June 26, 2021
One of the museums I was most excited to visit on this trip was the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. It's common to visit an art museum that focuses on a genre or time period, but less common to visit an art museum that focuses on the life work of a single artist.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 at age 42. She bought a home there in 1937 and a second one in 1945. New Mexico became her permanent home in 1949 (three years after the death of her husband) and she lived there until she died 37 years later in 1986.
Santa Fe's Georgia O'Keeffe Museum opened in 1997, eleven years after O'Keeffe's death. The building itself has the Santa Fe/Southwest adobe construction that is so prevalent in the area. The collection includes many of her best-known works, along with many others I would have never guessed were hers.
There are hundreds of paintings on display, just part of the collection that rotates among the galleries. I present my favorites, not in chronological order, but in the order I viewed them at the museum (and in the approximate order they are displayed, which is more or less thematically and definitely not chronologically). Occasionally as we walked through the galleries we read some interesting narrative that I will include bits and pieces of.
"In 1915, while teaching art at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina, Georgia O'Keeffe made a radical decision. As she later explained: 'I have my things in my head that are not like waht anyone has taught me. . . . so I decided to start anew.' The bold drawings that resulted, infused with energy and emotion, were some of the world's first 'pure abstractions.' . . . Her abstractions were first exhibited in New York in 1916 at Alfred Stieglitz's avant-garde gallery '291.' By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe was recognized as one of America's most important artists."
"In 1923, Stieglitz began organizing annual solo exhibitions of O'Keeffe's work. The following year, they were married."
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| Corn, No. 2 (1924) |
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| Bella Donna (1939) |
