New exhibition to explore how Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert home shaped her art

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.

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 of a murder before she bought it, and many of her most famous photoshoots – included with Cecil Beaton for Vogue – took place there.

Despite a significant international profile, O’Keeffe’s work has rarely been seen in the UK; Serres says only six out of the two dozen works on show at the Courtauld have been shown in Britain before.

O’Keeffe’s reputation in the UK hasn’t always been so exalted.

After her Hayward show in 1993, Britain’s male critics unleashed a torrent of dismissive reviews. She was called a “commercial illustrator”, “irredeemably amateur”, an artist who “made good monthly images on calendars” and “grossly overrated”.

Two decades later, before her show at the Tate in 2016, one of the main narratives was that the show aimed to challenge the “conservative male” assumptions that her flower paintings were depictions of female genitalia.

Serres said that the Ghost Ranch exhibition is another opportunity for the wider public to gain a deeper knowledge of an artist who is still often misunderstood or who has her work framed by the response of male critics.

“She’s known as just this formidable female artist,” said Serres. “But actually seeing her work, understanding what she’s about, I don’t think we are there yet.”