Winter '08 :: Beguiling Iris

When Georgia O’Keeffe finished brushing the delicate edge of a lavender petunia, the flower’s face filled most of a two by three foot canvas. Like a floral planet, it hovered in a frothy gray atmosphere without a vase, and she felt the surge of excitement that comes with a creative breakthrough. Her husband Alfred Stieglitz, the art dealer and photographer, appeared at the door of her studio and paused. With a snort, he exclaimed, “Well, what do you think you are going to do with that?”

Untitled (Purple Petunia), 1925
Oil on canvas, 7 1/4 x 7 1/4 in.
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Gift of The Burnett Foundation

Undeterred, O’Keeffe went on to paint many more petunias. She had a ready supply in the beds of the garden that she had planted at Lake George, where Stieglitz and his family kept a sprawling summer home. Like Claude Monet who repeatedly painted his garden at Giverny, O’Keeffe saw the flowers as a way to study color.

“I paint because color is a significant language to me,” she said. She painted the dusk to midnight purples of petunias, the screaming scarlets of cannas and the nuanced whites of calla lilies. Writing to a friend about her flower paintings, she said, “I am very much excited over my work this year.”

Flowers offered a welcome departure from the green hills and placid water at Lake George that had come to bore her after several years of painting the surrounding landscape.

“I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted, as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself,” she said.

O’Keeffe had painted flowers ever since taking her first art classes in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, where she was born in 1887 and raised on a prosperous farm. After taking courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, O’Keeffe taught art at colleges in South Carolina and Texas before moving to Manhattan to live with Stieglitz. While she had painted flowers, she considered herself a modern artist and often pursued abstract art. It was not until 1924 that she enlarged a blossom to an optic extreme.

Canna Red and Orange, 1926
Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
Gift of The Burnett Foundation

Influenced by the photography of Paul Strand, who also showed at Stieglitz’s galleries, O’Keeffe tumbled onto the notion of viewing a flower as if she were looking through the viewfinder of a camera. She enlarged the face of the flower to fill the entire canvas so that the edge of the petal, the fluff of the stamen, and the variations in color—all could be seen clearly. In part, she painted them as a protest against the pace of life in New York City where she lived that prevented people from taking time to really look at a flower.

“Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time…So I said to myself …I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it,” O’Keeffe explained.

Then, there was another reason. Stieglitz planned to show her paintings with the work of “the men,” a phrase she used to describe John Marin, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth, as well as the photographers Strand and Stieglitz. Stieglitz mounted a big group show called Seven Americans in 1925. For the first time, O’Keeffe intended her giant blossoms to compete against the serious-minded modern compositions of her male peers. She recognized the subversive possibilities in choosing the feminine imagery of flowers such as the black iris. After the exhibition opened, she told a reporter, “I’m one of the few artists, maybe the only one today, who is willing to talk about my work as pretty. I don’t mind it being pretty. I think it’s a shame to discard this word; maybe if we work on it hard enough we can make it fashionable again.”

The giant flowers were a popular and critical hit, wildly praised and much discussed. Critic Edmund Wilson observed that they had “a peculiar feminine intensity which…seems to manifest itself, as a rule, in such a different way from the masculine.”

In a statement O’Keeffe wrote for the gallery brochure, she said, “Everyone has many associations with a flower. You put out your hand to touch it, or lean forward to smell it, or maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking, or give it to someone to please them. But one rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted what each flower is to me and I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I would see.”

Stieglitz coyly referred to them as “silly but lovely—her kind of silliness—her kind of loveliness.” However, his enthusiasm grew quickly as they outsold anything produced by “the men.”

O’Keeffe’s flowers were soon synonymous with her identity as an artist. Elizabeth Arden commissioned a floral mural for the wall of her New York salon and O’Keeffe painted a trio of white jimson weeds, flowers she had discovered after 1929 when she started spending the summers in New Mexico. They grew wild on the patio of her small adobe home at Ghost Ranch.

After Stieglitz passed away in 1946, O’Keeffe moved to Abiquiu, New Mexico, where she designed an expansive adobe house with a walled garden that included fruit trees, vegetables, and herbs, as well as flowers (she planted bulbs of black irises but they never bloomed.). She painted poppies, hollyhocks and copper roses but her greater interest lay in painting the golden landscape and her mysterious patio door. When O’Keeffe died in 1986, she had been unable to paint for more than a decade due to macular degeneration.

Flowers, however, remain the subject of her best-known and most desirable paintings.

In 2001, Christie’s New York sold Calla Lilies with Red Anemone for 6.2 million dollars, a record price for the work of any woman artist sold at auction.

On March 7, 2009, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum honors Gloria Steinem, another well-known contributor to our culture, with its 2009 Women of Distinction award. www.okeeffemuseum.org

Winter 2008 | By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp | Photos courtesy of The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum