
Red Hills with Flowers
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Red New Mexico hills roll across the canvas with a few flowers brought right up close, the vast and the fragile in one frame.
★ 5.2

Red New Mexico hills roll across the canvas with a few flowers brought right up close, the vast and the fragile in one frame.

Her male colleagues doubted a woman could paint the city, so O'Keeffe painted the city, with a moon caught between two dark buildings.

O'Keeffe collected sun-bleached bones off the desert and hung this one in the sky over the hills, with a single white hollyhock beside it.

Everything is scraped off the bronze except forward motion. One cast briefly held the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold.

American customs taxed it as industrial metal until Brancusi v. United States in 1928 forced the law to recognize abstract sculpture as art.