 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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