Rust Red Hills

Rust Red Hills
Artist	Georgia O'Keeffe
Year	1930
Dimensions	16 in (41 cm) × 30 in (76 cm)
Location	Brauer Museum of Art
Accession No.	62.02

Rust Red Hills is a 1930 landscape painting by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It depicts red and brown hills under a glowing red and yellow sky in northern New Mexico. At its initial exhibition in 1931, O'Keeffe indicated that it was one of her own best-loved paintings from that time period. The work is currently held by the Brauer Museum of Art.

Background

Main article: Georgia O'Keeffe § New Mexico (1930s–1986)

O'Keeffe became interested in New Mexico after her friends Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury James (then known as "Beck" Strand), Paul Rosenfeld, and Dorothy Brett began sharing their experiences visiting there in the late 1920s. In the winter of 1928, Mabel Dodge Luhan, the leader of an art colony in Taos, invited O'Keeffe to visit. For the next two summers, from 1929 to 1930, O'Keeffe painted throughout Taos, Alcade, and near Abiquiu, often using her modified car as her studio. She was surrounded by Southwestern Pueblo architecture, cultural motifs, and the desert, hills, and mountains unique to the geography of New Mexico. Notable works by O'Keeffe at this time include a series of six paintings of the San Francisco de Asís Mission Church (Ranchos Church, Taos, 1929; Ranchos Church, 1930); her interest in the crosses of the Penitentes religious group (Black Cross, New Mexico, 1929); and her focus on mountains and hills (Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico/Out Back of Marie's II, 1930; The Mountain, New Mexico, 1931). One painting from O'Keeffe's 1930 mountain series, Mountain at Bear Lake — Taos, was gifted to the White House in 1997 and currently hangs in the White House Library as part of the permanent White House art collection.

Development

O'Keeffe produced 54 works in 1930, some of which were created in Maine and New York, but the majority of which were completed in New Mexico. In April 1930, O'Keeffe was painting in Maine, continuing her shell series which began in the 1920s (Shell and Old Shingle I, Shell and Old Shingle VII, 1926; Shell No. 2, 1928) and continued sporadically into the 1930s (Clam Shell, 1930; Two Pink Shells/Pink Shell, 1937). By May, O'Keeffe was painting in Lake George, New York (Lake George Early Moonrise, 1930). During her second stay in New Mexico from June to September 1930, O'Keeffe completed Rust Red Hills. Other titles for the work include Hills - Back of Mabel's, Taos, and Toward Abiquiu, New Mexico. Rust Red Hills was one of approximately 19 or more paintings and drawings of hills and mountains she made in the summer of 1930, with landforms such as sand hills, dark mesas, and the hills and mountains of Taos, Alcade, and the environs of Abiquiu representing the main thematic focus of her work for the entire year.

Provenance

General Mills purchased the work for their employee art collection in 1958 from the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was exhibited in Minneapolis and lent out to various museums. The 1953 Percy H. Sloan endowment to Valparaiso University allowed Richard Brauer to purchase Rust Red Hills for the university art museum in 1962 for $5,700. He was able to authenticate the work directly with Georgia O'Keeffe. It was the second painting acquired by the new museum and was added to the permanent collection of what was later renamed the Brauer Museum of Art.

Deaccessioning controversy

In 2023, Valparaiso University decided to raise funds for infrastructure improvements by selling three major works in its collection, including Rust Red Hills, now worth an estimated $15 million. The decision led to a deaccessioning controversy and lawsuit attempting to block the proposed sale, with Brauer and major museum associations denouncing the university's decision to sell the painting.

Exhibitions

The painting was first exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz's An American Place gallery in 1931, where it was first exhibited without a visible title, despite the title appearing on the stretcher bar on the verso, where O'Keeffe signed her initials within a star, a symbol she used to mark a selected painting she personally preferred as special and well liked. Several decades later, the painting appeared in a 1953 exhibition tour at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Mayo Hill Galleries in Florida. It has been included in touring exhibitions in 1961, 1965, 1980, 2004, 2008, and in 2013, appearing throughout the United States, Canada, Ireland, and Spain. The painting also appeared at the Tate Modern in 2016 in the United Kingdom.

• Georgia O'Keeffe: Recent Paintings, New Mexico, New York, Etc. -- Etc. (1931)
• An Exhibition of Paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe (1953)
• American Business and the Arts (1961)
• Georgia O'Keeffe (1965)
• Georgia O'Keeffe An Exhibition of Oils, Watercolors and Drawings (1980)
• Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place (2004)
• Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams (2008)
• Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico: Architecture, Katsinam, and the Land (2013)
• Georgia O'Keeffe (2016)