O'Keeffe's love affair with New Mexico
The iconography of the West inspired O'Keeffe's work for a substantial portion of her prolific career. In 1916, two years before leaving her position as head of a college art department in Texas to become a full-time artist, she visited New Mexico for the first time. She embraced it immediately. "From then on, I was always on my way back," she later said.
O'Keeffe visited repeatedly over the following decades, eventually buying a small house at Ghost Ranch, northwest of Santa Fe, and later, an abandoned adobe house and land in nearby Abiquiu. She moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949, three years after her husband's death, and stayed until her death in 1986.
Visiting O'Keeffe's home in Abiquiu Tours are available of O'Keeffe's home in Abiquiu for groups of six or fewer, by appointment only. The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation recommends making reservations at least six months in advance and requests a $20/person donation. Abiquiu is about 50 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
For more information,
call: (505) 685-4539 or fax (505) 685-4428.While O'Keeffe painted many cityscapes, trees, still lifes and nudes, she is most often associated with her naturalistic images of New Mexico -- bleached skulls, dreamy Western landscapes and her famed iconic flowers.
Jimson weed, which grew in abundance on the artist's patio in Abiquiu, became the subject of a monumental painting (Jimson Weed, 1932) that is a highlight of the museum's collection. O'Keeffe's artistic fascination with skulls began in the early 1930s, after she discovered a pile of bones at a dude ranch during a summer trip.
The O'Keeffe Museum also exhibits the artist's representation of a Pueblo Kachina doll, an occasional subject of her work. Amid her paintings of land and sky and flower, the Kachina doll attests that -- whatever O'Keeffe's attributes as an observer of nature -- it is her spiritual explorations that lend her artwork its uncanny emotional power.
Images © The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
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