Georgia O’Keeffe is famed as both an escapist of the East and a reckless hoarder—a dusty Wisconsinite, beach-combing the Southwestern desert for bones.

Her obsession with the desiccated remains of animals spanned the relics of horses, cattle, goats, along with any and everything antlered. Not even the humble bivalve, the clam, escaped her attention. As in this painting, she usually focuses on carcasses found in her favorite vacation getaway—New Mexico—where she relocated permanently at the first opportunity following her husband’s death.

O’Keeffe’s collections of bones and carefully selected stones eventually littered the windowsills of both of her New Mexico homes. (Insert Dr. Suess joke here.) Before acquiring property, however, she still needed a way to paint from the skeletons. The resourceful artist packed a barrel full of New Mexican bones like this pelvis and shipped them to Lake George in New York, where she happily painted away.

Unfortunately, these bone paintings didn’t fit with New York critics’ stereotyped ideas of the female painter who had previously given them still life paintings of flowers. The bones were termed “gruesome trophies” and often outright ignored in reviews. Due to her self-imposed isolation, O’Keeffe couldn’t fight all the misbranding. To her, the paintings weren’t morbid, but about an eternal beauty of the desert. In this painting, as in most others, O’Keeffe further shunned her critics and Euro-American tradition, choosing not to autograph the canvas. Reputation be damned!

Pelvis IV’s extreme close-up mirrors O’Keeffe’s concern with distance, both physical and emotional, in her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. She and Stieglitz shared clunky pseudonyms for their marriage-at-a-distance. She called him “My Far Away One” while he wrote the mouthful “My Great-White-Faraway-So-Near-One.” After the posthumous publication of their 5000-plus letters, it became clear that their closest emotional moments took place when they were two thousand miles apart. The heart grows fonder and all that. Also, they made use of the classic sexy pic trick to keep the flame alive. Always the sweetheart, Stieglitz initially wooed his woman with letters detailing his many illnesses, from an itchy scalp to constant sinus headaches. So romantic.