Which 1935 Georgia O'Keeffe painting combines a ram's skull with hollyhocks?

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Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills is the 1935 Georgia O'Keeffe painting that combines a ram's skull with hollyhocks.

The composition places a ram's skull in the foreground, with white hollyhocks and New Mexico hills behind it. O'Keeffe made the work in 1935, during the period when bones gathered in the desert became important subjects in her art. She treated bones as enduring, sculptural forms rather than simply as symbols of death, and she often contrasted their hard shapes with flowers and open skies.

The title can be confused with Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, another well-known New Mexico painting, or with later pelvic-bone works. The distinction is the animal and the flowers: this work has a ram's head and white hollyhocks. Its combination of a foreground bone, flowers, and distant hills demonstrates O'Keeffe's practice of joining natural forms that she encountered separately in the New Mexico landscape.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

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