Red Hills with Flowers

1940

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)

Georgia O’Keeffe frequently explored the Southwestern landscape in search of noteworthy views, and in the summer of 1940, she found an inspiring sight: “The places you can go on a horse here always astonish me … the most exciting was being on top of a ridge of red hills and seeing the blue flat topped mountains above them—it was very good.” She painted Red Hills with Flowers a month later, depicting bushes of small white flowers growing from the eroded gullies of the red badland, with the blue mesa barely visible to the right. O’Keeffe housed it in a thin strip frame made of a silver metal that she had partially plated with copper to complement the composition’s color scheme.

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

Artist: Georgia O'Keeffe
Title: Red Hills with Flowers
Places: United States (Artist's nationality:), New Mexico (Object made in)
Date: 1940
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Signed, inscribed, and dated verso, artist's backing board middle, in black ink: Georgia O’Keeffe / Red Hills with Flowers / Summer 1940 / ✡[hexagram]
Dimensions: 30.5 × 76.5 cm (12 × 30 1/8 in.)
Credit Line: Bequest of Mary P. Hines
Reference Number: 2022.618

“Georgia O’Keeffe: The American Southwest,” American Artist 40 (Jan. 1976): 79 (ill.).
Ruth Ann Appelhof et al., The Expressionist Landscape: North American Modernist Painting, 1920–1947, exh. cat. (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 1987), fig. 128, cat. 87 (ill.).
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Abiquiu, NM: Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), cat. 995.

New York, An American Place, Exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe, Jan. 27–Mar. 11, 1941, checklist only, no. 7.
Charleston, SC, Carolina Art Association, Gibbes Art Gallery, Georgia O’Keeffe, Feb. 8–March 6, 1955, checklist only, no. 14, as Red Hills with Flowers—Summer.
Manchester, NH, Currier Gallery of Art, Four MacDowell Medalists: Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, June 30–July 29, 1973, checklist only; Keene, NH, Louise E. Thorne Memorial Art Gallery, Keene State College, Aug. 19–Sept. 15, 1973.
Birmingham, AL, Birmingham Museum of Art, The Expressionist Landscape, North American Modernist Painting, 1920–1947, Sept. 11-Nov. 4, 1987, cat. 87; New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, Nov. 24, 1987-Jan. 30, 1988; Syracuse, NY, Everson Museum of Art, Feb. 14-Mar. 27, 1988; Akron, OH, Akron Art Museum, Apr. 9–June 5, 1988; Vancouver, Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, June 30–Aug. 21, 1988.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), NY and NM, 1940 [O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949]; consigned to Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 1985; sold to the Warner Collection of the Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, AL, 1985; consigned to Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 1996; sold to Mary P. Hines (1931–2020), Winnetka, IL, 1997; Estate of Mary P. Hines, 2020; bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2022.

Lynes 1999 995

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