Red Hills with Flowers

Arts of the Americas

1937

Georgia O’Keeffe
American, 1887–1986

Fascinated by contrasts in scale, Georgia O’Keeffe frequently juxtaposed enlarged still-life elements with far-off landscapes, as seen in Black Cross, New Mexico. She continued this practice in Red Hills with Flowers, an image of vibrant flowers magnified and set against the red hills that surrounded her New Mexico home. The striking colors of the land intrigued her, and she later equated the area’s myriad hues 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: Currently Off View
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe
Title: Red Hills with Flowers
Origin: United States
Date: 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: © 2018 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, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), no. 69.

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

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.