About This Artwork
Georgia O'Keeffe
American, 1887-1986
Cow's Skull with Calico Roses1931
Oil on canvas
91.4 x 61 cm (36 x 24 in.)
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O'Keeffe, 1947.712
In 1930 Georgia O'Keeffe witnessed a drought in the Southwest that caused the stravation of many animals, whose skeletons littered the landscape. She was fascinated by these bones and shipped a number back to New York so she could paint them. She noted, "To me they are as beautiful as anything I know...The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho' it is vast and empty and untouchable." In Cow's Skull with Calico Roses, O'Keeffe added a macabre note by decorating the skull with artificial flowers, the kind used to adorn graves in New Mexico. Alfred Stieglitz exhibited this painting at his gallery An American Place between 1931 and 1932.
Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories
Exhibition History
New York, Museum of Modern Art, American Painting and Sculpture, 1862-1932, October 31, 1932-January 31, 1933, no. 76.
Art Institute of Chicago, Georgia O’Keeffe, January 21-February 22, 1943, cat. by Daniel Catton Rich, no. 45 (ill. p. 34).
Philadelphia Museum of Art, History of an American: Alfred Stieglitz, 291 and After, July 1-November 1, 1944.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe, May 14-August 25, 1946, no. 43.
Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Georgia O’Keefe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives, A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs, December 12, 1992-April 4, 1993, cat. by Alexandra Arrowsmith and Thomas West, eds., ill. p. 113; New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Arts, April 27- June 26, 1993; Minneapolis, July 17-September 12, 1993; Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, October 2-December 5, 1993.
ASAHI Shimbun, Tokyo, Japan for the "Masterworks of Modern Art from The Art Institute of Chicago" exhibition. Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Nagaoka 4/20/94-5/29/94; Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya 6/10/94-7/24/94; Yokahama Museum of Art 8/6/94-9/25/94
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, January 28-April 22, 2001, no. 174, cat. by Sarah Greenough (National Gallery of Art/Bullfinch Press).
Milwaukee Art Museum and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes: The Artist’s Collection, May 5-August 19, 2001, no. 56, cat. by Barbara Buhler Lynes with Russell Bowman; traveled to Santa Fe, September 14, 2001-January 13, 2002; Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, February 8-May 20, 2002.
Publication History
Georgia O'Keeffe, James Warren Lane, and Leo Katz, The Work of Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portfolio of Twelve Paintings (Dial Press, 1939), n. pag.
Daniel Catton Rich, Exhibition of Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe,” Bulletin of The Art Institute of Chicago, 37 (February 1943), p. 19.
-----. “The Stieglitz Collection,” Bulletin of The Art Institute of Chicago, 18 (November 15, 1949) ill. front cover.
Paintings in The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1961, p. 346
Judith A. Barter et al., "American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955," (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat. 68.
Ownership History
Given by the artist to the Art Institute through the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1947.