Depicting a remote stretch of the Bisti/De-Na-Zin wilderness in northwestern New Mexico, Black Place II (1945) captures a landscape that Georgia O’Keeffe came to regard as one of her most cherished painting sites. Situated approximately 150 miles from her Ghost Ranch home, this desolate region was known to the artist as the ‘Black Place’. Captivated by its austere, eroded hills, which she once likened to ‘a mile of elephants… with almost white sand at their feet’, O’Keeffe developed a profound and enduring relationship with the terrain, striving to attune her vision to its stark geological forms and muted tonalities (quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe, The Viking Press, New York, 1976, n.p.). Created during her most prolific period of engagement with the site, Black Place II distils the region’s vast, elemental lineaments into a sensuous meditation on form, feeling and presence.

O’Keeffe first encountered the Black Place in the mid-1930s while driving through the Navajo Nation. Over the following decade and a half, she returned repeatedly, often accompanied by her assistant Maria Chabot. Setting up camp in the remote terrain, she transformed her Ford Model A into a makeshift studio – reversing the front seat and propping her canvas against the rear bench. Her earliest painting of the site, Grey Hill Forms (1936), renders its distinctive topography with a soft, measured naturalism, as gentle slopes unfurl beneath a narrow band of sky.

By 1944, O’Keeffe’s naturalistic sensibility had given way to a radical compression of space and a heightened abstraction: horizons vanished, forms contracted and the landscape was reimagined as a sequence of interlocking shapes and rhythms. Responding to the stormy conditions of that year, works such as Black Place II (1944) channel these elemental forces through a serrated streak of lightning that fissures the composition down its centre. The following year, under gentler skies, O’Keeffe created Black Place II – one of six paintings from this fertile two-year period – in which a deep ravine likewise divides the picture plane. Yet here, tranquility prevails: the smooth swelling hills graduate from tonal greys and blacks to a scalloped flush of rose pink that skirts the lower slope.

Over the course of her visits between 1936 and 1949, O’Keeffe produced only 14 works on canvas of the Black Place. Of these, Black Place II is one of only four remaining in private hands, with the rest held in prominent institutional collections across the United States, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. The work made its public debut in 1946 at An American Place, the final New York gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, who as both O’Keeffe’s partner and gallerist, played an instrumental role in shaping O’Keeffe’s artistic development. Mounted just months before his death, the exhibition was one of the last he personally oversaw and marked the beginning of the work’s illustrious exhibition history, with subsequent presentations in over 20 cities worldwide across nearly eight decades.