Black Cross, New Mexico
Georgia O’Keefe
GEORGIA O’KEEFE, 1929. OIL ON CANVAS.
On her first visit to New Mexico in 1929, Georgia O’Keefe would take long walks in the nighttime desert, and encounter mysterious crosses dotted throughout the landscape. Simple, folk objects; they became to her these strange spectres of religion in a land of arid nature, that they took on the form of a ‘thin dark veil of the Catholic Church’. These crosses were most likely placed by a Catholic lay brotherhood known as the Penitentes, marking the routes to their informal church like structures called moradas. Yet for O’Keefe, they became something else entirely. “Painting the crosses”, she said, “was a way of painting the country”, and this is evident in their composition. Reducing these already simple objects to their most formal elements of shape and color, and magnifying them from there, she sets the cross against the surreal New Mexico background, its crossarm almost enforcing the horizon behind it. O’Keefe would settle in New Mexico some 16 years after this first visit, and become amongst its most celebrated and famous daughters, but it was these early cross paintings that established her relationship with the state and her as a leading American modernist.