New Mexico inspired Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1930s paintings of bones and desert landscapes.
O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 and returned repeatedly during the 1930s. The state’s desert, cliffs, adobe buildings, crosses, animal bones, and broad skies became central subjects in her work.
She had already achieved recognition for New York architecture and enlarged flowers, but New Mexico gave her a new visual vocabulary. She often collected bones and other objects from the landscape, then isolated them in paintings with simplified backgrounds.
Arizona, Texas, and Nevada also contain desert regions, but they are not the state most closely associated with O’Keeffe’s mature Southwestern imagery. New Mexico remained her principal Southwestern setting, and she moved there permanently in the late 1940s.