You’ve probably seen the posters. Maybe it was in a college dorm or a high-end gallery gift shop. A bleached white deer skull floats in a vast, impossibly blue sky, hovering over a carpet of vibrant wildflowers. It’s "Summer Days," one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s most iconic works from 1936. But here’s the thing: most people look at it and see a pretty New Mexico souvenir. They’re missing the point entirely.
Honestly, it's a bit weird.
O'Keeffe wasn't just painting a desert scene. She was doing something much more radical with Summer Days by Georgia O’Keeffe. She was collapsing time. She was taking the "dead" things she found in the dirt and making them more alive than the actual flowers at the bottom of the canvas. To understand this painting, you have to understand a woman who was tired of being told what "feminine" art was supposed to look like. She was over the skyscrapers of New York. She wanted something primal.
The Desert Was Her Laboratory
By the mid-1930s, O'Keeffe had found her soul in the American Southwest. She’d spent years in New York being championed (and, some would argue, pigeonholed) by her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. People kept trying to read Freudian subtext into her flower paintings. It frustrated her. She famously said, "When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they’re really talking about their own affairs."
So, she went to Ghost Ranch.
The desert heat is brutal. It strips everything down to the essentials. O'Keeffe started collecting bones like other people collect seashells. To her, these weren't symbols of death. They were symbols of the permanence of life. In a letter to a friend, she basically explained that the bones seemed to cut more sharply to the center of what the world was made of. They were "strangely more living than the animals walking around."
When you look at Summer Days by Georgia O’Keeffe, notice the placement. The skull isn't resting on the ground. It’s not buried. It is elevated. It occupies the space usually reserved for the sun or the clouds. By putting a deer skull in the sky, she forces you to look at it as a celestial object. It’s a bit jarring if you think about it too long. Why is a dead animal’s head presiding over a field of sunflowers and zinnias?
It’s because, in O’Keeffe’s world, the bone is the ultimate beauty.
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Technical Mastery That Looks Easy (But Isn't)
The blue in this painting is legendary. It’s not just "sky blue." It’s that deep, high-altitude New Mexico cerulean that feels like it could swallow you whole. O'Keeffe used a technique of graduated washes to make the sky feel infinite.
There is no horizon line.
This is a huge deal. Without a horizon, the viewer loses their sense of scale. Are we looking at a tiny skull inches away? Or a giant, god-like skull hovering miles above the earth? This ambiguity is exactly why the painting stays in your head. It refuses to give you a floor to stand on.
The flowers at the bottom—those yellows, reds, and oranges—act as a visual anchor, but they are soft. Their edges are blurred compared to the sharp, anatomical precision of the skull. This wasn't an accident. O'Keeffe wanted the organic, fleeting life of the flowers to contrast with the "forever-ness" of the bone. The flowers will wilt by Tuesday. The bone has been there for years and will be there for decades more.
Why People Get Summer Days Wrong
A common misconception is that O'Keeffe was obsessed with death or morbidity. Critics at the time tried to frame her work as "macabre."
That’s just wrong.
She viewed the bones as "the most wonderful shapes I could find." She would carry them back to her studio, scrub them clean until they were white as paper, and then sit with them for hours. She wasn't mourning the deer. She was celebrating the architecture of its head. If you look closely at the antlers in the painting, they don't look like bone; they look like wood or even flickering flames reaching toward the top of the frame.
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Another weird thing? The scale. O’Keeffe often painted things much larger than they were. By blowing up the size of the skull and the flowers, she forces you to notice the "thing-ness" of the object. You can't ignore the curve of the eye socket or the jagged edge where the bone broke.
The Influence of Surrealism (Maybe?)
Art historians love to debate whether O'Keeffe was a Surrealist. She hated the label. She didn't like being part of "movements." However, you can't deny that Summer Days by Georgia O’Keeffe has a dreamlike, almost Salvador Dalí-esque quality. The floating object, the impossible perspective, the hyper-real colors—it all screams 1930s avant-garde.
But while Dalí was painting melting clocks to talk about the subconscious, O'Keeffe was painting skulls to talk about the actual world. She was a literalist. She saw a skull in the sky because the sky in New Mexico is so clear it feels like objects just hang in it. It wasn't a dream; it was her reality.
The Legacy of the Bone Paintings
This painting is now a crown jewel of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It stands as a testament to her middle period—the transition from her early abstract "charcoals" and "Ovis" to the more representational, yet still mystical, desert landscapes.
It also marked her independence.
By the time she painted this, she was spending more and more time away from the New York art scene. She was becoming the "Lone Woman of the Desert" trope that we all know today. This painting was her manifesto. It said: "I don't need the city. I don't need the skyscrapers. I have the dirt, the sky, and the bones."
It’s a powerful stance. Even today, in a world where everything is digital and fleeting, there’s something grounding about her focus on the elemental.
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How to Truly Experience Summer Days
If you want to move beyond just "looking" at a digital version of this masterpiece, here is how to actually engage with the themes O’Keeffe was obsessed with.
Go see it in person. The Whitney is the place. Digital screens can't replicate the texture of her brushwork. You need to see the way the white paint of the skull actually sits on top of the blue. There’s a physical depth there that disappears in photos.
Look for the "Negative Space." Don't just look at the skull. Look at the shapes formed between the antlers. O'Keeffe was a master of negative space. She believed the "holes" in the bones were just as important as the bone itself because they let the sky through.
Research her "Black Cross" and "Ram's Head" series. "Summer Days" didn't happen in a vacuum. To see the full evolution, look at her other 1930s works. You'll see how she experimented with different "floating" objects—crosses, ram skulls, and even floating flowers—before she perfected the balance in this specific piece.
Consider the environmental context. O'Keeffe was an early advocate for the preservation of the desert. She didn't call herself an environmentalist, but her work did the talking. She found value in the things the rest of the world discarded. Next time you're outside, try to find the "O'Keeffe beauty" in something typically considered ugly—a dry leaf, a cracked stone, or a piece of weathered wood.
The real magic of Summer Days by Georgia O’Keeffe isn't just that it’s a beautiful picture. It’s that it teaches you a new way to see. It suggests that death isn't the end of beauty; it’s just a different, more permanent kind of it. That is a pretty heavy concept for a painting with sunflowers, but that was Georgia for you. She was never just painting the surface. She was painting the soul of the desert.