Dan Flores

Hill was initially followed by the literary naturalist John C. Van Dyke, who wrote marvelous descriptions of the grand badlands of Death Valley in his early 20th century volume, The Deserts.

But it was Mary Austin who emerged as a California rival to Van Dyke as an early promoter of a Badlands aesthetic, providing an American desert appreciation that even prefigures Ed Abbey's with her book, The Land of Little Rain.

Then there was the unlikely British expatriate photographer, Evelyn Cameron, delighting through her viewfinder at the Northern Plains Badlands near her Terry, Montana ranch.

Cameron also became a devoted lover of Badlands scenery.

Cameron and her husband were naturalists who studied and sometimes tamed wolves, coyotes, foxes, and birds of prey from the marvelous Badlands she hiked and photographed, and who then watched in horror as homesteaders from the East and Europe tried valiantly but with signal lack of success to settle Eastern Montana in the 1910s and 1920s.

Cameron was followed on the northern plains by the North Dakota artist Zoe Beiler, whose paintings of the almost science fiction landscapes along the Little Missouri River were attracting attention to both the place and the artist by the 1920s, a decade before O'Keeffe's Badlands Oils would take the New York art scene by storm.

When Georgia O'Keeffe's portrayals of the undulating naked Badlands mounds of New Mexico first went up in galleries in Manhattan, the initial reaction was shock and revulsion.

Some Eastern critics concluded the artist must possess some psychological scar that frightened her of water.

Of course, that wasn't it.

In the 1930s, two decades after seeing Palo Duro in the Spanish skirts, after years of life as Alfred Stieglitz's model and artist wife in New York, O'Keeffe bought a small ranchette at the foot of the Ghost Ranch cliffs and turned her work from flowers toward the hot-colored badlands and cliffs around her home.

She found the curvilinear red mounds out her door charged with all the suppleness and grace of the human form.

Why do you love these barren landscapes so?

An interviewer from Boston asked her years later, clearly puzzled at her passion for places so far removed from the conventions of beauty.

I like color, O'Keefe replied.

In the East, everything is green, green, green.

I looked around me and wondered what one might paint.

Plus, Badlands are an especially fine place to climb around in, she exclaimed.

It was the shapes that fascinated me, the shapes of the hills.

One of O'Keeffe's Eastern biographers visited to try to understand the appeal of such country and concluded that the landforms that excited O'Keeffe as her landscape muse were in fact bizarre, garishly colored, and in fact ought to be extravagantly tasteless, vulgar, and unbelievable.

But for a painter, this was a landscape that offered up the earth itself as abstract modern art.