You think you know everything, and then all of a sudden, a virtually unknown Georgia O’Keeffe landscape emerges into the art history canon after spending decades boxed up in a New York City apartment closet. Just shy of a century old, O’Keeffe’s long-lost “Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I” (1930) is slated to go under the hammer at Christie’s 20th Century Evening sale on November 17.
Painted just one year after O’Keeffe’s first visit to New Mexico, the rediscovered landscape work depicting Lobo Peak is likely one of three iterations the artist completed; the second in the series is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, and the third now resides in a private collection after having once belonged to David and Peggy Rockefeller.
Considered an important early work documenting O’Keeffe’s growing love affair with the high desert, the artist’s depiction incorporates her signature undulating contours and near-anatomical landscape features that seamlessly fuse a high-contrast palette of saturated earth tones.
So, what was it doing at the back of a closet in an East Village apartment for the last four decades?
