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The brightly chalky palette she employed for the striated rock is contrasted in the foreground by a desiccated cedar tree. Stretching to three edges of the canvas, the tree is sharply defined, in marked counterpoint to its particolored surroundings. O’Keeffe painted the site exhaustively, often incorporating vistas toward the flint-topped Pedernal mountain in the distance. In later years, she remarked of this oft-painted mountain: “It belongs to me, God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” Following her death in 1986, her mortal remains came to belong to the landscape, when her ashes were strewn among the rocks, piñon trees, and sagebrush of her beloved Ghost Ranch.
The foregrounding of the dead cedar tree echoes other works from the mid-1930s in which bones or skulls are suspended over a colorful landscape, such as Deer’s Skull with Pedernal, 1936, and Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock–Hills (Ram’s Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Art historian Sarah Greenough has written, “This sense of flatness and depth, of near and far, of dislocations of space and scale, of examining and knowing one thing in detail while being uncertain about its relationship to a larger whole, is something O’Keeffe would extensively explore in the 1930s and early 1940s and would yield some of her most distinguished works from this time.”
About Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills, O’Keeffe wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz: “I’ve been painting an old dead cedar against those purple hills I’ve painted so often. It is a tree that I made a drawing of long ago when I first came up here [to Ghost Ranch] … It looks promising. It’s one of those things I’ve had in my so-called mind for a long time.” Two weeks later, she announced “I think I am through with my tree—It is the first thing I have done that when I stand it by the window and look at it—then I look out the window—it looks like what I see out the window, tho it was painted a mile away. I think it really looks like here.”
Upon completion in 1937, the painting was shown at Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place, where it was purchased by Eleanor Wilson. Barbara Babcock Millhouse, founding president of Reynolda House, purchased the work from Hirschl & Adler Galleries in 1977. In 2005, the painting was featured in the national touring exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. For the exhibition, the museum commissioned photographers to locate the artist’s vantage point for twenty individual works, which were shown alongside contemporary photographs of the sites. Photographer Malcolm Varon positioned his camera in the location of O’Keeffe’s vantage point from seven decades earlier and discovered the same dead tree, preserved upright in the dry conditions of the Jemez foothills. The Sense of Place exhibition reestablished the artist’s ambivalent relationship with representation; she derived inspiration from the essential and unique nature of beloved spots but abstracted freely in her depictions of artistic wellsprings such as Lake George, New York, Manhattan, and northern New Mexico.
ProvenanceAn American Place, New York, N.Y.
1930s
Eleanor Wilson, New York, N.Y.
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, N.Y.
1977
Barbara Babcock Millhouse
Source: Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999. pg. 582.
Exhibition History2005
Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (6/11/2004 – 9/12/2004)
Columbus Museum of Art (10/5/2004 - 1/16/2005)
Albright-Knox (1/28/2005 – 5/8/2005)
2021-2022
The O'Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (9/10/2021-3/3/2021)
Published ReferencesLynes, Barbara Buhler, Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place. Princeton University Press, 2004.
Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World. Phaidon Press: London, 2024. Page 261.
DepartmentCollection of Barbara B. Millhouse
Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills
Artist
Georgia O'Keeffe
(1887 - 1986)
Date1937
Mediumoil on canvas
DimensionsCanvas: 29 3/4 × 19 3/4 in. (75.6 × 50.2 cm)
Frame: 31 1/4 × 21 1/4 in. (79.4 × 54 cm)
Signed<none>
Credit LinePromised gift of Barbara B. Millhouse
Copyright© 2021 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Object numberIL2021.1.1
DescriptionIn 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe began summering at Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch on the eastern edge of the Jemez mountain range of New Mexico. Dude ranches provided cosmopolitan tourists, mostly from the East Coast, with a customized backcountry experience of riding and camping under big Southwestern skies. The cottage O’Keeffe began renting in the summer of 1937 was several miles from the heart of the ranch, free from social distractions, running water, and indoor heating. However, the intensely colorful geological stratification of the cliffs provided endless fascination. She said New Mexico was “a painter’s country.” At Ghost Ranch, she turned to reds, pinks, and purples to paint hills and mountains, and pinks and yellows to depict the stony cliffs visible from her house. “Out here,” she told a friend, “half your work is done for you.” Gray, pink, peach, blue, and purple bands of the cliffs near her home are described simply as “lavender hills” in the title of this 1937 canvas. The brightly chalky palette she employed for the striated rock is contrasted in the foreground by a desiccated cedar tree. Stretching to three edges of the canvas, the tree is sharply defined, in marked counterpoint to its particolored surroundings. O’Keeffe painted the site exhaustively, often incorporating vistas toward the flint-topped Pedernal mountain in the distance. In later years, she remarked of this oft-painted mountain: “It belongs to me, God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.” Following her death in 1986, her mortal remains came to belong to the landscape, when her ashes were strewn among the rocks, piñon trees, and sagebrush of her beloved Ghost Ranch.
The foregrounding of the dead cedar tree echoes other works from the mid-1930s in which bones or skulls are suspended over a colorful landscape, such as Deer’s Skull with Pedernal, 1936, and Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock–Hills (Ram’s Head and White Hollyhock, New Mexico), 1935. Art historian Sarah Greenough has written, “This sense of flatness and depth, of near and far, of dislocations of space and scale, of examining and knowing one thing in detail while being uncertain about its relationship to a larger whole, is something O’Keeffe would extensively explore in the 1930s and early 1940s and would yield some of her most distinguished works from this time.”
About Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills, O’Keeffe wrote to her husband, Alfred Stieglitz: “I’ve been painting an old dead cedar against those purple hills I’ve painted so often. It is a tree that I made a drawing of long ago when I first came up here [to Ghost Ranch] … It looks promising. It’s one of those things I’ve had in my so-called mind for a long time.” Two weeks later, she announced “I think I am through with my tree—It is the first thing I have done that when I stand it by the window and look at it—then I look out the window—it looks like what I see out the window, tho it was painted a mile away. I think it really looks like here.”
Upon completion in 1937, the painting was shown at Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place, where it was purchased by Eleanor Wilson. Barbara Babcock Millhouse, founding president of Reynolda House, purchased the work from Hirschl & Adler Galleries in 1977. In 2005, the painting was featured in the national touring exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place, organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. For the exhibition, the museum commissioned photographers to locate the artist’s vantage point for twenty individual works, which were shown alongside contemporary photographs of the sites. Photographer Malcolm Varon positioned his camera in the location of O’Keeffe’s vantage point from seven decades earlier and discovered the same dead tree, preserved upright in the dry conditions of the Jemez foothills. The Sense of Place exhibition reestablished the artist’s ambivalent relationship with representation; she derived inspiration from the essential and unique nature of beloved spots but abstracted freely in her depictions of artistic wellsprings such as Lake George, New York, Manhattan, and northern New Mexico.
ProvenanceAn American Place, New York, N.Y.
1930s
Eleanor Wilson, New York, N.Y.
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, N.Y.
1977
Barbara Babcock Millhouse
Source: Lynes, Barbara Buhler. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999. pg. 582.
Exhibition History2005
Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (6/11/2004 – 9/12/2004)
Columbus Museum of Art (10/5/2004 - 1/16/2005)
Albright-Knox (1/28/2005 – 5/8/2005)
2021-2022
The O'Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector
Reynolda House Museum of American Art (9/10/2021-3/3/2021)
Published ReferencesLynes, Barbara Buhler, Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place. Princeton University Press, 2004.
Tree: Exploring the Arboreal World. Phaidon Press: London, 2024. Page 261.
Status
Not on view