| Summer Days | |
|---|---|
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| Artist | Georgia O'Keeffe |
| Year | 1936 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Movement | Modernism |
| Dimensions | 76.5 cm × 91.8 cm (30.1 in × 36.1 in) |
| Location | Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
| Accession | 94.171 |
Summer Days is a 1936 oil painting by the American 20th-century artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It depicts a buck deer skull with large antlers juxtaposed with a vibrant assortment of wildflowers hovering below. The skull and flowers are suspended over a mountainous desert landscape occupying the lower part of the composition. Summer Days is among several landscape paintings featuring animal skulls and inspired by New Mexico desert O'Keeffe completed between 1934 and 1936.
The juxtaposition of skull and landscape imagery in Summer Days has prompted various interpretations. While some art historians and critics see them as commonplace desert elements, others emphasize the painting's transcendental or mystical potential. O'Keeffe, who never assigned any specific symbolic meaning to her use of skeletal motifs, associated the inclusion of bones in her artwork with the raw, alive essence of the desert, and later defined Summer Days as simply a "portrayal of summertime".
The work was first exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz's New York gallery space called An American Place in 1937 and remained with O'Keeffe for numerous years, later featuring on the cover of her monographic book published in 1976 by Viking Press. The Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe attempted to acquire the painting in 1980, but financial disagreements within the museum led to its return to O'Keeffe. Summer Days was eventually purchased by the American fashion designer Calvin Klein in 1983, who later donated it to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994. It has been described as one of O'Keeffe's most recognized paintings.[1][2]
- ^ Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter (2004). Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe. New York, New York: W.W. Norton. p. 536. ISBN 978-0-393-32741-0.
- ^ Abrams, Dennis (2009). Georgia O'Keeffe. New York, New York: Chelsea House. pp. 95–96. ISBN 978-1-60413-336-3.