Object number2022.16.4
Cottonwood No. 1
Date1944
Artist
Georgia O'Keeffe
(American, 1887-1986)
CultureAmerican
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 30 x 36 in. (76.2 x 91.4 cm)
Framed: 31 1/8 x 37 1/8 x 1 7/8 in. (79.1 x 94.3 x 4.8 cm)
Framed: 31 1/8 x 37 1/8 x 1 7/8 in. (79.1 x 94.3 x 4.8 cm)
Credit LineBequest of Mary Pick Hines, class of 1953
Period20th c
Classification(s)
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1987;
Mary Pick Hines, 1992
Bequest to The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, 2022
Exhibition HistoryGeorgia O'Keeffe, An American Place, New York City, NY, 1945
Georgia O'Keeffe, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1946
Georgia O'Keeffe: Selected Painting, Phoenix Art Museum, April 15-June 15, 1988; traveled to Seibu Museum, Tokyo, Japan, August 11-30, 1988, Seibu Museum, Osaka, Japan, September 15-October 15, 1988, and Aspen Art Museum December 15, 1988-February 12, 1989
Georgia O'Keeffe, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1990
Label TextThe feathery white branches and touches of bright green in Cottonwood No. 1 suggest the moment in spring when female cottonwood trees disperse downy white seeds. Georgia O'Keeffe encountered these distinctive trees across the landscape of Northern New Mexico where she lived and worked for decades, depicting them in a series of more than twenty paintings beginning in the early 1940s. Using pared down contours and passages of vivid color, O'Keeffe's painting focuses the viewer's gaze on the twisting forms of a single tree. The composition emphasizes the animated quality of its divergent trunk and branches stretching across the canvas and weaving together patches of sky and earth. O'Keeffe became one of the most celebrated American modernists, particularly renowned for adapting such motifs from nature into abstracted compositions. As she wrote in 1950, "I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way - things that I had no words for."
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Lillian Faye Barker
