Red Hills with Flowers

1937

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)

Fascinated by contrasts in scale, Georgia O’Keeffe frequently juxtaposed enlarged still-life elements with distant landscapes, as seen in Red Hills with Flowers, an image of vibrant blossoms magnified against the dry, steep hills surrounding her home in New Mexico. She admired the striking colors of the land, later equating them with artist paints: “All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochers—orange and red and purple earth—even the soft earth greens.”

Status: On View, Gallery 265
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe
Title: Red Hills with Flowers
Place: United States (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1937
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 50.8 × 63.5 cm (20 × 25 in.)
Credit Line: Bequest of Hortense Henry Prosser
Reference Number: 1992.649
Copyright: © Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation/Yale University Press, 1999) no. 926.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), no. 69.
Yang Zhigang, ed., Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, exh. cat. (Shanghai: Shanghai Book and Painting Press, 2018), cat. 57.

Art Institute of Chicago, America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, June 5–Sept. 18, 2016, not in cat.; Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Oct. 15, 2016–Jan. 30, 2017; London, Royal Academy, Feb. 25–June 4, 2017 (Paris only).
Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 57.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), New York and New Mexico, 1937 [O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949]; by exchange to Hortense Henry Prosser (1912–1992), Lake Forest, IL, 1963; Hortense Prosser Trust, Lake Forest, IL, 1992; bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1992.

Lynes 1999 926

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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