Pink and Green Mountains, No. 1

Georgia O'Keeffe, artist

1887–1986

Pink and Green Mountains, No. 1, 1917

Where object was made: Colorado, United States

Material/technique: watercolor; paper

Dimensions:
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 22.4 x 30.3 cm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 8 7/8 x 11 15/16 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 17 x 21 x 1 1/2 in
Weight (Weight): 8 lbs

Credit line: Museum purchase: Letha Churchill Walker Memorial Art Fund

Accession number: 1977.0043

Not on display

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When I first visited Georgia O’Keeffe at her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico, I was struck by the absence of artworks in her studio and living quarters. When I asked about it, she explained, “I prefer a bare wall to think on.” I prefer an O’Keeffe to think on. By now I’ve been thinking on the subject since first writing about her work in the early 1960s. A colleague once laughed at my interest. “She’s everyone’s first favorite artist,” he said. “When are you going to move on?” Probably never.
In preparation for her large Whitney Museum retrospective in 1970, O’Keeffe and her assistant were reviewing images from her long career. Revisiting the early watercolors, she remarked that the Whitney’s show could end circa 1917, for “It doesn’t get any better than that.” The Spencer’s Pink and Green Mountains was painted in that key year, the first in a series of five watercolors O’Keeffe made while vacationing in Colorado. Near the town of Ward she was attracted by the view across Long Lake toward the colorful peaks beyond. In No. 1, O’Keeffe renders the mountains that inspired her simply yet discernibly, albeit with unnatural hues. By the end of the series the landscape was transformed into abstract bands of colorful semicircles.
O’Keeffe often worked in such serial fashion, distilling her motif from more or less representational to abstract designs. Her inspiration was often found in nature—landscapes, bleached desert bones, or most famously colorful blossoms closely viewed and enlarged. But the sophisticated designs and colorful subjects of her later oil paintings, works that secured her place in art history, were forecast in the brilliant watercolors of O’Keeffe’s early years. CCE