Datura and Pedernal

Georgia O'Keeffe

Part of the American Journey Exhibit

The landscape continued to play an important role in American art during the early stages of modernism, but Georgia O’Keeffe’s images are far from traditional. She found beauty in the abstraction of nature and developed her own soft, sensuous style that she applied to the Southwestern landscape. By focusing greater attention to light, color, rhythm, and harmony, she achieved a more intuitive, feminine alternative to the traditional nature study.

Datura and Pedernal is one of O'Keeffe's paintings of the view from her Ghost Ranch retreat in New Mexico. Datura is the name for a flower found in the desert regions of the Southwest. Pedernal is the name of the mesa in the background, a part of the Jemez Mountain range in northern New Mexico, and it appears in many of her paintings.