Cow Skull With Calico Roses

Cow Skull with Calico Roses
Georgia O'Keeffe, Cow Skull with Calico Roses, 1931
By ELLIE SCHNEIDER

I stand in Gallery 265 at the Art Institute of Chicago staring at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Cow Skull with Calico Roses. I had seen O’Keeffe’s work before, the classic, mega-focused flowers, including Blue and Green Music and Oriental Poppies. I had never seen this side of her, though.

After presenting about O’Keeffe for the class I learned about her life in New Mexico and how that greatly influenced her work, which includes many animal skulls from her time in the desert. Paintings like Cow Skull Red, White and Blue and Ram’s Head are right up there with Red Canna and Black Iris III.

While I will always appreciate O’Keeffe’s bold flowers and feminist pieces, Cow Skull with Calico Roses makes me feel more emotion than any rose or iris. I’m not quite sure how to describe the feeling. The cow skull makes me feel hollow like the object itself. The soft cream makes me feel war. The white roses make me feel feminine and bring a sense of purity. The black stripe makes me feel scared as it rips through the middle of the painting. After researching the painting, I found that the flowers were common grave decoration in New Mexico, which affirms my feeling of fear in the black stripe, since I think it is death peaking out from behind the soft cream canvas. Furthermore, the cow skull is another symbol of death, as the O’Keeffe’s subject most likely died in a drought in New Mexico.

While O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz stayed together until his death in 1946, Stieglitz started an affair with Dorothy Norman around 1927 to fill the void of intimacy he lacked in his marriage. Cow Skull with Calico Roses could represent the death of her relationship with Stieglitz. It could also be seen as the “death” of the flowers as her subject matters changed when she spent more time in, and eventually moving to, New Mexico. While her flowers show the life cycle: birth, growth, death, and decay, her skull pieces focus on death and decay.

No matter the reason behind O’Keeffe’s painting, I will always count it as one of my favorite paintings. When I walk into Gallery 265, every other piece of art disappears and I am immediately drawn into the hollow skull and the rich black stripe. O’Keeffe combines beauty and death unlike anybody I have ever seen before.
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The Last Door and Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad
Georgia O'Keeffe, My Last Door, 1952



“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for a moment.” 
---- Georgia O'Keeffe   

This was not her last door, as Georgia O’Keeffe painted nearly twenty versions of the door during various times in a series titled Patio. All of them were dedicated to the same door in her second New Mexican home in Abiquiu, now owned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the place where Jesse and Jane visit in this flashback. This scene with Jesse and Jane carries so much sentimental value since Jane’s death in season two—the art exhibit Jane keeps nagging Jesse about, Jane’s lipstick traces on the butt of her cigarette, even Jesse’s annoyingly loud yellow clothes seems to remind us of a happier time. Contrary to what Walt believes, Jane has plenty of good influences on Jesse, dating her is like taking a college-level course for him, artistically speaking. 

First thing we see in the opening flashback is My Last Door with two silhouetted figures standing in front of it (unfortunately not included in the clip). Once in the car, Jesse argues that O’Keeffe painted that door to perfection while Jane insists that each time was different, and it was about making that feeling last. The painter herself remarked, “I work on an idea for a long time. It’s like getting acquainted with a person, and I don’t get acquainted easily.” This fixated feeling did not stop at her “last door.” O’Keeffe passionately believed colors’ effect on emotional connection with subjects, considering her last door is depicted entirely in black and white, it suggests O’Keeffe had dropped her paintbrush on a bad note with her door. Many other paintings in the same series are identical in composition, the only difference lies in her choice of color, as if the viewer is traveling in a visual documentation of the ups and downs in her relationship with the door.

This rare colorless painting of O’Keeffe’s echoes with Jesse’s ongoing abasement. The show has never let go of an opportunity to add to Jesse’s misery—kicked out of his family, beaten up by Hank, Jane’s death, later Gale, Brock, and Andrea...He tries over and over again to do the right thing, and in his mind, O’Keeffe does the same trying to achieve aesthetic perfection of a door. In the first half of season three, Jesse laments on Jane’s death in his own ways, a fact strongly emphasized through his wardrobe change, another amazing quality of Breaking Bad. He starts dressing predominately in black, and gone are his cheerful combinations of yellows and reds. Like the black negative space, Jesse slowly falls into a downward spiral. 

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