Black Door with Red

Nature, pattern, abstraction, and imagination meet in Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Door with Red. Between 1946 and 1960 she painted more than 20 images of this patio wall at her adobe house in Abiquiu, New Mexico, varying the framing, perspective, and color with each new version of this simple composition. Here she reduced its visual elements to a strip of sky, a row of paving stones, and a single dark door. Most dramatically, O’Keeffe broke with her optical experience of this scene and drenched the canvas with deep yellows and reds. Do these colors bring to mind the desert sun and heat, or does the black door suggest some hidden secret, perhaps a personal meaning for the artist?

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