Purple Hills

Rust-red mountains rise across most of this canvas, their surfaces creased and folded like heavy cloth left to gather. Georgia O'Keeffe painted "Purple Hills" in 1935, drawing on the landscape near Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the corner of the world that pulled her back again and again. Soft greens pool in the low dips between the ridges, and the reddish earth in the foreground splits into shallow gullies. She trimmed away every unnecessary detail, leaving just color, curve, and the pale strip of sky along the top.

Though most people picture her enormous flowers or sun-bleached bones, O'Keeffe found endless material in these bare hills. She called the badlands around her ranch her own private mountain, a place she felt belonged to her and no one else. This style is often tied to American Modernism, which favored clean shapes and confident color over busy scenes. The result is a quiet, unfussy portrait of ground she clearly loved, painted by someone who knew exactly how it looked at every hour of the day.