GEORGIA O'KEEFFE | UNTITLED (GHOST RANCH CLIFF)

The artist

Gift to the present owner from the above, 1984

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, New Haven, Connecticut, 1999, no. 1069, p. 673, illustrated

In 1929 Georgia O’Keeffe escaped her urban life in New York City and moved to New Mexico. In the desert, O’Keeffe had access to new surroundings and visual material that transformed her artistic practice. During her time in New Mexico she developed innovative techniques to depict landscapes and capture what she saw as their sublime essences. Art historians have noted, “No artist has seen and painted like O’Keeffe, whose spiritual communion with her subject was of a special quality, unparalleled, and irreducible. In the 1930s and 1940s, her ceaseless searching out and intelligent use of the material of the southwest enlivened her potentials of her art” (Jack Cowart, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Artist,” Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters, Boston, Massachusetts, 1987, p. 5).

Dating to the 1940s, Untitled (Ghost Ranch Cliff) O’Keeffe depicts one of the surrounding hills by O'Keeffe's home at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. The artist often climbed a ladder onto her roof to capture the cliffs and expansive terrains that surrounded her home. The drawing affords the viewer the opportunity to see through O’Keeffe’s unique vantage point, situating the viewer in the intimacy of the artist’s private home and personal surroundings. Significantly, this investigative drawing exemplifies O’Keeffe’s masterful ability to portray both abstraction and realism in a single picture. There is concentrated detail and shadows in the center of the scene. However, on the edges of the picture the lines taper, suggesting the immeasurable and infinite sensation of the landscapes around her.