What was Georgia O'Keeffe's 1930s painting of a cow skull with the U.S. flag colors called?

Georgia O'Keeffe's painting of a cow skull in U.S. flag colors is called Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue. She completed the painting in 1931, during the period when bones and skulls became important subjects in her New Mexico work.

The composition places a weathered cow skull against a blue ground, with red and white bands running through the central form. O'Keeffe found animal bones in the New Mexico landscape and treated them as objects with sculptural structure and visual power. Their stark shapes offered a different kind of subject from her close-up flowers, but both bodies of work rely on enlargement and careful simplification.

The patriotic colors do not make the work a literal flag painting. O'Keeffe often transformed found objects into bold, ambiguous images rather than presenting them as ordinary still-life specimens. The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it remains one of her best-known bone paintings.