Georgia O’Keeffe’s Bones and Skulls

Collecting bones in a worked landscape

O’Keeffe found bones while walking in New Mexico, brought them to her temporary quarters and eventually shipped examples east for study and painting. The objects crossed categories as they moved: remains in a working landscape became collected specimens, domestic display, studio material and marketable images. Photographs and preserved interiors later helped turn the collection itself into part of her public persona.^[2][3] The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum now cares for many bones from her belongings. Zooarchaeological research has identified species and skeletal elements more precisely than older titles or casual visual recognition allowed.^[4]

A skull long called a ram’s head, for example, has been identified as Spanish goat. This does not invalidate the painting’s historic title, but it separates animal identification from archival nomenclature.^[3] Sun-whitened bones were not timeless ornaments produced by an abstract desert. Livestock ranching, predation, slaughter, drought and decomposition all contributed to their presence. O’Keeffe encountered many during the drought-stricken early 1930s and treated them as the opposite of New York’s urban litter.^[5]

The museum has gone beyond generic comparison by reuniting physical specimens with works. The skull used for Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory is the object now identified as Spanish goat, while a small ram skull was connected to O’Keeffe’s 1946 sculpture Abstraction.^[3] These matches demonstrate two different transformations: one specimen retained recognisable anatomy inside a historically misnamed painting, while another supplied a curved horn form for three-dimensional abstraction. Secure one-to-one evidence is therefore powerful precisely because it is exceptional and should not be presumed for every painted skull.

“Found” describes her acquisition, not an absence of prior animal life or human economy. The distinction prevents romanticising mortality. A cow, horse, mule, deer, antelope or goat connects the image to different forms of labour, habitat and ownership. Catalogue titles sometimes identify species securely; at other times later scientific work corrects them. Where evidence stops, a manuscript should say “animal skull” rather than supply an evocative but unsupported taxonomy.

Specimen and staged still life

O’Keeffe did not simply record bones where they lay. She transported, cleaned, stored, turned, propped, hung and combined them with flowers, feathers, cloth, paper, horseshoes and distant terrain. The studio was a site of construction. The white grounds in the 1931 skull paintings and the impossible suspension of later landscape compositions make that intervention visible.

This matters for the word “symbol”. A bone could stand for her experience of the desert, yet each painting also results from practical decisions about orientation and negative space. A skull seen frontally creates bilateral symmetry; a foreshortened skull becomes a tapering shape; a pelvis makes the hole as important as the bone. Meaning begins in those operations.

Pelvis and skull distinctions

Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow (1945; CR 1106) is a 36-by-48-inch oil on canvas on extended loan to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum from a private collection.^[6] A reddish-orange pelvic bone fills the horizontal support, while a large yellow oval occupies its aperture. Scale removes the bone from ordinary anatomical measurement and turns interior absence into the dominant colour field. The title belongs to a series, and the archive also records the dash form Pelvis Series – Red With Yellow.

It appeared in O’Keeffe’s 1946 exhibition and later surveys of American abstraction.^[6] That history matters: audiences have encountered it as bone painting and as abstract painting, categories the object refuses to keep separate. The pelvic series developed after roughly a decade in which skulls often appeared as central objects. In the 1940s O’Keeffe increasingly used a bone opening to frame sky or distant land.^[7]

The aperture is both literal anatomy and a device for seeing. Red and yellow deny the expectation that a bleached bone must remain white, while the monumental format turns a handheld fragment into an environment for the eye. The title Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose refers to at least two 1931 works. CR 774 is a 10-by-8½-inch graphite drawing on thin, cream, smooth wove paper in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.^[8]

Its title and date come from O’Keeffe’s recto inscription. The rose appears above the eye socket, but graphite means that “pink” survives primarily as a linguistic instruction and remembered colour. CR 775 is the far larger 40-by-30-inch oil on canvas in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.^[9] A pale skull and small pink rose rest against layered white paper or cloth. The objects occupy shallow studio space rather than floating over land.

Treatment records indicate cleaning and wax-resin work in 1948 and 1954, evidence that its current surface has a conservation history.^[9] Stieglitz supplied the published title Life and Death in 1931–32.^[9] Its afterlife has been powerful, but the catalogue explicitly identifies it as his wording rather than O’Keeffe’s established title. The juxtaposition certainly invites mortality and renewal, yet repeating Life and Death as if it were her declared programme would give a promoter’s interpretation the status of artist testimony.

Stieglitz’s 1931 photograph Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Horse Skull documents the same specimen and supplies a second channel of public meaning.^[31] National Gallery research records that O’Keeffe returned to Lake George after shipping home a barrel of bones and identifies the skull with the one painted in the oil. The photograph was later exhibited as Life and Death—Hands and Skull, extending Stieglitz’s phrase beyond the canvas. O’Keeffe’s hands, the shipped object and the published image together helped turn private studio material into a recognisable artistic identity.

Bones against landscape

Red Hills and Bones (1941; CR 1025), oil on canvas, measures 29¾ by 40 inches and belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.^[10] Two bones sit across the lower edge before red, orange and yellow hills, green-white vegetation and high cliffs. They do not float: their placement at the front constructs a viewer close to collected fragments and looking beyond them. The title is documented in archives and the checklist for the 1942 exhibition of 1941 paintings. O’Keeffe retained the work until about 1942; it passed to Stieglitz, then entered Philadelphia in 1949 through the Alfred Stieglitz Collection selected by O’Keeffe as executor.^[10]

That provenance joins private arrangement, gallery display and museum canonisation. The painting reverses a common hierarchy. Small bones are physically near but pictorially low; the hills are distant but occupy most of the support. Comparing their curves does not make one a symbol of the other. It shows how the studio object can calibrate distance within a landscape construction.

Antelope and changing titles

Antelope (1954; CR 1273) is a 14¼-by-32-inch oil on canvas in a private collection.^[11] Curving brown horns and part of a tan skull appear at the left above a thin earth band, with pink-grey sky extending across the long support. The asymmetrical composition makes the partial head an edge event rather than a centred icon. Letters to dealer Edith Halpert supply rare process and reception evidence. O’Keeffe wrote in August 1954 that she liked a small piece of antelope head very much; the following year she called a related picture unlike her other work and among her best.

Her later account remembered both a gifted head with backward-turning horns and other horns that curved inward.^[11] This evidence supports serial examination of different specimens, not one generic “antelope skull”. The catalogue record also reminds us that ownership and identification can diverge. A privately held painting is accessible through documentation even when direct technical study remains limited. Claims about unrecorded underdrawing or surface treatment would exceed the evidence.

Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1931; CR 772) is a 36-by-24-inch oil at the Art Institute of Chicago. O’Keeffe’s 1947 gift entered the museum through the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.^[12] A pale horned skull is centred against layered white material and a narrow black vertical; two white roses sit above and below it. “Calico” names the rose variety, not patterned cloth. Technical examination in 2025 found a pre-primed canvas, forms painted beside one another with small ground gaps, and an original unvarnished surface.

The work remains unlined and stable, though brown passages have traction cracking and a protective backing now reduces vibration.^[12] Its matte, lightly textured whites should not be read through glossy reproductions. Historic titles included Cow’s Skull & Two White Roses, Cow’s Skull and White Roses and White Skull with White Roses.^[12] The changes show reception seeking a clearer description. The current title restores the specific flower name without converting the arrangement into an allegory.

Antelope horns and serial identity

The legacy title “Antelope Horns” does not isolate a single work. Untitled (Antelope Horns) (about 1952; CR 1249) is graphite and charcoal on 17⅞-by-23⅞-inch manila-yellow paper in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.^[13] Other sheets, including CR 1250, repeat the image-derived title, while CR 1252 is catalogued as Antelope Horns.^[14][15] The group explores side views, horn curvature and the distribution of dark material across largely bare sheets. Graphite supplies contour; charcoal can concentrate the horn or skull without requiring painted colour.

Because “Untitled” derives from the image rather than a documented artist title, an old singular URL cannot safely select a catalogue number without matching its illustration. The drawings are not automatically preparatory for the 1954 oil. They belong to an earlier group, and resemblance alone does not prove a direct transfer. Their value lies in repeated looking at the object from different positions before and beyond any one canvas.

Summer Days and uncertain allegory

Summer Days (1936; CR 880) is a 36⅛-by-30⅛-inch oil in the Whitney Museum of American Art, given by Calvin Klein in 1994.^[16][17] A deer skull with antlers hangs above red and yellow flowers and a narrow New Mexico landscape. Clouds, skull and blooms occupy incompatible scales, producing an intentionally constructed, almost weightless space. Whitney interpretation associates the composition with cycles of life and death.^[17] That reading is plausible and historically influential, but the catalogue title came through O’Keeffe’s archives and 1937 checklist, not an explanatory subtitle.

Her own bone statement emphasised desert vitality and sharpness rather than death alone.^[3] The manuscript should therefore distinguish museum interpretation from documented intention. The painting belonged to O’Keeffe until 1983, when Calvin Klein acquired it through the artist; he gave it to the Whitney eleven years later.^[16] Removed exhibition labels track its movement through exhibitions in the United States, Germany and Italy. International display helped make floating skull-and-flower imagery emblematic of her New Mexico identity.

Skull, leaves and species correction

The legacy “Mule Skull and Feathers” most securely resolves to Untitled (Skull with Turkey Feather) (about 1936; CR 902), a graphite drawing on ivory wove paper in the Art Institute of Chicago.^[18] The owner’s alternate title Mule Skull with Turkey Feather explains the legacy wording, but the catalogue title remains anatomically cautious. A foreshortened skull dominates the 21 7/16-by-15 7/16-inch sheet; a striped feather lies beside it. The moderate paper thickness and slight texture are part of the work’s visual economy.

Graphite modelling must describe porous bone, dark cavities and the feather’s banding without paint. The work was not recorded in the Whitney, Downtown Gallery or Abiquiú archives, and its title derives from the image.^[18] This is precisely where specificity can become false confidence. The Art Institute may identify a mule; the catalogue preserves a more general skull. Both records should be visible.

Ram’s Skull with Brown Leaves (1936; CR 881) is a 30⅛-by-36⅛-inch oil on canvas on loan to the Roswell Museum and Art Center.^[19] A horned skull and two large brown leaves appear against white. The backing carries title, a $6,000 price and $5,000 insurance value on an Alfred Stieglitz exhibition label, making commerce part of the object record. A period publication called it Ram’s Head and Autumn Leaves.^[19] The current title changes “head” to the materially accurate “skull” and “autumn” to colour.

Species identification still deserves caution because another celebrated “ram’s” skull in O’Keeffe’s collection proved to be Spanish goat after zooarchaeological study.^[3][4] No equivalent correction is documented for this painting, so its historical title remains controlling. The provenance is unusually circular. Courtland Barns bought it in 1949; O’Keeffe repurchased it through the Downtown Gallery in 1955; a collector group acquired it in 1957 and gave it to Roswell.^[19] The artist’s reacquisition shows that a sold picture could re-enter her decisions about circulation.

Its present location has changed under emergency conditions. Following the catastrophic October 2024 flood at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Ram’s Skull with Brown Leaves went on loan to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum while Roswell undertook a multiyear recovery.^[32] The loan does not alter ownership, title or provenance, but it makes institutional vulnerability part of the object’s continuing history. Flood response, safe storage and inter-museum cooperation now determine where the painting can be studied and seen, just as earlier sales and reacquisition shaped its circulation.

Feather, horseshoe and composite objects

Turkey Feather with Horseshoe, II (1935; CR 856) is a 12 3/16-by-16-inch oil on canvas in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.^[20] A horseshoe stands upright behind a striped feather on a reflective surface. The arrangement is domestic and controlled: hard manufactured iron, soft organic feather and their reflections share a shallow field. Its companion Horseshoe with Feather No. I (1935; CR 857) is smaller—8½ by 13 9/16 inches—and painted on laminated cardboard rather than canvas.^[21]

Alternate titles reverse object order, and the backing inscription privileges Horse Shoe with Feather No I. The two versions therefore differ in support, scale, placement, reflection and title history. Conservation makes those distinctions visible. No. II was wax-resin lined, which slightly darkened thin white passages; analysis identified zinc and lead whites, viridian, ochres, umbers and bone black.^[20] No. I contains a painting on its verso that O’Keeffe requested be covered in 1975; its yellowed synthetic varnish and fragile laminated edges further separate it materially.^[21]

A paired subject is not a pair of duplicates. O’Keeffe repeatedly joined collected things that would not ordinarily meet: horse skull and rose, cow skull and calico roses, ram skull and brown leaves, mule skull and feather, horseshoe and turkey feather. These combinations encouraged Surrealist readings, especially because objects sometimes float or change scale. Later exhibitions have productively compared her use of unexpected natural forms with Henry Moore’s bones, stones and shells.^[22][23] Comparison need not imply direct influence.

The 2023–25 O’Keeffe and Moore project framed both artists through careful observation, enlargement, apertures and collections of found forms, while recreating their studios with original contents.^[22][23] It placed O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV beside Moore’s Reclining Figure Bone, showing independent approaches to hollow form and negative space. The pairings within O’Keeffe’s own work are also material comparisons. A feather’s shaft, a leaf’s vein and a skull’s fissure generate different lines; flower petals and bone cavities organise different kinds of interior. Interpretation is strongest when it begins there rather than imposing a universal code.

Pelvis apertures and sight

A pelvis is not only a bleached surface. Its opening can frame blue sky, a yellow field or distant land, making the missing material active. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum describes this 1940s shift as using bone as a lens for relations of near and far.^[7] The viewer sees through an object that is simultaneously close, enlarged and anatomically specific.

This is why the pelvis paintings belong to the history of abstraction as well as still life. Edge, hole and colour organise vision before the object is named. Contemporary comparison with Moore confirms that modernists could use bone structure to test enclosure, penetration and the transformation of small natural forms into monumental experience.^[22]

Vanitas, vitality and American imagery

The skull-and-flower arrangements invite comparison with the European vanitas tradition, in which flowers fade and skulls warn of worldly transience. LACMA explicitly calls Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose a modern vanitas and reads the pairing as death beside fleeting beauty.^[26] The comparison is historically intelligible, especially after Stieglitz circulated the phrase Life and Death. It should remain a comparison rather than a decoding key. O’Keeffe described bones as keenly alive and did not attach a vanitas programme to every canvas.^[1][3]

The rose may carry cultural associations with fragility, but it is also a specific small form whose folds, softness and colour differ from hard, bleached bone. The painting sustains both readings: symbolic opposition and close material comparison. The same caution applies to Summer Days. Cycles of death and renewal are part of its museum reception, while O’Keeffe’s broad title and surreal spatial construction leave other possibilities open.^[16][17] A useful manuscript records the interpretive history and its author rather than turning later consensus into a quotation from the painter.

Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931) made the bone motif part of a debate about national art. The skull hangs before vertical bands and a blue field whose palette invokes the United States flag. The Metropolitan Museum reads that choice as a satirical comment on contemporaries preoccupied with defining a distinctly American style.^[27] This context affects the other 1931 skulls. Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses was made in the same year but replaces national colour with white layers, black division and cultivated flowers.^[12]

Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose replaces frontal heraldry with a more intimate, asymmetrical conjunction.^[9] Their shared date does not make them one manifesto; it shows O’Keeffe testing how species, flower, ground and format change the cultural charge of bone. French and German versions of the Met record translate the title and carry the national-modernist interpretation to different audiences.^[27][28][30] The work’s Americanness is therefore continually re-presented abroad. Multilingual reception helps expose that “American” is an argument produced by title, palette, museum and historical framing, not an essence residing naturally in a cow skull.

Near object and far landscape

O’Keeffe’s bone landscapes repeatedly collapse normal perspective. Red Hills and Bones gives foreground fragments enough scale to converse with cliffs, while Summer Days suspends skull and flowers against clouds. From the Faraway, Nearby omits a conventional middle ground so that deer skull and antlers confront the viewer across a gulf from distant land.^[2] This near-far construction is not an optical accident. Transporting a bone into the studio allowed O’Keeffe to inspect it at arm’s length, then compose it with a remembered or selected landscape.

The Met’s updated research makes that landscape less generic. O’Keeffe first exhibited the work as Deer’s Horns, Near Cameron, linking it to her 1937 camping trip with Ansel Adams near Cameron, Arizona, on Diné Bikéyah; close examination also finds two combined sets of antlers rather than one intact trophy.^[2] The later poetic title carries language from Stieglitz’s letters, but it loosens the geographical evidence. The museum consequently reads collection and rearrangement through a longer history of trophy imagery and settler entitlement, an interpretation grounded in location and staging rather than skull symbolism alone.

The result brings different times together: the duration of weathering, the moment of collection, studio arrangement and a distant geological view. The Philadelphia Museum describes Red Hills and Bones as a Ghost Ranch view distilled into monumental shapes.^[29] That identifies place and formal compression but should not erase staging. The bones establish an artificial foreground, making the painting both landscape and still life. Genre overlap is the method.

Display and artistic identity

Bones did not disappear between painting sessions. O’Keeffe placed collected natural objects on windowsills, shelves, tables and walls at Ghost Ranch and Abiquiú.^[3] Their domestic display trained repeated looking and gave visitors a curated encounter with her environment. The spare placement seen in photographs later became central to the public image of her “modern” life.

Recent exhibitions have reconstructed the Ghost Ranch studio with original tools and found objects, enabling viewers to see bones beside stones, shells, wood and working materials.^[22][23] Such installations are valuable evidence for scale and adjacency, but they are also museum reconstructions. They frame the artist after her death and should not be mistaken for a room frozen outside history.

Domestic collecting also complicates authorship. Friends and visitors gave O’Keeffe objects, including antelope material.^[11] The collection joined things she found herself with gifts and objects later identified by staff and researchers. “O’Keeffe’s bone” may therefore mean an item she gathered, owned, displayed, painted or all four; the record must specify which.

Drawing before and beside painting

The surviving graphite works demonstrate that bone practice was not confined to iconic oils. The 1931 horse-skull drawing fixes title and date through a recto inscription, while the 1936 skull-and-feather sheet relies on later visual cataloguing.^[8][18] Antelope drawings use graphite with charcoal on differently coloured and textured papers.^[13][14][15] Drawing lets the support remain active.

Empty paper may become background, air or light; pressure shifts distinguish horn, cavity and feather; erasure and revision can survive where oil conceals them. Paper surveys add evidence about thickness, weave and colour that screen images flatten. A drawing may prepare a painting, test an arrangement independently or return to an already familiar specimen. Chronology and direct compositional correspondence are needed before claiming a preparatory function. Serial looking is the broader fact: O’Keeffe turned objects, changed viewpoint and remade their relations across media.

Empty-desert politics and species knowledge

O’Keeffe’s 1943 statement calls the desert vast, empty and untouchable.^[3] It is indispensable evidence for her feeling and equally important evidence of a settler viewpoint. Northern New Mexico was not empty: Pueblo, Diné and Hispano communities lived within, named and worked these landscapes. The recent Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country initiative explicitly addresses their erasure from the O’Keeffe story.^[24] Bones can intensify the error when they are treated as proof of untouched nature.

Livestock remains may instead register ranching and drought; a horseshoe records human and animal labour; a collected object moved through homes, postal systems and galleries. Personal solitude should not be converted into historical vacancy. Museum research now brings zooarchaeology into art history. Identifying which species and bone elements survive in O’Keeffe’s collection lets researchers compare physical specimens with paintings and correct habitual names.^[4]

This method can separate a title’s historical authority from its biological accuracy. The distinction is especially useful because O’Keeffe simplified, rotated and cropped forms. A painting may preserve enough anatomy for identification while also altering scale and colour. When a one-to-one object match exists, it grounds formal analysis in a handled specimen. When it does not, the catalogue should resist treating resemblance as proof.

Material and conservation histories

The bone pictures are materially diverse: graphite on smooth or textured papers, oil on board, oil on pre-primed or artist-primed canvas, thin matte layers, palette-knife whites and later synthetic coatings. Conservation has revealed unvarnished originals, wax-resin linings, traction cracks, hidden verso paintings and underdrawing.^{[9][12][20][21]} These facts change interpretation. A glossy white skull may be a varnish effect; a darker ground may result partly from lining; a visible gap can be intentionally exposed preparation rather than damage. O’Keeffe’s apparently immaculate simplicity often depends on complex surfaces and later interventions.

Exhibition and reception

Stieglitz recognised the promotional force of skulls and assigned titles such as Life and Death.^[9] Reviews, installation photographs and reproductions then helped make bones synonymous with O’Keeffe’s Southwest. The 1984 Metropolitan Museum bulletin traced how cow skulls shipped east entered this public identity, while later museum displays placed them within American modernism, Surrealism, still life and national symbolism.^[5][25]

O’Keeffe participated actively in this circulation. She retained works, sold and repurchased others, selected paintings for the Stieglitz bequests and wrote about bones in exhibition publications. Agency does not make reception identical with intention. A flag-coloured skull could be read as national emblem; a skull with flowers as life and death; a pelvis as abstraction. Each interpretation must be attached to its source and date.

Bones as an evolving method

Begin by identifying the object and its evidence: species if secure, catalogue number and year, then record its materials, dimensions, support and present owner. Establish whether its title came from O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, a gallery archive, an owner or visual cataloguing. Compare drawings and paintings without assuming that every drawing prepares an oil. Then reconstruct arrangement. Is the bone lying on cloth, standing on a shelf, floating in sky or framing a distant view?

What does its scale do to the surrounding flower, feather, leaf or landscape? Examine technical records before judging colour and finish. Finally, distinguish the artist’s statements, museum interpretation and later symbolic reception. O’Keeffe’s bones changed over more than two decades. Early skulls were close, staged objects; later pictures joined them to hills and flowers; pelvis works made the aperture a viewing device; antelope studies returned to contour and partial form.

The subject endured because it could generate new spatial problems, not because one symbol needed endless repetition. Their lasting power comes from a double condition. They are actual remains, marked by species, weather, ranching, collection and conservation. They are also forms O’Keeffe could enlarge, turn, colour and suspend until solid matter organised emptiness. Keeping both conditions in view—historical object and modernist construction—offers a richer account than the legend of death in a vacant desert.