In her later years, Georgia O’Keeffe loved painting the deserts and cliffs of New Mexico.
O’Keeffe first visited northern New Mexico in 1929 and quickly became captivated by its high-desert light, dramatic rock formations, wide skies, animal bones, and adobe architecture. The landscape offered a striking contrast to the urban subjects and flowers that had helped establish her reputation in New York.
She eventually maintained two homes in the state: one at Ghost Ranch, beneath towering cliffs and facing the distinctive Pedernal mountain, and another in the village of Abiquiú. After 1949, she lived in New Mexico year-round, making the region central to her identity and work. Her paintings often transformed recognizable places into simplified, nearly abstract arrangements of color and shape.
A common mix-up is to associate O’Keeffe’s landscapes mainly with Texas, where she taught and lived earlier in her career, or with New York, where she exhibited extensively. New Mexico was the enduring setting of her mature landscape paintings. Failing eyesight limited her work late in life; she completed her last unassisted oil painting in 1972 and died in Santa Fe in 1986.