Georgia O’Keeffe collected this cow’s skull in New Mexico during the summer of 1930, when a drought had devastated the Southwest, and many animal skeletons could be found in the desert. She was captivated by the stark elegance of the bones and shipped some back to New York so she could paint them the following year. 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.” O’Keeffe’s inclusion of the calico fabric roses—which were used to decorate graves in New Mexico—further evokes questions of life, death, and mortality.
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.
Georgia O’Keeffe, James Warren Lane, and Leo Katz, The Work of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portfolio of Twelve Paintings (Dial Press, 1939), n.p.
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: Art Institute of Chicago, 1961), 346.
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1 (National Gallery of Art/Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation/Yale University Press, 1999), no. 772.
Judith A. Barter et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), no. 68.
Roy Matthews, DeWitt Platt, and Thomas Noble, “Experience Humanities” (McGraw–Hill Higher Education, 2013), 8th edition, (ill.).
Washington DC, National Gallery of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, Nov. 1, 1987–Feb. 21, 1988; Art Institute of Chicago, Mar. 5–June 19, 1988; Dallas Museum of Art, July 31–Oct. 16, 1988; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nov. 19, 1988–Feb. 5, 1989, cat. 75.
Washington DC, Phillips Collection, Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives, A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs, Dec. 12, 1992–Apr. 4, 1993, ill. p. 113; New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Arts, Apr. 27– June 26, 1993; Minneapolis, July 17–Sept. 12, 1993; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Oct. 2–Dec. 5, 1993.
Tokyo, ASAHI Shimbun, Masterworks of Modern Art from The Art Institute of Chicago; Nagaoka, Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Apr. 20–May 29, 1994; Nagoya, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, June 10–July 24, 1994; Yokohama Museum of Art, Aug. 6–Sept. 25, 1994.
Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, Jan. 28–Apr. 22, 2001, cat. 174.
Milwaukee Art Museum, O’Keeffe’s O’Keeffes: The Artist’s Collection, May 5–Aug. 19, 2001; Santa Fe, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Sept. 14, 2001–Jan. 13, 2002, cat. 56; Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Feb. 8–May 20, 2002.
Art Institute of Chicago, America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, June 5–Sept. 18, 2016, cat. 38; Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie, Oct. 15, 2016–Jan. 30, 2017; London, Royal Academy, Feb. 25–June 4, 2017 (Paris and London only).
Shanghai Museum, Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Sept. 28, 2018–Jan. 6, 2019, cat. 56.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), New York and New Mexico, 1931; given through the Alfred Stieglitz Collection to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1947.
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