What was the name of Georgia O'Keeffe's 1935 painting featuring a white hollyhock and desert hills?

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Georgia O'Keeffe's 1935 painting featuring a white hollyhock and desert hills is titled Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills. The work combines a bleached animal skull, a pale flower, and a distant New Mexico landscape in a carefully balanced vertical composition.

O'Keeffe repeatedly used bones collected in the Southwest as subjects. She was interested in their sculptural shapes and in the way they could suggest permanence, rather than treating them simply as symbols of death. The hollyhock adds a contrasting living form, while the hills establish the regional setting.

The painting belongs to a period when O'Keeffe was making New Mexico central to her imagery. She often enlarged or isolated objects so that viewers would look at them with unusual intensity.

Titles can be confused because O'Keeffe created several works with skulls, flowers, and hills. The precise title includes both the ram's head and the white hollyhock, followed by the hyphenated reference to the hills.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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