Lot Essay
This striking picture which was in the artist's possession until 1980, had been on loan to the National Gallery in Washington since 1948, where it was exhibited frequently. In our opinion, it is one of the most important pictures from her hand ever to come to the auction market.
Broadly speaking, O'Keeffe's work breaks down into approximately six categories spanning a career of nearly seven decades: abstractions, cityscapes, bones, landscapes, florals and still lives. While her floral subjects are most commonly thought of as her signature pictures, and her urban scenes are clearly monumental, it is her pictures of skulls, pelvises and the like, often floating above the western landscape or contrasted against vividly colored backdrops, that are her rarest and most powerful statements.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917, but it wasn't until 1929 that she returned to Taos where she spent a summer. This experience significantly changed the course of her life and she moved there permanently after the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, in 1946. Lloyd Goodrich wrote in his essay accompanying the catalogue for the Whitney Retrospective exhibition in 1970: "...her love of the physical objects of nature has been created on things that are part of the desert country. Her Abiquiu house contains a collection of hundreds of stones of all sizes, shapes, colors and surfaces, picked up in the desert...animal's bones, skulls, horns, vertebrae and pelvises--worn by wind and water to fine, fragile, shell-like textures, and bleached by the sun to pallid, delicate white...."
O'Keeffe is thought to have brought bones as subjects back to New York starting in about 1929-31. O'Keeffe (in Goodrich): "I brought home the bleached bones as my symbols of the desert. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around...The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive..."
In these pictures, the artist seems to remove her subject from any realistic or comprehensible relationship on earth. They are isolated, suspended in space. Goodrich continues: "In Cow's Skull - Red, White and Blue the white skull, like an emblem on a banner." Roxana Robinson, in her biography of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life writes: "...the inexorability of the cold, white bone, creates an atmosphere of austerity, emphasized by the severe contrast between the pale skull and the black pole behind it. There are, however, equally strong forces opposing that austerity...and opposing forces are a part of a familiar O'Keeffe dynamic: severity and passion, a powerful order competing with violent flux."
Cow's Skull - Red, White and Blue, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was painted at Lake George in 1931, and is certainly one of her best known and most powerful pictures. Other examples of this type include Ram's Head - White Hollyhock 1935 also at the Metropolitan Museum; Deer's Skull with Pedernal 1936 from the collection of William R. Lane and now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and From the Faraway Nearby 1937 from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal now also at the Metropolitan Museum. Cow's Skull on Red is perhaps the last great image of this sort not in a public collection. As Ms. Robinson poignantly suggests. "In the bones, O'Keeffe had found her last great image: the smooth, osseous shapes that she transformed into icons."
Broadly speaking, O'Keeffe's work breaks down into approximately six categories spanning a career of nearly seven decades: abstractions, cityscapes, bones, landscapes, florals and still lives. While her floral subjects are most commonly thought of as her signature pictures, and her urban scenes are clearly monumental, it is her pictures of skulls, pelvises and the like, often floating above the western landscape or contrasted against vividly colored backdrops, that are her rarest and most powerful statements.
O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1917, but it wasn't until 1929 that she returned to Taos where she spent a summer. This experience significantly changed the course of her life and she moved there permanently after the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, in 1946. Lloyd Goodrich wrote in his essay accompanying the catalogue for the Whitney Retrospective exhibition in 1970: "...her love of the physical objects of nature has been created on things that are part of the desert country. Her Abiquiu house contains a collection of hundreds of stones of all sizes, shapes, colors and surfaces, picked up in the desert...animal's bones, skulls, horns, vertebrae and pelvises--worn by wind and water to fine, fragile, shell-like textures, and bleached by the sun to pallid, delicate white...."
O'Keeffe is thought to have brought bones as subjects back to New York starting in about 1929-31. O'Keeffe (in Goodrich): "I brought home the bleached bones as my symbols of the desert. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around...The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive..."
In these pictures, the artist seems to remove her subject from any realistic or comprehensible relationship on earth. They are isolated, suspended in space. Goodrich continues: "In Cow's Skull - Red, White and Blue the white skull, like an emblem on a banner." Roxana Robinson, in her biography of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life writes: "...the inexorability of the cold, white bone, creates an atmosphere of austerity, emphasized by the severe contrast between the pale skull and the black pole behind it. There are, however, equally strong forces opposing that austerity...and opposing forces are a part of a familiar O'Keeffe dynamic: severity and passion, a powerful order competing with violent flux."
Cow's Skull - Red, White and Blue, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was painted at Lake George in 1931, and is certainly one of her best known and most powerful pictures. Other examples of this type include Ram's Head - White Hollyhock 1935 also at the Metropolitan Museum; Deer's Skull with Pedernal 1936 from the collection of William R. Lane and now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and From the Faraway Nearby 1937 from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Lowenthal now also at the Metropolitan Museum. Cow's Skull on Red is perhaps the last great image of this sort not in a public collection. As Ms. Robinson poignantly suggests. "In the bones, O'Keeffe had found her last great image: the smooth, osseous shapes that she transformed into icons."