Georgia O'Keeffe Belt

The Héctor Aguilar X-belt associated with Georgia O’Keeffe is among the most consequential wearable objects produced by the Taxco School. Created around 1940, it extends Aguilar’s celebrated X-motif across the full length of a black leather belt, with repeated groups of handwrought silver bands crossing diagonally over the dark ground. The design is austere but forceful: silver becomes line, leather becomes negative space, and the body supplies the architecture on which the composition is completed. In place of gemstones or literal historical imagery, Aguilar relied on repetition, contrast, and structural rhythm—evidence that, by the early 1940s, Taxco silver had developed into a mature form of international modernism rather than merely a revival of Mexican motifs.

Its historical importance is amplified by period documentation of Georgia O’Keeffe wearing an Aguilar X-belt while working on her Pelvis Series - Red with Yellow in Abiquiú. The published caption identifies the photograph as dating to 1951 and states that O’Keeffe may have purchased the belt - or received it as a gift - while visiting Rosa Covarrubias that year. The precise acquisition history therefore remains unresolved, but the documented association itself is unusually strong: O’Keeffe is not simply photographed at a social event wearing Mexican jewelry; she wears Aguilar’s design in the context of her own artistic practice. The belt’s crossing silver lines, severe palette, and disciplined abstraction are entirely consonant with the formal economy of her painting.

Within Aguilar’s body of work, the belt is particularly important because it demonstrates the scalability and coherence of the X-design. The better-known bracelet compresses the idea into a powerful wrist ornament; the belt turns it into a continuous frieze encircling the body. The companion forms are reproduced together in Silver Seduction, where they are captioned as Héctor Aguilar’s circa-1940 X-bracelet and X-with-dots belt in .925 or .990 silver and black leather, from the collection of Günter Kühn and Marc Navarro. This scholarly publication history, together with the O’Keeffe photograph, gives the design a level of documentary support rarely available for an individual Taxco accessory.

Original examples are exceptionally scarce. Belts were made in smaller numbers than bracelets, were subjected to greater physical stress, and incorporated leather that often dried, cracked, stretched, or was replaced over decades of use. A substantially intact example retaining its original silver elements, fittings, and leather is therefore both materially and historically rare. For serious collectors, the belt ranks among the most desirable Aguilar objects: it is visually commanding, unmistakably attributable, extensively published, and directly connected to one of the defining artists of American modernism. More than an accessory, it is a canonical work of Taxco wearable sculpture and one of the clearest surviving records of the intellectual and aesthetic exchange between Mexico and the United States during the Silver Age.