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How did New Mexico’s desert landscapes influence Georgia O’Keeffe’s art?

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Alfred Stieglitz: photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe — Georgia O’Keeffe Georgia O'Keeffe, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1922.

New Mexico’s desert landscapes profoundly influenced Georgia O’Keeffe’s artistic development by providing a wealth of natural and architectural forms that naturally contained the abstract language she had been exploring since the 1910s.1

Living at Ghost Ranch and later in Abiquiu, O’Keeffe found inspiration in the stark, barren hills of the region, which she famously referred to as the "Black Place." Her fascination with these subjects led to a series of works that epitomized a new resolution with abstraction; while these paintings depicted what she actually saw, they were rendered as abstract shapes. Notable works from this period, such as From the White Place (1940), Pelvis IV (1944), and Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs) (1940), allowed her to claim the vast American West as her own.1

Beyond her artistic output, the Southwest environment enabled O’Keeffe to cultivate a public identity as an uncompromising, self-made individualist, distinct from the image previously constructed by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.1