Georgia O'Keeffe famously painted a cow skull in Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue.
The 1931 painting presents a weathered cow skull against a red, white, and blue background. O'Keeffe found animal bones in the New Mexico landscape and treated them as powerful formal subjects. Their bleached surfaces, holes, curves, and stark silhouettes allowed her to explore shape and color as directly as she had done with flowers.
The title makes the subject unusually clear, but viewers sometimes confuse the work with O'Keeffe paintings of pelvic bones, which became another important group in her New Mexico art. The object is specifically a cow skull, not a bison skull or a human skull. The national colors also invite symbolic readings, although the painting’s visual structure is central to its impact.
O'Keeffe’s bone paintings helped establish her reputation as an artist who could turn ordinary or overlooked natural objects into monumental images. They remain among her most recognizable works.