Black Cross, New Mexico

This is an oil painting on canvas, taller than it is wide, at about 99 centimeters high and 76 wide. That is roughly the height of a small child. A huge black cross fills the front of the picture. It looks flat, like a cutout pressed against the surface of the canvas. Behind it, rolling hills stretch into the distance, and a bright sunset glows beyond them. The cross is a handmade Catholic cross, painted far larger than it would be in life, so it towers over the landscape and takes over your view.

Look at how the picture is split between close and distant. The cross is right at the front, dark and solid, and it seems to have no depth, as if it sits on top of the canvas. Now look past it to the hills behind. They roll away in soft curves, and the sunset above them shines with bright color. The painter has set the heavy dark shape against that brilliant, faraway light. Let your eyes move back and forth between the two and notice how different they feel.

Georgia O'Keeffe, an American artist, painted this in 1929 after visiting the Southwest. The trip led her to make a series of paintings of Catholic crosses. She later recalled that for her, painting the crosses was a way of painting the country. So the cross here is not only a religious object. It is also her way of capturing the place she was seeing. She chose to enlarge the handmade cross and set it flat against the picture, with the distant sunset behind the hills.

The cross paintings helped tie O'Keeffe's name to New Mexico. She came back every summer after this first visit, and in 1949 she moved there for good. The Art Institute of Chicago organized her first major museum retrospective in 1943, a large show looking back over her career, and bought this painting at that time. Before you move on, look once more at the edge where the black cross meets the glowing sky and hills, and think about how one dark shape can stand for a whole landscape.