Georgia O’Keffee

May 5 – May 7, 2025                                                         Most Recent Posts:
Santa Fe Skies RV Park                                       First Four Days in Santa Fe
Santa Fe, New Mexico                                         Petroglyphs and Santa Fe Skies

In the midst of the current heat wave and how sluggish and unmotivated I’m feeling, it is actually nice to read about these days in Santa Fe in early May when there was hail and rain for days in a row with lows in the 30’s.  IN MAY……

May 5th was a rainy Monday when Jodee and I went to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe.  I couldn’t get a picture of the outside of the museum so I borrowed this one from the internet showing blue skies we didn’t have on that day. 

The museum costs $22 which shocked me as pretty high until I’d spent some time inside.  They had an excellent video and an audio tour of everything in the museum.  The headsets worked perfectly and I was carried away by the incredible artistic talent of this woman born in 1887, the year before my Great Aunt Carrie.  These two women were contemporaries and both were mid westerners but they could not have been more different.   O’Keeffe died in 1986 at age 98 and my aunt at 102 in 1991.

I have been an admirer of Georgia O’Keeffe ever since I read what is still considered the best biography of her by Roxana Robinson.  It was chosen by the Chautauqua Institution as one of their “book club” readings over their 9 week program when I was there in 1989.  Robinson came to speak about it and her research. There was a discussion of the book.   I cannot recommend the biography highly enough.  O’Keeffe was an amazingly independent talented woman especially for her time.

I’ve been a long time making it out to her favorite part of the world.

The museum took me through her works from this 1903 watercolor of Cherry Blossoms done in 1903 when she was only 16 years old

to some of her final abstract works in the late 1970’s when she returned to watercolor and macular degeneration had made art work extremely difficult for her.  How unbelievably sad for an artist to lose her sight. 

The progression of her art between these times is fascinating.

I feel some connection to O’Keeffe not only because I admire her and her art, but also because she lived in Charlottesville on Wertland Street and attended and taught art classes at the University of Virginia during the summer from 1912 to 1914.   These early paintings of the Cherry Blossoms and the Law Building show her traditional training.

This photograph was taken of her on the UVA Campus at that time.

She is perhaps most well known for her flower pictures and the controversy they sparked at the time of their showing in New York at Alfred Stieglitz’s Gallery 291.

                            1919 Oil on Board   Blue and White Flower Shapes

O’Keeffe said she painted the flowers big so that busy New Yorker’s would take the time to really see them.  She is quoted as saying “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they are really talking about their own affairs.”

                                                   Pink Tulip 1925 Oil on Canvas

Georgia O’Keeffe’s first experience of the western landscape was when she took a job in the Amarillo Schools from 1912 to 1918.  She became very attached to the landscape.  In 1917 she made her first visit to New Mexico on a trip to Santa Fe with her sister.  She later said that “From then on I was always on my way back”.

In 1929 she begins her summers in New Mexico first as the guest of Mable Dodge Luhan in Taos.  

Beginning in 1934 she stays each summer at Ghost Ranch where, due to the success of her paintings in Stieglitz’s gallery she is able to buy a home in 1940.

This photograph is of her on her Ghost Ranch house roof in 1944.  She was 57.

I visited Ghost Ranch and saw her home while staying in Taos.  I’ll do a separate blog on that visit.

During her summers at Ghost Ranch, she wandered the huge 20,000  acres collecting bones and painting them.  Horse;s Skull with White Rose 1931 is, like the giant flowers, one of her most well known paintings.

In 1945 she bought and restored an adobe home in Abiquiu New Mexico only about 12 miles from her Ghost Ranch home.  The Abiquiu home was  more comfortable and better equipped for winter, had a large garden with fruit trees and a more social environment not being as remote as Ghost Ranch.  There will be a blog post on my visit to Abiquiu as well. 

This 1943 painting is of The White Place, white sandstone formations which she could see from her bedroom window at this home.

Black Mesa Landscape 1930 was painted when she first stayed in New Mexico at Taos before buying either of her homes. 

Purple Hills at Ghost Ranch #2 in a series.  1934

This depiction of a cliff  with its tall dry waterfall was the view behind her home at Ghost Ranch. 

The mountain painted most often by Georgia O’Keeffe could be seen from the patio door at her home at Ghost Ranch.   She was deeply attached to this flat topped mesa  Cerro Peternal and called it “my private mountain”.  She is famously quoted as saying “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it”.

I love all of her art but it is her paintings in New Mexico which I love the most and her extreme attachment to her place as well as her insistence that we must all look closely, much more closely than we do, at the magnificence of the natural world around us.

I have to thank Jodee profusely for her patience with me in the museum.  I took FOREVER.

Next up is our visit to O’Keeffe’s home at Abiquiu where I think Jodee caught some of the fever.