Georgia O’Keeffe
b. Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887–1986
Goat’s Horn with Red
1945
Pastel on paperboard mounted on paperboard
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972 (72.217)
About Museums Without Men
Celebrated art historian Katy Hessel has launched an audio guide series highlighting the women and gender-nonconforming artists in the public collections of international museums. Museums Without Men is an ever-growing series that introduces museum visitors to underrepresented and often lesser-known artists, opening up collections to new and existing audiences who will be able to follow the audio stops while in the galleries or online. The series links public institutions globally, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hepworth Wakefield, UK; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and Tate Britain, London, to foreground the important work that museums and galleries do by collecting and displaying women and gender-nonconforming artists, whether historical or contemporary.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Georgia O’Keeffe, Goat Horn with Red (1945). A red circle dominates the picture. Not quite completing itself, it’s interrupted by a brown and white shaded motif on the left hand side. A fragment reminiscent of a hollow bone, as seen through the grey shaded circular mark. In the middle is a bright blue pulsating orb erupting with luminosity, with speckles of white, as if we are looking through a portal to the sky on a summer’s day. Beside it is a shard of white, a glimmer, a reflection, or perhaps a broken splinter. I can’t make out what I’m looking at, but maybe that’s the point. Between 1943 and 1947, the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe painted works centering on the [00:01:00] minutiae of bones.
Fascinated by the natural world, she produced works that were glowing, semi-abstract compositions that distort our vision and reframe our perspective. The title of this piece is Goat Horn with Red, and, while we can all imagine a goat horn in our minds, O’Keeffe plays with this familiar object. She repositions our viewpoint, using the bone as a framing device, to look through to something, as opposed to being the primary focus.
She once said, “I was most interested in the holes in the bones. What I saw through them, particularly the blue from holding them up in the sun against the sky as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world.” O’Keeffe was a master at painting her surroundings beside her home in New Mexico.
But this device was entirely new. [00:02:00] Because, whereas her previous paintings saw her capture the full image of landscape, with dusty, arid floors, red cliffs and lunar skies, here she is physically reshaping our perspective and the genre of landscape, by getting us to look at the universe through the portal of a bone, as if we were a bit of detritus looking up at the vast expanse.
