The Black Place

Georgia O'KeeffeWW-1943-029403

1943·Oil on canvas·50.7 × 91.5 cm (19 15/16 × 36 in.)

<p><em>The Black Place</em> features an unusually muted palette for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwestern paintings: the composition is dominated by shades of white and gray, relieved only by a thin strip of blue sky at the top. “The Black Place” was the name she gave her favorite location to paint, an area of the Bisti/De-Na- Zin Wilderness (also known as the Bisti Badlands) located approximately 150 miles west of Abiquiu, New Mexico. While she painted numerous images of the region’s rounded, gray hills, here she depicted a low, sandy crest that reminded her of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, as she wrote to him: “When I see the country in its silvery beauty and forbidding blackness in my memory—it is so often almost as if I see you too—your silvery hair and grey clothes and black cape.”</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1943
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 50.7 × 91.5 cm (19 15/16 × 36 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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