During the early 1960s, Georgia O’Keeffe made a group of photographs, drawings, and paintings of the road that passed by her house in Abiquiú, New Mexico. She wrote about creating one of the photographs:

Two walls of my room in the Abiquiu house are glass and from one window I see the road to Espanola, Santa Fe and the world. The road fascinates me with its ups and downs, and finally its wide sweep as it speeds toward the wall of my hilltop to go past me. I had made two or three snaps of it with a camera. For one of them I turned the camera at a sharp angle to get all the road. It was accidental that I made the road seem to stand up in the air, but it amused me and I began drawing and painting it as a new shape. The trees and mesa beside it were unimportant for that painting—it was just the road. ^[1]

The photograph she referenced was probably [Looking from Bedroom at Abiquiu Towards Espanola, New Mexico] ^[fig1], in which the road curves and disappears into the Cerro Pedernal mesa in the Jemez Mountains. O’Keeffe, who is often interpreted through photographs made of her by others—especially those by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946)—was also a photographer herself. ^[2] In the case of Winter Road I, her photography and painting worked in tandem.

The quasi-abstract, asymmetric composition of Winter Road I is two-dimensional, with no indication of spatial recession. The elegant, undulating brown line that signifies the road meanders across the canvas. O’Keeffe has removed all of the supporting scenery in the painting, which is without a trace of the hills, mesa, and trees that are visible in her photograph. She loosened her reductive approach and included suggestions of landscape elements in two later, horizontal-format versions of the theme. Road to the Ranch (1964, private collection) and Road Past the View ^[fig2] both represent another view of the road descending from O’Keeffe’s ranch until “it disappears in the hills below the mesa with the Sangre de Cristo mountains on beyond.” ^[3]

The artist’s desire to eliminate spatial recession and recreate her perception that the road in the photograph seemed “to stand up in the air” drew on her recent experiences traveling high above the earth’s surface in an airplane as well as her elevated vantage point from her home atop a mesa. The flat, linear quality of Winter Road I relates the painting to her extensive series of dry desert riverbeds such as It Was Yellow and Pink II ^[fig3]. While her road and riverbed works evoke aerial views of the landscape, O’Keeffe also constantly experimented with organic ambiguities—the form of a gently winding river or road mimics that of a tree branch, for example.

The linear elegance of Winter Road I and its emphasis on formal balance and unfilled space reminiscent of sumi-e ink painting may reflect O’Keeffe’s long-held interest in Japanese and Chinese art. The artist owned a number of books on Chinese and Japanese art, including an exhibition catalog on Chinese calligraphy and painting that had been published the year before she executed this painting. ^[4] Through severe economy of form, verging on abstraction and invoking wide-ranging associations, this composition expresses the serene, spacious southwestern landscape.

The medium-weight, plain-weave support is unlined and remains mounted on its original stretcher. The stretcher had been used for an earlier work that was formerly mounted on its opposite side. The artist applied a thin white ground layer. Infrared reflectography reveals the presence of a charcoal underdrawing that outlines the road. The artist used only two colors, white and brown. The road was painted first, although the paler brown part in the distance was created with a mixture of brown and white and worked wet in wet. The paint was applied thinly, and the texture of the brushstrokes is evident. The support’s weave pattern is quite distinct, providing the white expanse with textural variation. The painting is in good condition. The surface is coated with a thin layer of synthetic resin varnish.

Michael Swicklik

July 24, 2024