1936

American Paintings and Sculpture

Georgia O’Keeffe adopted the motif of animal skulls, long used by artists of the American West as evocative emblems of death, the passage of time, and the frontier. Created largely in the East at her upstate New York home, O’Keeffe’s "skull series" depicts the specimens she collected during summers in New Mexico. "I have wanted to paint the desert and haven’t known how," she once mused. "So I brought home the bleached bones as my symbol of the desert."

Audio Guides

Keely Orgeman, Curator

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I'm Keely Orgeman, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

We are looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's painting entitled "Bob's Steer Head," painted in 1936. The title refers to Georgia O'Keeffe's friend and a fellow resident of Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. Georgia O'Keeffe moved to a house on Ghost Ranch in 1934, and about the same time, Robert Wood Johnson II and his wife, Maggie, moved to Ghost Ranch, and they built a house on that property.

This, in some ways, could be considered a symbolic portrait, and O'Keeffe would have been aware of the tradition of symbolic portraiture among her fellow modernists, including those portraits made a decade earlier by Charles Demuth, which are on view in the same gallery. They include a symbolic portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe that Demuth made of the artist. Whether this painting, "Bob's Steer Head," refers to Robert Johnson II, is a question.

Today we often think about O'Keeffe's work from the early part of her career, which featured these close-up, almost zoomed-in views of various types of flowers. She became associated with flowers and all of their associations. O'Keeffe herself resisted these interpretations, and I think that's related to her turn, in this period of the mid-1930s, toward different subjects.

When she began to spend more time in New Mexico, she shifted her focus largely to the subject of the desert. And it really speaks to her conscious effort not to position herself as a woman artist but rather to buck the traditions and take on these subjects that were associated with the American West and cowboys and masculinity. Referring to the animal bones that O'Keeffe found in the desert, she said: "To me, they are as beautiful as anything I know; the bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert, even though it is vast and empty and untouchable."

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

30 × 36 in. (76.2 × 91.4 cm)

Credit Line

Gift of Arthur Milliken, B.A. 1926

Accession Number

1965.52

Culture
Period

20th century

Classification
Disclaimer

Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery’s complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of records is ongoing.

Provenance

Provenance

An American Place, New York, 1936. The Downtown Gallery, New York, about 1936–1937; Arthur Milliken, Simsbury, Conn., 1937–1965; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.
Bibliography
  • American Art: Selections from the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2023), 226–27, no. 107, ill.
  • "Simple Beauty: Paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe," American Art Review XVIII No. 4 (2006), 135, no. No. 4, ill.
  • Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: catalogue raisonne´ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 549, no. 882, ill.
  • Jeu de Paume, Trois sie`cles d'art aux E´tats-Unis, 2, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions des Musées nationaux, 1938), 4, 43, no. 7, fig. 31
Object copyright
Additional information

Object/Work type

animal art

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