On Cézanne’s mountain, O’Keeffe’s mesa, and what a painter owns after decades of looking.
Georgia O’Keeffe refused to paint like the European masters, and a new profile takes her at her word. But Paul Cézanne, the painter the men around her revered, painted one mountain some eighty times over nearly thirty years, and she painted hers twenty-nine. She called it her private mountain and said God had told her she could have it if she painted it enough. The question is what she got.
I A Mountain Near Aix
In the last autumn of his life Paul Cézanne walked most mornings from his studio on the hill of Les Lauves, above Aix-en-Provence, to a spot from which he could see Mont Sainte-Victoire, and painted it again. He had been painting it for nearly thirty years. The mountain is a ridge of grey limestone a thousand meters high, and he had painted it framed by pines, crossed by a railway viaduct, from the road to Le Tholonet and from his sister’s house at Bellevue, in watercolor and in oil, some eighty times in all. In the late pictures it is barely a mountain. It is a field of blue and green and ochre patches, each one a decision, and what the picture records is not the ridge but a man looking at it and not trusting what he sees. He died in October 1906, a week after being caught in a storm while painting outdoors.
Within a few years Cézanne was among the most revered painters in the small modern world of New York. Alfred Stieglitz showed his watercolors at 291 in 1911; the Armory Show hung him in 1913; the painters around Stieglitz, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, learned his lesson in a particular form. A painting is made of touches. Doubt can be a method. The surface should show the hand’s hesitation. A profile of Georgia O’Keeffe in the summer Smithsonian tells how she refused all that. Its last picture is the Courtauld’s Sainte-Victoire, and the caption says two things about it: that O’Keeffe “did not share her male peers’ reverence” for Cézanne, and that his paintings of the mountain were Impressionist. The second is wrong, and the profile’s text says it too, setting Cézanne beside Monet; Cézanne spent his life getting out of Impressionism. The first is half right: she did refuse the Stieglitz men’s Cézanne, and theirs was a manner, which most of them took for the whole of him.
II The Spoiled Poplars
The story the profile tells is a good one, and it is hers. In the 1907–08 school year at the Art Students League, where William Merritt Chase taught the brush to move quickly, she showed a classmate a painting of two poplars with the sky between their branches, and he took it from her and painted dots of red and blue and green over the trees to show her how the Impressionists did it. She had not heard of them. She thought he had spoiled her picture. The profile says that from then on she did not let other people spoil her paintings, and the sentence is true in a way it does not intend, because the rest of her life was spent fighting off what other people saw in them.
The flowers came first. In the middle 1920s she painted petals at the scale of a window so that New Yorkers in a hurry would have to stop, and they stopped, and they saw what they brought. She found this as irritating as the dots: people hung their own associations on her flower, she wrote, and wrote about it as if she saw what they saw, and she did not. Then, in 1929, she went to New Mexico, and after her second summer there she sent a barrel of bones back to the house she shared with Stieglitz on Lake George, and sat down to paint them. The men she knew, she wrote afterward, talked endlessly about the Great American Novel and the Great American Play, and she was not sure they aspired to the Great American Painting. So she painted a cow’s skull floating against blue, and because that was not quite enough she added a red stripe down each side. She said they would not think it great, but they would notice it.
This is the O’Keeffe of the profile and of the museum shop: the painter who owed nothing, who answered Paris with a skull in the colors of the flag. The evidence for it is real. Her edges are hard where Cézanne’s are broken; her color is flat where his is built from a hundred touches; she painted the thing in front of her until it turned into a shape, where he painted his uncertainty about it. On the surface, which is where a painting lives, she refused him entirely.
III Seven or Eight Versions
But a painter’s method is not her surface, and the method was in place before the desert. In December 1931, speaking of her calla lilies, she told a reporter from the Herald Tribune that she always did seven or eight versions of the same thing before she arrived at the final one. Nearly forty years later, explaining her paintings of clouds seen from airplanes, she told the Times that when she got started with a theme she had to keep going. That is the habit of a painter who works by return, and it is Cézanne’s habit, not Monet’s. Monet’s haystacks are a series about light changing; Cézanne’s mountain is a series about a man changing in front of a thing that does not. O’Keeffe’s bones and doors and flowers are the second kind.
Consider what the men did with the same reverence. Marsden Hartley, who loved Cézanne as hard as any of them, saw a Cézanne show at Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1926 and moved to Aix. By December he was living in the Maison Maria, a stone house in the woods by the Château Noir that Cézanne had painted about 1895, so that he lived inside a Cézanne and walked out of it to Cézanne’s mountain. He drew it, and painted it in Cézanne’s constructive strokes and louder colors. The pictures are good and they are borrowed: he took the manner and the motif both, and left the one thing that made Cézanne Cézanne, which was that the mountain had been his own, outside his own window, for nearly thirty years. His graphite drawing of it in the Brooklyn Museum is dated 1926–27. The mountain in it is a thousand meters high and belongs to someone else.
In 1934 O’Keeffe saw the mountain that would hold her habit for the rest of her life. Cerro Pedernal is a flat-topped, basalt-capped mesa southwest of Abiquiú, just over three thousand meters, and from the window of the house she took at Ghost Ranch it sits on the horizon like a table someone set there. She began painting it in 1936. She painted it behind red hills and behind a pink one, framed in the hollow of a pelvis, under a ladder hanging in an evening sky, as a thin blue line at the bottom of a canvas that was otherwise cloud. The museum that holds her estate counts twenty-nine paintings of it, and the profile says simply that she painted the Pedernal over and over.
Most of the men who revered Cézanne took his manner and left his method. Hartley found the repetition later. From 1939 to 1942 he painted Katahdin, in Maine, a mountain the Penobscot named and four nations hold sacred, at least eighteen times, all from sketches made in eight days at a lakeside camp; by then O’Keeffe had been at the Pedernal for three years. He worked from the sketches, not from the mountain. She took the method entire, and left the manner. She refused the touch, the doubt, the hesitation in the stroke, and kept the one idea underneath them, which is that a painter’s subject can be a single thing seen for the rest of a life, and that the seeing is the work. Whether it came to her from Cézanne, in the years after his watercolors hung at 291, when the men around her talked of nothing else, or whether she arrived at it alone, the kinship is closer than the refusal. She did not want to paint like Cézanne. She wanted what he had, which was a mountain of her own.
IV My Private Mountain
She said so. In her late eighties she called the Pedernal her private mountain, and said it belonged to her: “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.” It is the best sentence she ever spoke about her work, and it has aged in two directions at once.
Read one way it is a painter’s joke about a painter’s truth, and her biographer Laurie Lisle records that it was made jokingly. Nobody owns a mountain by looking at it, and she knew that; the joke is that she had done it anyway, by a method that takes nothing from the mountain and leaves it where it was. What she owned were twenty-nine paintings, and through them a way of seeing a particular horizon that is now, for a great many people, the only way they see it. That is a real kind of ownership, and it is the only kind a painter can have, and Cézanne had it over Sainte-Victoire.
Read the other way, the sentence is what it says. The mesa has a name in Tewa, Tsí Pín, flaking-stone mountain, and a name in Spanish, flint hill, that means nearly the same, and people quarried its flint for thousands of years, the ancestors of the pueblos among them, before anyone arrived with an easel. In 2021 the New Mexico Tourism Department built an advertisement around her words about the state, “that was mine,” and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, which exists to keep her name, posted a statement that it did not support the use of such quotations, because it was now clear that this was the language of possession, colonization and erasure.
Four years later the museum gave three galleries, its largest among them, to the correction: Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, which opened last November and closes on Sunday, November 1. In the museum’s own description, she often claimed northern New Mexico as her own, on land that has been home to six Tewa Pueblos since time immemorial. The exhibition went out under an image by the Santa Clara artist Jason Garcia, who brought it to the museum and co-curated it: a clay tablet made up as a comic-book cover, with a cover date of 1977, the year her claim to the mountain went public. On it O’Keeffe stands in her black dress before a sign that once read “Welcome to O’Keeffe Country,” with “Tewa” scrawled over her name and Tsí Pín behind her.
Garcia has answered her on her own terms. He told NPR that her line about God was “pretty funny,” and that the mountain is not hers alone. He opened with nineteen pictures of Tsí Pín, painted from one vantage during a residency at Ghost Ranch, and he set out to pass her twenty-nine. He says he returns to the mountain “not to possess it, but to be in conversation with it,” and also that painting it more often than she did is a way of taking it back. That is her method turned on her claim, in a Tewa hand.
A year ago, in Aeon, the Puebloan poet Alanna Offield published an essay called “My private mountain,” about growing up in the shadow of a painter who was sold to her as the owner of her own homeland. This spring Alicia Inez Guzmán argued in High Country News that O’Keeffe’s paintings have come to stand for the whole of northern New Mexico, so that the region is sold as O’Keeffe Country and the people who were there first are painted out of it.
Offield is right, and the museum is right, and so is the joke. The sentence holds both readings. She did not take the mountain from anyone, and she also said, in the plain American way, that it belonged to her, and the saying is part of what the Smithsonian profile means by a great American painter. Cézanne never said Sainte-Victoire was his, as far as anyone recorded; Hartley, after eight days at Katahdin, wrote that it was “my mountain.” The claim is the American part, and it is also the part that has come back on her.
V The Cloud in the Eye
The eyes began to go in the 1960s. She described it later as a cloud entering her eyeballs, and in a manuscript from the seventies, “My Eyes and Painting,” she wrote of the world beginning to turn grey when her eyes stopped seeing sharply as they had for eighty years. Macular degeneration takes the center of the field and leaves the edges, which is to say it takes exactly the kind of seeing her paintings were made of, the hard edge and the flat plane, and leaves the kind Cézanne’s late pictures look like, the blur at the margin. She painted her last unassisted oils in 1972, among them a black rock against blue sky and a canvas called The Beyond, a dark band under a pale one, a horizon with nothing on it.
She stopped working, she wrote, and then, surprised in time that the grey world could be beautiful in a new way, she began to think about how to start again. She worked in clay in her last years, by touch, with a young potter named Juan Hamilton who had come to the door looking for work and stayed. She had assistants mix her colors. The mountain was still outside the window, and she could no longer see it sharply, and she had, by her own account, already been given it. Ownership by looking has to pass through the years when she could not look, and it passes: the owning was done, and it was in the paintings, and the paintings did not need her eyes any more than Cézanne’s needed his after October 1906.
VI Ashes
She died in Santa Fe in March 1986, at ninety-eight, and her ashes were scattered on the Pedernal, which she had climbed herself. Cézanne is buried in the cemetery of Saint-Pierre in Aix, under his mountain too; he climbed it as a boy and at least once more, in his fifties, and otherwise looked. He never claimed it; everyone else gives it to him.
That is the difference, and it is smaller than the profile thinks and larger than it knows. Two painters, a continent apart, took one piece of ground and painted it until the painting and the ground could not be told apart. One of them did it in a manner the other refused, and the other did it in a manner that made her what the profile says she set out to be, a great American painter. But the manner was never the point. The point was the return, morning after morning, to a thing that did not change, so that the changing could be seen. That was his method, and she made it hers, and the only original thing in it was the mountain. The Pedernal is still there. It belongs to the people who named it and to no one, and it has been painted, by her count, enough.
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Sources: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “Georgia O’Keeffe Ignored Advice to Mimic Great European Masters. Her Goal Instead Was to Be a Great American Painter,” Smithsonian, Summer 2026, photographs by Jen Judge; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s “In Her Own Words,” for her interviews with the New York Herald Tribune (Ishbel Ross, December 29, 1931) and the New York Times (Grace Glueck, October 18, 1970); Laurie Lisle, Portrait of an Artist (1980), p. 295, as cited by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for Deer’s Skull with Pedernal; Alanna Offield, “My private mountain,” Aeon, October 28, 2025; Alicia Inez Guzmán, “O’Keeffe Country was never O’Keeffe’s to begin with,” High Country News, May 29, 2026; NPR, March 14, 2026; Alex De Vore, “New Mexico True Campaign Refresh Draws Ire,” Santa Fe Reporter, April 17, 2021; Ania Hull, “Indigenous artists reframe the ownership of ancestral lands,” Pasatiempo, Santa Fe New Mexican; the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country and its press release of October 8, 2025; New Mexico Magazine; Southwest Contemporary; the National Gallery of Art on Marsden Hartley’s Mount Katahdin, Maine (1942); the Princeton University Art Museum on Hartley’s Blue Landscape (1942); the Brooklyn Museum, Hartley, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1926–27); the Kimbell Art Museum, Cézanne, Maison Maria with a View of Château Noir; the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project chronology (Bates College); the Maine Atlas on Katahdin; Gary A. Smith and Bruce B. Huckell, “The geological and geoarchaeological significance of Cerro Pedernal,” New Mexico Geological Society Guidebook 56 (2005); the Vision and Art Project on her eyesight, for Jeffrey Hogrefe’s account and her manuscript “My Eyes and Painting”; and Britannica on Mont Sainte-Victoire. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini Argon for this essay; they reproduce no painting or photograph. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; cold read by Claude Fable 5.1.