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Lot Essay
As is true with all of Georgia O'Keeffe's finest works, the strength of Piñons with Cedar lies in its careful balance of realism and abstraction, its intricate layering of objective and subjective meaning, its wonderful synthesis of form and color. Painted in 1956, after the artist had settled in New Mexico, the work reflects the intense spirituality and wonder that she associated with the landscape.
It was during the spring of 1956 that O'Keeffe spent two months in Peru. She was fascinated by the mountainous landscape, and her sketchbooks from the trip were filled with pencil drawings that captured the striking silhouettes of her favorite peaks. In this fully realized oil painting, O'Keeffe juxtaposes the majesty of a tall cedar tree and the lush compactness of the piñon pine against a similar mountain landscape.
O'Keeffe's lifelong fascination with the forms and colors found in nature manifested itself in her various depictions of diverse physical forms. Natural objects ranging from wonderfully sensuous shells and exotic flowers, to more modest objects such as autumn leaves, skunk cabbage and animal bones found their way equally into O'Keeffe's paintings. In 1944, the artist said: "I have picked flowers where I found them -- Have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked. When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." (as quoted in E.H. Turner, Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. vi)
The tree became an important element of O'Keeffe's imagery in 1943 when she began to paint the cottonwood trees that spread outside her bedroom and studio windows at her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She continued to develop this theme throughout her career -- the earliest sharp and angular versions gave way, over time, to more attenuated and ethereal representations. In Piñons and Cedar, O'Keeffe imbues the trees, particularly the dead cedar, with this same ethereal quality, creating an almost otherworldly effect. A neutral palette with characteristically warm earth tones, broken only by the lush green of the pinion pine, contribute to the overall sense of softness and silence. It is this layering of visual and spiritual interpretations of the landscape that makes Piñons and Cedar a characteristically remarkable work.
O'Keeffe wrote in her "biographical catalog" in 1976: "I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at -- not copy it." (as quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, p. 69) A true modernist, rather than simply creating an objective visual record of that which she discovered in nature, O'Keeffe chose to represent these forms in an abstract way by focusing on the act of painting itself, and by including her subjective emotions about the real objects into her representations. Ever faithful to her subject, she endows the scene with a weightlessness and spirituality that befit the mountain and trees that she depicts.
It was during the spring of 1956 that O'Keeffe spent two months in Peru. She was fascinated by the mountainous landscape, and her sketchbooks from the trip were filled with pencil drawings that captured the striking silhouettes of her favorite peaks. In this fully realized oil painting, O'Keeffe juxtaposes the majesty of a tall cedar tree and the lush compactness of the piñon pine against a similar mountain landscape.
O'Keeffe's lifelong fascination with the forms and colors found in nature manifested itself in her various depictions of diverse physical forms. Natural objects ranging from wonderfully sensuous shells and exotic flowers, to more modest objects such as autumn leaves, skunk cabbage and animal bones found their way equally into O'Keeffe's paintings. In 1944, the artist said: "I have picked flowers where I found them -- Have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were sea shells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked. When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too. I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it." (as quoted in E.H. Turner, Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. vi)
The tree became an important element of O'Keeffe's imagery in 1943 when she began to paint the cottonwood trees that spread outside her bedroom and studio windows at her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. She continued to develop this theme throughout her career -- the earliest sharp and angular versions gave way, over time, to more attenuated and ethereal representations. In Piñons and Cedar, O'Keeffe imbues the trees, particularly the dead cedar, with this same ethereal quality, creating an almost otherworldly effect. A neutral palette with characteristically warm earth tones, broken only by the lush green of the pinion pine, contribute to the overall sense of softness and silence. It is this layering of visual and spiritual interpretations of the landscape that makes Piñons and Cedar a characteristically remarkable work.
O'Keeffe wrote in her "biographical catalog" in 1976: "I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at -- not copy it." (as quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, p. 69) A true modernist, rather than simply creating an objective visual record of that which she discovered in nature, O'Keeffe chose to represent these forms in an abstract way by focusing on the act of painting itself, and by including her subjective emotions about the real objects into her representations. Ever faithful to her subject, she endows the scene with a weightlessness and spirituality that befit the mountain and trees that she depicts.