Which 1935 Georgia O'Keeffe painting features a ram's skull, hollyhock, and New Mexico landscape?

The story behind the answer

Georgia O'Keeffe's 1935 painting Ram's Head, White Hollyhock-Hills features a ram's skull, a white hollyhock, and a New Mexico landscape.

The work combines several recurring O'Keeffe subjects: animal bones, desert flowers, and the distant hills of northern New Mexico. She often collected bones and carried them back to her studio, where she used them as carefully arranged forms rather than simply as natural-history specimens.

The painting’s title identifies its principal elements and links the skull to the pale, mountainous landscape. O'Keeffe’s bone paintings are sometimes treated as symbols with one fixed meaning, but she resisted overly literal interpretations. Their shapes, spaces, and visual rhythms were central to her artistic decisions.

The 1935 date places the painting within the period when O'Keeffe was spending increasing amounts of time in New Mexico while still connected to her New York life.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Oct. 2026

Add question to a list

Choose a list to keep this question in: