Taos Mountain, New Mexico

Inscriptions

Signed on backing, in graphite: OK [in circle]; inscribed, on backing, in Alfred Stieglitz's hand: Near Alcalde [struckout] Taos Mountain [inserted as correction below "Near Alcalde," in O'Keeffe's hand?] - New Mexico - 1930 / by Georgia O'Keeffe; stamped twice on backing: ALFRED STIEGLITZ / LAKE GEORGE, N.Y.; label on backing stamped: AN AMERICAN PLACE / ROOM 1710-509 MADISON AVE. / NEW YORK, -N.Y. [and inscribed]: Georgia O'Keeffe 4 / 1930 / Taos Mountain - New Mexico [label is torn in lower right corner to remove price]; Downtown Gallery; label on backing printed: THE DOWNTOWN GALLERY . 32 E. 51st. ST., New York / ARTIST...GEORGIA O'KEEFFE..No...279 / TITLE ... TAOS MOUNTAIN, NEW MEXICO... DATE...1930...MEDIUM...OIL...SIZE...30x16 ...S.P>...; label on backing stamped: FINE ARTS CONSERVATION LABORATORIES [typed:] SPRAYED WITH: / Lucite #46, Acrylic Resin, Co. / polymer of N-Butyl and Isobutyl / Methacrylate. / April 1961.

Label

Georgia O’Keeffe painted Taos Mountain during her second summer in New Mexico, before moving to the area permanently in 1949. In the Southwest she discovered a spiritual affinity for the light-bathed and rugged terrain that would inspire some of her most celebrated works. Here, O’Keeffe retains the integrity of the landscape she so admired yet rounds its contours, compacts its space, and intensifies its colors with a fresh palette of vivid greens and soft violets, creating a painting that is at once representational and abstract. She pushes the mountain’s summit up against the top edge of the canvas, thereby accentuating its monumental presence and transcendent significance. O’Keeffe’s fluid, feathery rendering of the sagebrush reflects the more expressive brushwork that she adopted for a brief period around 1930—a manner that contrasted sharply with the smooth-surfaced, hardedged work that both preceded and followed  this period.

From the 2019 exhibition American Art, Colonial to Modern, curated by Barbara J. MacAdam, Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art

From her first visit to the northern New Mexico desert in 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe felt a deep affinity with the region’s rugged terrain and crystalline light. Taos Mountain’s dramatic height and Tewa association with sacred power likely held special appeal for O’Keeffe. Here, she rounded its contours and accentuated its height by pushing the summit up against the canvas’s top edge. She wrote to a friend after this, her second season in the Southwest, “The Mountain calls one, and the desert—and the sagebrush—the country seems to call one in a way that one has to answer it.”

From the 2022 exhibition This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, curated by Jami C. Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art; Barbara J. MacAdam, former Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art; Thomas H. Price, former Curatorial Assistant; Morgan E. Freeman, former DAMLI Native American Art Fellow; and Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Course History

ARTH 17, The Power of Place: Urban and Rural Images in American Art, 1900-1945, Sarah Powers, Winter 2014

ARTH 17, The Power of Place: Urban and Rural Images in American Art, 1900-1945, Sarah Powers, Winter 2014

ARTH 17, The Power of Place: Urban and Rural Images in American Art, 1900-1945, Sarah Powers, Winter 2014

Writing 7.2, Writers on Writing, Wendy Piper, Spring 2014

WRIT 7, Religion and Literature: Revisioning the Invisible, Nancy Crumbine, Spring 2014

WRIT 5, Writing into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Spring 2014

WRIT 5, Writing into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Fall 2014

WRIT 5, Writing Into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Winter 2015

WRIT 5, Writing Into the Wilderness, Nancy Crumbine, Winter 2015

GEOG 11, Qualitative Methods and the Research Process in Geography, Abigail Neely, Winter 2015

WRIT 7.2, Writers on Writing, Wendy Piper, Spring 2015

ANTH 7.05, Animals and Humans, Laura Ogden, Winter 2022

GEOG 31.01, Postcolonial Geographies, Erin Collins, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

SART 25.01, Painting I, Viktor Witkowski, Winter 2022

SART 25.02, Painting I, Viktor Witkowski, Winter 2022

ARTH 5.01, Introduction to Contemporary Art, Mary Coffey and Chad Elias, Winter 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

SPAN 65.15, Wonderstruck: Archives and the Production of Knowledge in an Unequal World, Silvia Spitta and Barbara Goebel, Summer 2022

College Course 35.01, Color in Art & Philosophy, Viktor Witkowski and John Kulvicki, Winter 2023

Geography 7.02, Into the Wild, Coleen Fox, Spring 2023

Exhibition History

American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 9-December 9, 2007.

American Art, Colonial to Modern, Israel Sack Gallery and Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26, 2019-September 12, 2021.

American Paintings from the Dartmouth Collection, 1910-1960, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 17-April 12, 1998.

Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 1-19, 1994.

Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 11-September 12, 2004; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, October 1, 2004-January 16, 2005; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, January 27-May 8, 2005.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Place and Influence, Loveland Museum/Gallery, Loveland, Colorado, September 27-December 31, 2014.

Images of the West: Selections from the Permanent Collection, MALS 190, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 15-August 28, 1994.

Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 2, 2009--November 28. 2010.

Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 26, 1996-June 22, 1997.

Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, May 28, 1998-September 12, 1999.

Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 16, 1997.

The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality, The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, October 8-December 31, 2000.

The Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, April 11, 2016-June 30, 2018

This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 5–July 22, 2022.

Publication History

Jane Benson Ackerman, The Hood Museum of Art: Ten Years of Making Art at Home in the Upper Valley, Upper Valley Magazine, November/December 1995, Volume 9, No. 6, Van Etten, Inc., 1995, pp. 22-29, ill. p. 23

Barbara Buhler Lynes, "Georgia O'Keeffe Catalogue Raisonne", Volume 2, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, April 1999, illus. p. 452.

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Lesley Poling-Kempes and Frederick W. Turner, "Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place", Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004, 143 pp., color ill. p. 65.

Barbara J. MacAdam, Marks of Distinction, Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art, Manchester, Vermont: Hudson Hills Press, 2005, pp. 17, ill. p. 18, fig. 13.

Barbara J. MacAdam, American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Muesum of Art, Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2007, p. 89, no. 65.

John R. Stomberg, The Hood Now: Art and Inquiry at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 2019, p. 149, ill. plate no. 80.

Provenance

Downtown Gallery, New York; sold to M. Rosalie Leidinger (1906-1991) and Louis W. Schmidt (1909-1995), Norwich, Vermont, April 18, 1961; given to present collection, 1993.

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