Georgia O’Keeffe
American (1887-1986)
Date:
1926
Medium:
Oil on canvas
Size:
Width: 15 5/8″
Height: 11 3/4″

With a close-cropped focus on her subject and glowing color, Georgia O’Keeffe used smoothly blended brushwork to present the tulip as a living, changing blossom. Critics often wrote that her flower paintings evoked the human body. Here, O’Keeffe captured the way tulips open and close in response to heat or cold and light or darkness, as well as the brevity of their sculptural beauty as they bloom and fade—a powerful metaphor for personal growth and change. The artist completed more than 200 paintings of flowers during her lifetime.

Bequest of Mabel Garrison Siemonn, in Memory of her Husband, George Siemonn BMA 1964.11.13

Ways of Interpreting O’Keeffe’s Paintings

Transcript

[Aaron Henkin] I asked Aneta Georgievska-Shine about ways that O’Keeffe’s paintings have been
interpreted
[Aneta Georgievska-Shine] In this particular painting, you do have that almost phallic form in the middle.
That green vertical that blooms at the top, and then you have all those rosy and pink layers all around. All of
that add to the allusion to sexuality and even particular reproductive organs. However, I would say that
what she’s interested in is this idea of the capacity of forms to generate themselves almost this cosmic
dimension that you can uncover in the smallest things in nature. So it goes beyond human sexuality per se.
[Aaron Henkin] In fact, O’Keeffe herself denied the connection of her flower paintings to sexuality. Listen to
a reading of what O’Keeffe said.
[Speaker 3] Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw, and when you took time to really notice my
flower, you hung all of your own associations with flowers on my flower, and you wrote about my flower as if I
think and see what you think and see of the flower. And I don’t.