A painting by Georgia O’Keeffe has surfaced in an East Village apartment after spending decades in a closet. It now carries an estimate of $2 million to $3 million at Christie’s. A woman from Rhode Island who didn’t want to be named found it in 2022 while helping her elderly aunt clear an apartment to make room for home health care workers.
The aunt has since died. She was a former Foreign Service worker. In 1963, her mother bought the picture from the Downtown Gallery on 51st Street for $3,800 and gave it to her as a graduation present. Later text from the sale material says it came from both her parents. Either way, it stayed with her for more than sixty years, and for much of that time it sat in its original gallery packaging. Part of the proceeds will go to an educational institution, which has not been named.
The work is called Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I. It is an early view of the landscape that held O’Keeffe for the rest of her life. She first visited New Mexico in 1929 and was captivated at once. The sky, the long views and the rolling hills all pulled her in. She painted this picture the following year. A nearly identical panorama of the same size hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
O’Keeffe wrote to the critic Henry McBride telling him she never felt at home in the East the way she did out west. She described a beautiful adobe studio with a very large window. Beyond it lay a green alfalfa field, then sagebrush, then a perfect mountain. It made her feel like flying. The painting reads like the same mood in oil.
Specialists think this may be the first of three related pictures of the sand hills in the Rio Grande Valley, west of Taos—the Met version dates from 1930. The third, from 1931, belonged to Peggy and David Rockefeller. It sold at Christie’s New York on 9 May 2018 for $8,412,500, against an estimate of $3 million to $5 million. That result will not have escaped anyone’s notice.
The newly found canvas is the more intimate of the group, according to the catalogue. It feels like a quick, direct answer to a place she loved. Earth tones swell and dip across the surface, and the paint is thick. The format is stark and horizontal. The mountains are cropped so the hills seem to carry on past the edges. A thin band of bright blue sky is all that shows between the peaks. No figure appears anywhere.
O’Keeffe loved how New Mexico made distances look sharp. New York, by contrast, felt tight and crowded. A curator, Lisa Mintz Messinger, once wrote that the light gave her something like telescopic vision. The cropping and viewpoint also recall photographs by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and her friend Paul Strand.
She never stopped struggling with the scenery. In June 1931 she told Stieglitz that she wanted to paint Lobo Mountain, had wanted to every year, and found it nearly impossible.
She moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949. Ghost Ranch became home, and she kept returning to the terrain. Over time her forms grew flatter and simpler. She cared more about the feeling of the place than about how it looked. The sky stayed central. The narrow blue strip at the top of this early canvas grows into the large abstractions of her last decades, such as Sky Above the Flat White Cloud II, made between 1960 and 1964 and now in the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. Those later pictures have been compared to the work of Agnes Martin.
A critic writing in 1932 said O’Keeffe’s attitude to nature was close to pantheism. She loved the sky, the wind and the solitary places, he wrote, as one might love a person. The new find supports the idea. It is a painting made by someone in the first flush of belonging somewhere.
The story of its survival is part of the appeal. It was bought directly from the artist’s own dealer. It passed through a single family. It was rarely handled and seldom seen. Few rediscoveries are this clean.
Whether bidders will respect the estimate is another matter. The 2018 sale suggests that Abiquiu pictures of this period can outrun their guide prices by a wide margin.