Petunia No. 2

Georgia O’Keeffe made two hundred of her acclaimed flower paintings, only a small proportion of the two thousand pictures she created in her lifetime.

It would be these signature floral close-ups that brought her widespread attention, and respect as one of the pioneering modernists, but also provoked some notoriety.

At the time, critics saw O’Keeffe’s enlarged flower paintings, such as Petunia No. 2 1924, as purely sexual creations, allusions to the female form – most simply genitalia – an assumption that continued for decades.

But the artist always rejected these erotic interpretations of her work. She simply dismissed these views as symptomatic of critics’ own desires to create meaning and identity in her work, looking for something that they could understand and relate to.

Her interest in the natural world was paramount to her art, and she explained that, ‘when you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it becomes your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.’

‘Most people in this city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.’

Clearly, she was attempting to introduce the exquisiteness of the natural world into the frenetic and bustling lives of the disinterested inhabitants of New York City.

O’Keeffe (1887-1986) knew she wanted to become a professional artist at the age of ten, and went on to study in Chicago and New York, but found the traditional lessons taught at art school uninspiring.

Drawn to the notion of celebrating beauty for beauty’s sake, she began a series of abstract paintings, and was to be recognised as being one of the first American artists to practise pure abstraction.

In 1916, the young O’Keeffe created a series of charcoal abstracts that caught the attention of the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who remarked: ‘at last, a woman on paper.’

He invited Georgia to embrace the patronage of his gallery, where his other artists were equally impressed with her talent.

The wonderful painter Arthur Dove said, ‘this girl is doing naturally what many of us are trying to do and failing.’ As Stieglitz noted, ‘she has done more than paint, she has invented a language.’

Once secure in his gallery the dealer told her to ‘do whatever you want for the next year’, and it was during this period in 1919 that she was to begin creating the most extraordinary paintings in her life.

From their first meeting Stieglitz fell wildly in love with her, and she was slowly to equally fall for him.

In O’Keeffe, he had found his muse. He took over three hundred photographs of her, recording her every mood, working with urgent vigour and energy.

She on the other hand felt helpless as his model, being told what to do, and didn’t enjoy the process very much.

But in 1921 Stieglitz held an exhibition of the photographs that caused a sensation; suddenly she became a newspaper celebrity, an ‘It Girl’, and overnight everybody knew her name.

In September 1924, O’Keeffe married Stieglitz. During their time together they wrote 25,000 pages of love letters to each other, often two or three times during a day, some as long as forty pages.

Alongside the flirtations and echoes of desire, they explored all that interested them, using each other as sounding boards for their work.

O’Keeffe work was getting more recognition, and her paintings became in much demand.

In 1928, six of her Calla Lily paintings sold for $25,000, at the time the largest sum ever paid for a group of pictures by any living American artist.

Despite her success, O’Keeffe struggled with depression throughout her life and was hospitalised at age forty-six after a breakdown.

Her intense anxiety was said to stem from her fear of public failure, having not been able to complete a Radio City Music Hall mural, and rebellion against her brilliant but overbearing husband.

For O’Keeffe hospitalisation wasn’t the answer, but she found her remedy in travelling – to Bermuda, Mexico, Japan,

Peru and Hawaii, finding endless inspiration for making art.

Eventually, in 1946 she was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – the first given by that museum to a woman.

O’Keeffe spoke openly about her work and ‘how I happened to make the blown up-flowers’: ‘In the twenties, giant buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York.

‘At that time I saw a painting by Fantin-Latour, a still-life with flowers I found very beautiful, but I realised that were I to paint the same flowers so small, no one would look at them because I was unknown.

So I thought I’ll make them big like the huge buildings going up and people will be startled; they’ll have to look at them – and they did’.

Her many other paintings primarily depict landscapes, and the ethereal nature of subjects such as leaves, rocks and shells. O’Keeffe actually began picking up bones in the desert when she first visited New Mexico in 1929, because there were no flowers to paint.

She loved it there and returned every year, before moving permanently to her beloved Ghost Ranch after her husband’s death.

‘If you ever go to New Mexico’ she declared, ‘it will itch you for the rest of your life. I’m half-mad in love with it.’

The curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe described how the artist adapted the confines of her car into a studio, able to paint outside, without being bothered by the area’s large bee population.

‘She would remove the driver’s seat. Then she would unbolt the passenger seat, and turn it around to face the back seat. She would lay the canvas on the back seat as a support and paint inside her Model-A Ford.’

By 1971 O’Keeffe had begun to lose her sight, and had to stop painting entirely. Still unrelenting in her desire to create art, she swapped oil paint for clay, and continued to sculpt until her death.

With the internal awareness of an artist she declared: ‘I can see what I want to capture. The thing that makes you want to create is still there.’