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Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
Black Door with Red, 1955
Oil on canvas, 48 x 84 inches
Bequest of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
© The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In Black Door with Red, Georgia O'Keeffe painted a familiar and much-loved scene: an enclosed patio at her adobe home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Characteristically, she reduced its visual elements to a strip of sky, a row of paving stones, and a dark void set in an intense field of deep red that brings to mind desert sun and heat. The subject originally caught her attention in the mid-1930s:

When I first saw the Abiquiu house it was a ruin with an adobe wall around the garden broken in a couple of places by falling trees. As I climbed and walked about in the ruin I found a patio with a very pretty well house and bucket to draw up water. It was a good-sized patio with a long wall with a door on one side. That wall with a door in it was something I had to have. It took me ten years to get it-three more years to fix the house so I could live in it-and after that the wall with a door was painted many times.

O'Keeffe often varied the framing, perspective, and color of the "wall with a door," painting it more than twenty times between 1946 and 1960; Black Door with Red, seven feet wide, is among the largest. During the last active years of her long life, aerial views of clouds and rivers interested her as well, with each subject inspiring its own ambitious series of mural-sized paintings.

O'Keeffe's approach to abstraction in these years was independent of contemporary movements on the East Coast; her working methods and principles of design had coalesced into a personal style during the early 1920s. Her most important mentor was Arthur Wesley Dow, whose innovative teaching left a lasting mark on American modernism. From Dow she acquired a strong sense of two-dimensional design (derived from Japanese art) and the notion that parallels existed among the senses; color relationships, for example, were analogous to musical chords (some of her early abstractions were based on the concept of "visual music").

Alfred Stieglitz gave O'Keeffe her first one-artist show at his 291 gallery in New York in 1917, and she soon became one of the major figures in his circle of modernists. From the most conventional of subjects-the floral still life-she developed the powerful, sensual imagery that became her signature. At the same time, her paintings of New York skyscrapers placed her among the leaders of Precisionism. In 1946 O'Keeffe was the first woman artist given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

For more than three decades Stieglitz was her personal and professional partner. She married him in 1924, held annual exhibitions at his galleries, posed for some of his most important photographs, and after his death in 1946 managed the disposition of his archives, photographs, and art collection. With this task complete, she moved permanently to New Mexico. For later generations the austere, aged O'Keeffe was completely identified with the exotic landscape, architecture, and dry bones of the Southwest.

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