Animal skulls, like the one painted in O’Keeffe’s 1936 work Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettia, hung on the walls of Ghost Ranch, her New Mexico home. Photograph: Georgia O’Keeffe/© 2026 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / DACS Courtesy of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART View image in fullscreen Animal skulls, like the one painted in O’Keeffe’s 1936 work Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettia, hung on the walls of Ghost Ranch, her New Mexico home. Photograph: Georgia O’Keeffe/© 2026 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / DACS Courtesy of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART Georgia O'Keeffe New exhibition to explore how Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert home shaped her art Show will exhibit 18 works never shown before in the UK, and offer deeper insight into an often misunderstood artist
Prefer the Guardian on Google As soon as Georgia O’Keeffe was shown Ghost Ranch, she knew it was her place.
The remote property in the shadow of the mountains north of Santa Fe in New Mexico would become the artist’s summer residence for decades – a setting that fascinated her, inspired several paintings and is where her ashes were scattered. “I knew the minute I got up here that this was where I would live,” she once said.
Now, a new exhibition at the Courtauld will shed light on O’Keeffe’s home at Ghost Ranch and how it shaped her art and life.
Almost two dozen works that have never before been shown in the UK will make up the show, titled Georgia O’Keeffe: Ghost Ranch, which opens in October 2027.
View image in fullscreen Red and Yellow Cliffs, 1940, is one of a number of O’Keeffe’s works explicitly influenced by the land that surrounded Ghost Ranch. Photograph: Georgia O’Keeffe/© 2026 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / DACS Courtesy of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo: Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART Dr Karen Serres, senior curator of paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, told the Guardian that few in the UK are aware of the role Ghost Ranch played in the development of one of the most important 20th-century American modernists.
“Ghost Ranch was such an important part of her life, and it illuminates a large part of her art in general,” said Serres.
“For example, in her flower paintings, where she goes really, really, really close up and says, ‘I want to do that because I want to make people look at things that are overlooked.’ She does the exact same thing for these landscapes.”
O’Keeffe moved into the property, which was part of a sprawling 21,000 acre estate, in 1934, initially renting a room there before eventually purchasing it and making it her permanent home.
“ As soon as I saw it, that was my country,” she once said. “I’d never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly.”
Ghost Ranch was one of two properties O’Keeffe lived at in New Mexico. The other was a house in the village of Abiquiú, 16 miles south of the ranch, which is preserved and open to the public.
Ghost Ranch is not open to the general public but was somewhere that O’Keeffe “ always felt more at home ”, according to the New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins, who profiled her in 1974.
“The solitude, the stillness and the harsh, dry, splendid landscape are more her world,” he wrote. “Animal skulls and bleached antlers hang on the walls of her patio, and rocks picked up on her walks and camping trips spill in profusion over low tables and shelves.”
O’Keeffe added to the mystique around Ghost Ranch when she suggested in interviews that the home had been the scene…