New Mexico

O’Keeffe was in New Mexico during the summers of 1930 and 1931, but remained at Lake George in 1932, making brief painting trips to Canada and New York City. In the fall of that year, she accepted a mural commission at Radio City Music Hall, which she ultimately abandoned because of technical problems. That disappointment, in combination with Stieglitz’s disapproval of her having accepted the commission and his growing infatuation with a wealthy admirer, Dorothy Norman, contributed to O’Keeffe’s experiencing a nervous breakdown early in 1933.

She recovered in Bermuda that spring and returned there the following spring. O’Keeffe spent the fall of 1934 in New Mexico, and it was then that she discovered Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch in a spectacular desert setting, some 20 miles (32 km) north of the village of Abiquiu. From then until 1949 when she made New Mexico her permanent home—three years after Stieglitz’s death—O’Keeffe painted for part of the year in New Mexico; an exception was 1939, when at the invitation of the Dole Hawaiian Pineapple Company she traveled to Hawaii to paint. In 1940 she purchased the house that she had occupied at Ghost Ranch since 1936, and in 1945 she purchased a second property—a badly deteriorated hacienda in Abiquiu with a large garden. From 1945 to 1949, O’Keeffe’s friend Maria Chabot oversaw the restoration of the Abiquiu house and garden.

In New Mexico O’Keeffe produced From the White Place (1940), Pelvis IV (1944), Black Place III (1944), and numerous other paintings of the area’s distinctive natural and architectural forms. Such paintings of what she saw allowed her to continue to explore the abstract language she had identified as her own in the 1910s in that its abstract shapes are naturally embedded in these subjects. Moreover, her increasing fascination with the inherently abstract character of the stark and barren hills of a region that she called the Black Place, some 150 miles (240 km) west of Ghost Ranch, led to a series of paintings that epitomize a new resolution with abstraction. That is, these works depict what O’Keeffe actually saw, but read—and are rendered—as abstractions. Moreover, as she painted these and other landscape and architectural subjects either in Abiquiu or at Ghost Ranch, she effectively claimed a piece of the vast American West as her own. Such paintings as Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs) (1940) portray aspects of what has come to be known as “O’Keeffe country.” Being in the Southwest also made it possible for O’Keeffe to realize herself in yet another way; by allowing widely published journalists and photojournalists into her isolated and exotic world, she increasingly defined herself to the public as she had begun to do in the mid-1920s—as an uncompromising, determined, self-made individualist. This new public image differed dramatically from and effectively replaced the one Stieglitz had constructed.

In 1959 O’Keeffe began traveling the world, and although she saw many astonishing sites, she was most inspired by views from the windows of airplanes. She subsequently furthered her commitment to abstraction, completing a series of paintings of sky, land, and water configurations, as observed from high above the earth. While these works, such as Blue, Black and Grey (1960), are perceived by their viewers as abstractions, they nonetheless depict what O’Keeffe actually saw. After 1959 she returned to abstraction almost exclusively, using abstract shapes that recall those of her works of the 1910s.