Beschreibung:

Skull of a Rocky Mountain Bighorn ram, complete with curled horns and portions of first vertebra, approximately 270 x 210 x 120 mm, desiccated, with minor active chipping and flaking. Provenance: Georgia O'Keeffe; gifted to: Marilyn Thuma (a.k.a. Mym Tuma, recorded in her manuscript diary, July 1971). A GEORGIA O'KEEFFE RAM'S HEAD FROM GHOST RANCH PRESENTED BY O'KEEFFE TO MYM TUMA. Clearly reminiscent of Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Hills, this ram's head was presented to Tuma on July 22nd, 1971, during a sixteen day stay at Ghost Ranch, as recorded in her contemporary sketch diary, as "Ram's head in Studio." She would later add to the reminiscence, "She offered me a skull on the Ghost Ranch patio that I noticed had a bullet hole in it thinking I might like it in remembrance of her, a memento. I said, 'No, I could not take anything that died by trauma' so she took me into her studio and showed me this beautiful skull which I own that she said hung on her house above the gate for 30 years — 'A long time,' O'Keeffe said, 'It's brittle.'" O'Keeffe's association with the ram's head is etched into our understanding of her — beginning with her iconic 1935 painting Ram's Head, White Hollyhock Hills. The ram's head would figure in a number of her works, but never so effectively. In 1968, photographer Arnold Newman captured O'Keeffe in front of another ram's head, reinforcing the association. In a way, they are the distillation of O'Keeffe's experience of New Mexico. "When I found the beautiful white bones on the desert I picked them up and took them home too ... I have used these things to say what is to me the wilderness and wonder of the world as I live in it." The skulls for O'Keefe represent not death, but life, "The bones seem to cut sharply to the centre of something that is keenly alive ... even though it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty" ("About Myself," essay in the exhibition catalogue for An American Place, 1939).