Nearly 20 Georgia O’Keeffe works, most never before shown in the UK, will be displayed at the Courtauld Gallery in London from October 2027. The exhibition, titled Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch, will examine how the artist’s New Mexico home influenced her life and work.
The Importance of Ghost Ranch
O’Keeffe first saw Ghost Ranch in 1934 and immediately felt a connection. “As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” she once said. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.” Initially renting a room, she later bought the property and made it her permanent home. The remote ranch, north of Santa Fe, became her summer residence for decades, inspiring numerous paintings. Her ashes were scattered there.
Dr Karen Serres, senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, said few in the UK appreciate how Ghost Ranch shaped O’Keeffe’s development as a modernist. “Ghost Ranch was such an important part of her life, and it illuminates a large part of her art in general,” Serres told the Guardian.
Landscapes and Flowers
Serres noted that O’Keeffe applied the same close-up, attentive approach to landscapes as she did to her famous flower paintings. “For example, in her flower paintings, where she goes really, really, really close up and says, ‘I want to do that because I want to make people look at things that are overlooked.’ She does the exact same thing for these landscapes.”
Ghost Ranch was one of two New Mexico properties O’Keeffe lived in. The other, a house in Abiquiú 16 miles south, is preserved and open to the public. Ghost Ranch itself is not open to the general public.
Mystique and Misunderstanding
O’Keeffe added to the ranch’s mystique by suggesting in interviews that a murder had occurred there before she bought it. Many famous photoshoots, including one with Cecil Beaton for Vogue, took place at the ranch.
Despite her international reputation, O’Keeffe’s work has rarely been shown in the UK. Serres said only six of the works in the exhibition have been seen in Britain before.
Shifting Reputation
O’Keeffe’s British reception has not always been favorable. After her 1993 Hayward show, male critics dismissed her as a “commercial illustrator”, “irredeemably amateur”, and “grossly overrated”. At her 2016 Tate show, the narrative focused on challenging assumptions that her flower paintings depicted female genitalia.
Serres said the Ghost Ranch exhibition offers another chance to understand an often-misunderstood artist. “She’s known as just this formidable female artist,” said Serres. “But actually seeing her work, understanding what she’s about, I don’t think we are there yet.”
