Description
Although relatively small in scale, this long horizontal canvas conveys a striking sense of the panoramic views around Abiquiu, New Mexico. After visiting the area repeatedly, Georgia O’Keeffe bought a home there in 1945, and she painted this image of the sandy hills leading up to a massive flat-topped mesa the same year. The brilliant Southwestern light offered O’Keeffe immense visual clarity over many miles, and she translated her perception of distant geological formations—particularly the dark green mesa that dominates the top third of the composition— into an abstracted arrangement of stacked bands of color.
Provenance
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), New York and New Mexico, then Abiquiú, NM, from 1949; sold to Paul Rosenbaum (1897–1982) and Gabriella Rosenbaum (1905–2000; born Gabriella Kramer), Chicago and Palm Springs, FL, 1967 [documentation in curatorial object file]; by descent to Gabriella Rosenbaum; bequeathed to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2002.
Accession Number
158748
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
40.5 × 91.5 cm (15 15/16 × 36 in.)
Classification
oil on canvas
Credit Line
Bequest of Paul and Gabriella Rosenbaum
Background & Context
Background Story
Georgia O'Keeffe's "Abiquiu Sand Hills and Mesa" (1945) is an oil on canvas depicting the landscape around Abiquiu, New Mexico, where O'Keeffe had a home and studio. Abiquiu, a small community about 50 miles north of Santa Fe, was O'Keeffe's home for the last four decades of her life, and the surrounding landscape—the sand hills, the mesas, the river valley—provided endless subjects for her art. This painting shows the distinctive sand hills and a mesa (a flat-topped hill) under the New Mexico sky. The forms are simplified and monumental, the colors are warm and earthy, with the reds, ochres, and browns of the desert soil. O'Keeffe's treatment emphasizes the ancient, timeless quality of the landscape, the sense of being in the presence of geological forces that have shaped the earth over millennia. The sky—always important in O'Keeffe's New Mexico paintings—stretches above the hills, its blue providing a cool contrast to the warm earth tones. This painting belongs to the period when O'Keeffe was most closely identified with the Southwest and producing the works that would establish her as the preeminent painter of the American desert.
Cultural Impact
O'Keeffe's Abiquiu landscapes are among the most iconic works of American modernism, capturing the timeless beauty of the New Mexico desert with a clarity and power that have never been surpassed.
Why It Matters
This painting of the sand hills and mesa at Abiquiu captures the ancient, monumental quality of the New Mexico landscape, O'Keeffe's simplified forms and warm palette conveying the enduring presence of the desert.
