What is the title of Georgia O'Keeffe's 1935 painting featuring a red-and-yellow New Mexico landscape beneath a skull?

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Georgia O'Keeffe's 1935 painting featuring a skull above a New Mexico landscape is titled Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills. The work combines a ram's skull, a white hollyhock, and distant red-and-yellow hills in a deliberately unusual arrangement.

O'Keeffe collected animal bones in the Southwest and repeatedly used them as subjects. She valued their durable, sculptural shapes and placed them against spacious skies or desert landscapes. In this painting, the skull does not function simply as a conventional symbol of death; it becomes part of an investigation of form, place, and visual scale.

The title is sometimes confused with Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, another famous O'Keeffe painting from 1931. Both works use bones, but they feature different animals, dates, and compositions.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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