Women in high places

In the spring of 1956, Georgia O’Keeffe (1888–1986) took a three-month trip to Peru, visiting both the coastal and mountainous regions of the country. Traveling with her friend, Bettie Pilkington, the two experienced the desert, lush vegetation, swift rivers, and towering mountains. O’Keeffe wrote in a letter to her friend and fellow artist Anita Pollitzer (1894–1975) that this trip was the kind that “one could only take in complete ignorance.” ¹ The traveling companions hiked, camped, drove along dirt roads on the edge of mountain cliffs, and even watched an entire hotel sink into a lake, making Peru, not only the most “foreign” place in which the artist had ever traveled, but also the most “terrifying.” ² In the year or so after this three-month journey, O’Keeffe produced just a few watercolors and oil paintings of the sights in Peru from her sketches and memory. O’Keeffe’s drawings, watercolors, and paintings of Peru, undertaken in the artist’s late career, will be discussed in the context of her oeuvre and reaction to the Peruvian landscape.