Georgia O’Keeffe Finds a New Landscape in New Mexico

In the spring of 1929, Georgia O'Keeffe departed New York City by train for northern New Mexico, accompanied by her friend Rebecca Strand. By that time, O'Keeffe had established a formidable reputation within the American avant-garde. Promoted by the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, whom she had married in 1924, she had spent the 1920s producing major bodies of work, including monumental close-ups of flowers and precisionist canvases of Manhattan skyscrapers painted from her residence in the Shelton Hotel. Personal strain, including Stieglitz's affair with Dorothy Norman, prompted her to seek artistic renewal and distance outside the East Coast art establishment.

Arriving in Taos, O'Keeffe stayed at the home of arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, who supplied studio space and introduced the visitors to the surrounding high desert. She purchased a Ford automobile, learned to drive, and embarked on expeditions into the rugged terrain. During that first summer, she produced The Lawrence Tree at the nearby D. H. Lawrence Ranch and rendered the adobe forms of the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church at Ranchos de Taos, depicting fragments of the building's massive buttresses framed against the open sky.