Jimson weed, a cow’s skull, bare mountainsides scored by flash floods: revelations of beauty in badlands mark the work of American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). This is ‘nature’ art from a Modernist sensibility — strong, simplified form shocked into being by a lush palette. O’Keeffe may once have been drawn to the dark hearts of flowers, but she became a desert geek par excellence, in love with geological strata and stripped skeletons in the Martian landscapes of New Mexico. “The bones,” she wrote, “seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable”. Much as early nineteenth-century art of the sublime — in tandem with explosive discoveries in geology — shifted Europe’s responses to its own wilderness from repulsion to awe, O’Keeffe taught us to see new worlds in the New World.  Read more