Home > Art > Black Place II
Large mounds of green-black and pink mountains form a valley at the center of the painting.
Large mounds of green-black and pink mountains form a valley at the center of the painting.

About the Object

In this painting, the pink and grey hills stretch across the entirely of the canvas, creating an all-consuming environment. O’Keeffe eliminated any indication of sky, drawing the viewer right into the valleys at the center of the composition, where a speck of green paint catches the viewer’s eye.

 

Additional Information

In 1929, O’Keeffe began splitting her time between New York and New Mexico. She explored New Mexico in her car, discovering landscapes like the Black Place, an area of rolling black hills in the Bisti Badlands that she first visited in 1936. It became a frequent subject of her work for the next fourteen years in drawings, paintings, and pastels including Black Place I, 1944, in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Black Place III, 1944 and Black Place, Grey and Pink, 1949, both in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

The Artist;
[An American Place, New York, NY];
[Downtown Gallery, New York, NY];
Catrina McCormick Barnes, Denver, CO;
To her son, Medill McCormick Barnes, 1971;
[Washburn Gallery, New York, NY];
[Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, NY];
Daniel Dietrich, Philadelphia, until 1985;
[Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, NY];
[The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, NM];
Private Collection, Santa Fe, NM, 2000;
[The Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, NM];
Jan T. and Marica Vilcek Collection, New York, NY, 2011;

New York. An American Place. Georgia O’Keeffe. February 4-March 27, 1946, cat. no. 10.

New York Whitney Museum of American Art. Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, November 13, 1948-January 2, 1949, cat. no. 105.

Dallas. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. An Exhibition of Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. February 1-22, 1953, cat. no. 22.

Delray Beach, Florida. Mayo Hill Galleries. Georgia O’Keeffe. March 16-April 11, 1953, cat. no. 22.

New York. Hirschl & Adler Galleries. Important Recent Acquisitions: Late 19th and Early 20th Century American Paintings. February 2-23, 1972, ill. np., cat. no. 52.

New York. Washburn Gallery. Mind over Matter: Painters of the Immanent Things. September 20-October 21, 1972, cat. no. 7, ill. p. 3.

New York. Hirschl & Adler Galleries. Georgia O’Keeffe: Selected Paintings and Works on Paper (April 26-June 6, 1986); Dallas. Gerald Peters Gallery (June 14-July 14, 1986) cat. no. 28, ill. on cover and in the plates section.

Montclair, NJ. Montclair Art Museum.  Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land (September 28, 2012-January 20, 2013); Denver. Denver Art Museum (February 10-April 28, 2013); Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (May 17-September 8, 2013), p. 140,  ill. pl. 49.

Tulsa. Philbrook Museum of Art.  From New York to New Mexico: Masterworks of American Modernism from the Vilcek Foundation Collection (February 8-May 3, 2015); Phoenix. Phoenix Art Museum (June 5-September 6, 2015); Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (September 25, 2015-January 10, 2016).

Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Extended loan. January-April 2016.

London. Tate Modern. Georgia O’Keeffe (July 6-October 30, 2016); Vienna. Bank Austria Kunstform (December 7, 2016-March 26, 2017); Toronto. Art Gallery of Ontario (April 22-July 30, 2017), p. 255, ill. p. 178.

Santa Fe. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.The Black Place: Georgia O’Keeffe and Michael Namingha. April 28-August 20, 2018.

Corpus Christi. The Art Museum of South Texas. Masterpieces of American Modernism from the Vilcek Collection of American Art. September 13, 2018-January 6, 2019.

Wichita. Wichita Art Museum. Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style (March 30-June 23, 2019); Reno. Nevada Museum of Art (July 19-October 13, 2019); West Palm Beach. Norton Museum of Art (November 21, 2019-February 9, 2020).

Coates, Robert M. “The Art Galleries – Contemporaries, Including the Whitney,” New Yorker XXII (February 16, 1946), p. 84.

“New York Exhibitions – Georgia O’Keeffe,” MKR’s Art Outlook (April 1946), p. 1, 3, ill. p. 1.

“Stock of Miss O’Keeffe, November 5, 1953.” The Downtown Gallery. Gallery Stock: Miscellaneous Stock Records, O’Keeffe, Georgia. Box 64, Reel 5609, Frame 764. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

“O’Keeffe Stock – February 12, 1954.” The Downtown Gallery. Gallery Stock: Miscellaneous Stock Records, O’Keeffe, Georgia. Box 64, Reel 5609, Frame 767. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Edith Gregor Halpert to Georgia O’Keeffe, January 28, 1957. The Downtown Gallery. Artist Files, A-Z: O’Keeffe, Georgia, 1955-57. Box 25, Reel 5551, Frame 94. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Edith Gregor Halpert to Georgia O’Keeffe, December 28, 1959. The Downtown Gallery. Artist Files, A-Z: O’Keeffe, Georgia, 1958-61. Box 25, Reel 5551, Frame 209. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Kramer, Hilton. “Review,” New York Times, September 23, 1972, p. 27.

Mellow, James R. “Landscapes-The Real and the Imaginary – in American Art,” New York Times, October 8, 1972, D27.

Perreault, John. “Review” Village Voice, October 5, 1972.

Schwartz, Sanford. “New York Letter,” Art International XVI (December 1972), p. 61.

Hirschl & Adler Galleries advertisement, The Magazine Antiques, v. 129 (May 1986), p. 925, ill.

Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, advertisement. Art in America, v. 74 (June 1986), p. 58, ill.

Gerald Peters Gallery, Dallas, advertisement. Art & Antiques (Summer 1986), p. 45, ill.

Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. Volume Two.  New Haven: Yale University Press; Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art; Abiquiu: The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1999. Appendix II: Additional Works, p. 1107, ill. p. 1107, cat. no. 119.

Udall, Sharyn. Contested Terrain: Myth and Meanings in Southwest Art. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. pp. 120-134, ill on cover and pl. 8.

Bischoff, Dan.  “Artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sense of Place,” Star-Ledger (NJ), September 30, 2012.

Zeaman, John. “Art review: ‘Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico’ at the Montclair Art Museum, The Record (NJ), October 2, 2012.

Schwendener, Martha. “The Spirit of Cultural Objects,” New York Times, January 4, 2013, NJ11.

Rinaldi, Ray Mark. “Georgia O’Keeffe’s inspired Western art comes to Denver Art Museum,” Denver Post, February 15, 2013.

Agee, William C. and Lewis Kachur. Masterpieces of American Modernism: From the Vilcek Collection. London: Merrell, 2013, pp. 11, 160-161, 235, 240, 267, ill. p. 161.

Related Objects

Tesuque Jar

1860-1920 Unknown Artist
A Tesuque jar with black designs.

Acoma Polychrome Pot

c. early 20th century Unknown Artist
Rust-orange Acoma pot with a black and white geometric design.

Summer Landscape #2

1940 Stuart Davis
An abstracted landscape of heavily applied paint in baby blue, coral, yellow, black with white dots and stripes, on a mint green background.

Acoma Polychrome Olla

c. 1880 Unknown Artist
An Acoma olla with a brown and beige checkboard pattern atop a black and beige geometric design.

Study for Synchromy in Blue-Violet

1912/13 Morgan Russell
An arc of three striped planes of color centered inside a pencil-sketched border.

Plastic Polygon

1937 Charles Green Shaw
Tall vertical rectangles of red, grey, white, and black arranged to mirror a cityscape in front of a blue sky.

Schiff

1915 Marsden Hartley
A ship, blue and white waves with four emerging stylized plants, and a yellow sun with symmetrical white wings hovering above.

Indian Pottery

c. 1912 Marsden Hartley
A still life painting featuring an Acoma pot decorated with a bird and leaf designs, a Santa Clara double-spouted jug, a small figure sculpture and a book on a table in front of a red tapestry.

Zuni Polychrome Olla with Rain Bird Design

c. 1880 Unknown Artist
A Zuni olla with two bands of continuous black geometric patterns.

Atlantic Window in the New England Character

c. 1917 Marsden Hartley
A single white calla lily in a vase in front of a window that looks out onto a shoreline filled with sailboats.

You may also be interested in

May 11, 2020

Coloring Book Inspired by Marsden Hartley

Join the coloring book craze! Download a coloring book of masterworks by Marsden Hartley from the Vilcek Collection.
A line drawing of Marsden Hartley's
2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise

Iman Issa

Iman Issa receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for exploring, through works of various media, difficult philosophical questions, such as the individual’s relationship to places, figures, and events that are collectively familiar, or the difference between experience and recognition.
Portrait of Iman Issa
2017 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise

Meleko Mokgosi

Meleko Mokgosi receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Fine Arts for paintings that rely on intensive research, reflection, and conversation in order to address widespread misrepresentation of Africa and Africans, and to accurately portray the continent’s complex social and political realities.
Portrait of Meleko Mokgosi