The Black Place features an unusually muted palette for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Southwestern paintings: the composition is dominated by shades of white and gray, relieved only by a thin strip of blue sky at the top. “The Black Place” was the name she gave her favorite location to paint, an area of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness (also known as the Bisti Badlands) located approximately 150 miles west of Abiquiu, New Mexico. While she painted numerous images of the region’s rounded, gray hills, here she depicted a low, sandy crest that reminded her of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, as she wrote to him: “When I see the country in its silvery beauty and forbidding blackness in my memory—it is so often almost as if I see you too—your silvery hair and grey clothes and black cape.”
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.
Daniel Catton Rich, “The Stieglitz Collection,” Bulletin of The Art Institute of Chicago, 18, (November 15, 1949), 70.
Mitchell A. Wilder, ed., Georgia O’Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist From 1915 to 1966, exh. cat. (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1966).
Lloyd Goodrich and Doris Bry, Georgia O’Keeffe, exh. cat. (New York: Praeger, 1970), cat. 90.
Alexandra Arrowsmith and Thomas West, eds., Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives, A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs exh. cat. (New York: HarperCollins/Callaway Editions. in association with the Phillips Collection, 1992), 105 (ill.).
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Abiquiu, NM: Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), no. 1058.
New York, An American Place, Georgia O’Keeffe Paintings–1943, Jan. 11–Mar. 11, 1944, checklist only, no. 19.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe, May 14–Aug. 25, 1946, checklist only, no. 50.
Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Georgia O’Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist from 1915 to 1966, Mar. 17–May 8, 1966; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, May 26–July 3, 1966.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Georgia O’Keeffe, Oct. 8–Nov. 29, 1970, cat. 90; the Art Institute of Chicago, Jan. 1–Feb. 7, 1971; San Francisco Museum of Art, Mar. 15–Apr. 30, 1971.
Pittsburgh, Museum of Art of the Carnegie Institute, Forerunners of American Abstraction, Nov. 18–Jan. 9, 1972, no. 80.
Washington, DC, The Phillips Collection, Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives, A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs, Dec. 12, 1992–Apr. 4, 1993, no cat. no.; New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Arts, Apr. 27– June 26, 1993; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, July 17–Sept. 12, 1993; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Oct. 2–Dec. 5, 1993.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), New York and New Mexico, 1943 [O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949]; given through the Alfred Stieglitz Collection to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1969.
Lynes 1999 1058
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