Episode #86: Art Fact and Fiction: Are Georgia O'Keeffe's Paintings References to the Female Body? (S10E03)
In our tenth season, we’re going at art history with a skeptical eye and a myth-busting attitude to uncover the fictions and facts about some of our favorite artists. We’re starting our season today with this controversial subject: Are Georgia O'Keeffe's floral paintings direct references to the female body?
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ArtCurious is sponsored by Anchorlight, an interdisciplinary creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle.
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Episode Transcript
Flowers are a common subject in the history of art. After all, who doesn’t want to paint or look at a fresh budding bouquet? Artists can manipulate the presentation of these plants to serve their own intent and impart them with their own style. Dutch still lifes attempt to reproduce flowers with photographic realism. The vases in these paintings overflow with multicolored petals and posed stems, frozen in time. Famously, Van Gogh experimented with color in his multiple versions of sunflowers which are scattered around the globe. Impressionist artists such as Monet, Morisot, and Renoir have also crafted luscious images of flowers with their paint brushes. Georgia O'Keeffe is one artist whose body of work is synonymous with flowers. The twentieth-century artist’s monumental floral paintings are hallmarks of her oeuvre, and notable elements in the canon of art history by themselves. Over the course of her career, O’Keeffe created 2,000 paintings. Around 200 of her works contain flowers. When most people hear the name “Georgia O'Keeffe,” her enlarged floral canvases come to mind. At face value, these works illustrate O'Keeffe's exploration of various flora specimens. By manipulating these flowers, O'Keeffe used them as vehicles to explore abstraction and forge her own visual language. Some of her fans and critics would argue that O’Keeffe’s floral images are more sensual and sexual than she led on. In fact, a popular belief is that the flowers are direct references to the female body.
In 2016, an article published by The Guardian entitled “Flowers or vaginas?” recast a light on this ongoing art history debate of O’Keeffe’s series. The article states that only a handful of artists have their life's work reduced to a question. O'Keeffe is regarded as the Mother of American modernism and one of the greatest twentieth-century artists. Yet, this question pervades, and casts a floral shadow on her legacy and career. Is her floral series really just paintings of flowers? Or is it a way for an artist to simultaneously make a political statement while embracing her femininity?
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. Welcome to a new season, season 10, in which we’re going to dig deep on some great art historical facts--and fictions. In this episode, we’re circling back to Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the most singular artists of the 20th century. Are her floral paintings actually risque interpretations of the female anatomy? This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
When we think of the foremost female artists throughout history, chances are probably good that a modern artist-- i.e., someone from the 20th century, as opposed to earlier, or later--is likely the one that will spring to mind. And if it’s not Frida Kahlo who first enters your brain, it probably will be Georgia O'Keeffe. As we discussed previously on Episode #76 of ArtCurious, O’Keeffe was an extraordinary American painter whose specialty involved creating beautiful pictures that inched closer and closer to abstraction, all while honing a trademark and super-identifiable style that celebrated the little things in life, including sometimes the smallest detail of even the smallest flower.
And chances are high that is a flower--bright blooms, dramatically cropped, like you’ve zoomed in on them with a telephoto lens-- that you really imagine when you picture a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in your head, even though she did so much more than just quote-unquote “flower pictures.” Throughout her long career, she produced almost 2,000 works of art, with flowers making up a little more than 10% of her output. In addition, she painted indelible urban scenes, vast landscapes, and lots of cow skulls. Her name has become synonymous with a certain westernized, sometimes feminized version of mid century modern American art--and as such, she’s always, always in vogue, especially among museums and collectors. Georgia O’Keeffe, at once trendy and timeless.
Let’s discuss some of the salient details of her upbringing and training as a quick review for those who are longtime ArtCurious listeners, and a little introduction to those of you who might be new to the show, and to art in general. Georgia O’Keeffe was born on November 15, 1887 near San Prairie, Wisconsin to Ida and Francis O’Keeffe, as the second of their seven children. Early on, Georgia set herself aside from her siblings by showing off an incredible amount of artistic talent, which her parents encouraged, providing her with private art instruction where possible. In 1905, when turned 18, O’Keeffe made her desire to become a working artist official when she enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago and a year later studied at Arts Student League of New York, receiving formal training with a conventional European focus that emphasized drawing from life and casts. A few years later, in 1908, she needed a little break from schooling, so she moved to Chicago for four years to work as a commercial artist. But she didn’t leave formal training behind either. While attending a summer course in 1912, she became acquainted with the work of Arthur Wesley Dow, a painter and commercial artist whose theories about art techniques--and its mission-- changed O’Keeffe’s conception of her own work. She was struck by Dow’s encouragement to forgo academic painting styles and subject matter in favor of crafting abstract art through line, mass, and color. What a simple, yet surprising idea-- and that, along with Dow’s use of artmaking as self-exploration--stuck with her. "His idea was, to put it simply, fill a space in a beautiful way," she said, and it was based on that basic tenet that she began to produce what would eventually become that very eye-catching O’Keeffe style. And it caught someone else’s eye, too. Several of the drawings she produced during this period made their way to famed photographer, gallery owner, and O'Keeffe's future husband, Alfred Stieglitz.
Alfred Stieglitz is considered to be the big daddy of modern photography in the United States, first and foremost, but he was also a huge patron and promoter of the artists in New York city at the beginning of the 20th century. He was the founder and director of a prominent gallery, known as 291, though its full, official time is the much more cumbersome “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession.” Not only did Stieglitz use his gallery to promote photography as an artistic medium worthy of respect and admiration as painting and sculpture were--a pretty radical thought, still, at the early part of the century--but he also exhibited traveling shows by the leading figures in European avant-garde, including Matisse, Rodin, Pablo Picasso, and many others--figures whom Georgia O’Keeffe also admired. The mutual professional interest that both O’Keeffe and Stieglitz enjoyed grew into a personal acquaintance, which then evolved into a mentorship, and later progressed into a slow-burning romantic relationship, thus becoming one of the most fertile love affairs in the history of American art, one that is beautifully documented in thousands of letters and hundreds of Stieglitz’s own photographs. The couple married in 1924, and it was through Stieglitz’s connections that O'Keeffe became acquainted with artists among the likes of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Paul Strand. This network helped influence O'Keeffe's semi-abstract style. But it was nature itself that was probably the biggest influence. And that’s coming up next, right after a quick break. Stay with us, grab some cool deals and coupons, and support our show.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
In the early years of their relationship, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz lived in Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack region. Inspired by the lush rural landscapes surrounding her there, Georgia O’Keeffe felt transformed, lost in the moment, and wanted to share her sensations with her viewers.She aspired to portray nature from this sensory perspective, one that would allow viewers to experience a unique encounter with something that usually goes unnoticeable. She especially felt this about something as small as a beautiful flower. Famously, she once declared, quote, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the 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.” To fix this rush-rush-rush mindset, O’Keeffe scrutinized flowers and plants as if each was an individual, basically creating a portrait of a particular item. The result is a highly detailed, sometimes ethereal and breathtaking close-up image. Voila-- those O’Keeffe florals you are probably imagining right now, a big way to enjoy something small that usually passes us by.
In 1925, O’Keeffe exhibited her first large scale flower painting in New York, a piece called Petunia No. 2, now part of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was inspired by flower beds that the artist had planted at Lake George, where she could follow their growth up-close-and-personally. Ultimately, Petunia No. 2 gets its inspiration directly from the blooming phase itself, so that in her take, the flower’s vivid purple petals utterly consume the canvas as if we’re looking at it from under the lens of a magnifying glass, abstracting it into curls and swaths of color. And as viewers we have to stop and look, to peer closely, to have our expectations shattered, even if just a little bit. We don’t brush past them as if they are your typical still life painting, a flower delicately and precisely wrought. This is something bigger and bolder, and, if you’ll pardon the pun, it grabs us in such a way that makes us stop and smell the flowers.
And thus began a lifelong study on O’Keeffe’s part, a continual return to those zoomed-in, closely cropped florals, allowing us, the viewers, to come face-to-face with even the most minute elements of a blossom. Take her many canvases illustrating the red canna lily-- throughout her life, O’Keeffe would find herself enamored, her eyes captured, by one type of flower in a garden or the landscape, and she would then paint versions of that bloom again and again. The red canna was one of the flowers that grabbed her beginning in the 1920s, and she created versions of the lily in various degrees of close-up in watercolors and oils With versions now found at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Amon Carter Museum Of American art The High Museum in Atlanta, and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. And it may have been one, if not multiples, of these red cannas that started to grab people's attention. And one of those people was none other than Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s husband, who first responded to viewing one of her early large-format florals by scoffing, quote, “Well, Georgia, I don’t know how you're going to get away with anything like that-- you aren’t planning to show it, are you?” Unquote. As Mae Miller Claxton of Western Carolina University noted in a 2003 journal article discussing what she calls the “untamable texts” of Eudora Welty and Georgia O’Keeffe, there had already been some discussion of the supposed feminization of O'Keeffe's works-- remember, this was the 19-teens and the 1920s, and having O’Keeffe taken seriously as a painter--and not just a “woman painter” --was a particularly irksome problem for both artists. We’ll get back to that in a moment. But Stieglitz’s knee-jerk, immediate reaction to her floral pictures was something more: something too feminine, he thought-- nothing short than an overt metaphor for female genitalia. In the soft, fluttery curves and the inks, reds, and purples of the red canna, Stieglitz saw biology, passion, and power. And he wasn’t alone. In her biography, Portrait of an Artist, author Laurie Lisle mentions the experience of the owner of an O’Keeffe floral who discovered that a visitor once used the painting as a visual prop to teach a child about sex. And this association with sex and O’Keeffe- or if not sex exactly, then anatomy, perhaps, has stuck. O’Keeffe herself was fairly shocked about the whole thing herself, because--as the story goes-- it was not her intention. In a 1939 text produced as a companion to an exhibition of some of her flower works, she said, quote, "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 your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't." Unquote. But at the same time, even O’Keeffe’s phrasing of “my flower” feels a bit sensual. It’s her flower. Not the flower. She painted it, sure, so it is hers, but some have argued that she painted, most specifically, the reproductive elements of the flower itself, the pistils and stamens. But this was not what Georgia O’Keeffe had meant for us to see. She meant for us to stop and admire flowers in a whole new way, an innocent one, a way to admire even life’s smallest beauties. And people did admire flowers in an all-new way, but to be sure. But that biological reading was, to the very end, irritating to O’Keeffe. But is it wrong to read O’Keeffe’s flowers in this way, since the artist doesn’t like it? Is that okay? And what is the “language of flowers” and does it apply here? We’ll get into it when we come back from this short break.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
Interestingly, one of my personal art heroes, the dearly departed feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, promoted this reading of Georgia O’Keeffe’s florals. Famously, Nochlin described O’Keeffe’s 1926 painting, Black Iris, as a, quote, "morphological metaphor" for genitalia, a connection she also called, quote, “immediate,” “concrete,” and “that the two meanings are almost interchangeable.” For Nochlin, an O’Keeffe flower became shorthand for the vagina, and even some images being called out for clitoral imagery, too. For the better part of a century, viewers have been seeing what they want to see--and our minds have been in the gutter for most of that time.
To be fair, there has been a long-standing connection between flowers and floral symbolism and female desire, a connection that O’Keeffe may have inherited in some ways, whether she liked it or not. Feminist literary scholars have noted in recent decades that coded language and imagery was particularly strong during the 19th century--peaking during the Victorian Era--that leaned on a so-called “Language of Flowers” specifically to discuss female sexuality and desire in a time period that was outwardly stodgy but inwardly super-randy. Flowers, then, could say what could otherwise not be said. You’ll still see references to this so-called “floriography” when you read about the origin of the red rose as the flower of love and romance, of yellow roses symbolizing friendship, daisies represent innocence, and lavender-- get this-- apparently stood in as a marker of deception. But some of them went even deeper, with a whole slew of blooms standing in for the sexy side of things: everlasting pea for everlasting pleasure; fleur-de-lys for burning, firefly passion; geraniums as invitations for secret trysts; dog-rose for pleasure and pain; and the peach blossom, which sent a very specific secret message: I am your captive. Whew. It’s getting a little hot in here, guys. All of this to say: this was a legit and widely-known thing, references in books by the Brontes and Jane Austen, in poems by Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson, and was still very much in the collective consciousness of Western Europe and the U.S. by the turn of the 20th century. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that it was the code that Georgia O’Keeffe lived and worked by. For her, a rose was a rose was a rose, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.
When looking at the long-lasting assumptions about O’Keeffe’s florals as sexual metaphors, it makes sense to consider the timing surrounding these neverending rumors. Remember that they started almost 100 years ago, not long after the artist debuted her first large-scale florals in the late 19-teens and early 1920s. By the ‘30s she was vehemently denying their interpretation as anatomical stand-ins, and that should have been the end of that conversation. But remember Linda Nochlin, getting all fired up about those “morphological metaphors” with their “immediate” and “concrete” connections. Nochlin first burst onto the art scene indelibly with her 1971 magnum opus, an article in the magazine ArtNews entitled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Nochlin is the feminist scholar of art history, the mother of all feminist art scholars, and her work coincided early on with the 1970s arrival of second-wave feminism. The power of women was trumpeted loudly, and fiercely, and, according to art historian Anna Chave, so many feminists began to champion O’Keeffe’s works as symbols of sexual liberation and female empowerment. Their choice was to supplant their political statements upon these paintings. O’Keeffe had never intended it, and frankly hated it-- but here’s the thing that I always stand by as an art historian, though, not being an artist myself, perhaps puts me in a lesser category. I firmly believe that art is for everyone--and that a work of art can mean something different to everyone. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but so is meaning. We do our best, as curators and art historians--speaking from experience here on both ends--to help guide you to understand a work of art,but understanding isn’t the same thing as meaning What a work of art “means” can be whatever you want it to mean. and it may be very different than what the artist themselves intended. And that should be okay. I know a lot of artists, personally, who want their work to only ”mean'' one thing, and that’s hard. But art affects us all differently, connects with us on different emotional levels. For sme, ascribing an essential femininity to O’Keeffe’s works is inescapable, regardless of whether or not O’Keeffe innately saw her works as being “feminine.” (O'Keeffe, by the way, hated thathe flowers were deemed feminine, hated that they were even praised in that regard, or that she herself was praised as a “woman painter” due to her chosen subject matter. “I am not a woman painter,” she long protested.). And just as some think of those florals as innately womanly, there are those who still see vaginas, vulvas, and more in them, too. It’s no coincidence that in her own iconic opus, The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago gives Geogia O’Keeffe pride of place at her feminist dinner party, a triangular table presenting thirty-nine place settings inspired by thirty-nine important women from history, all of whom are honored by Chicago with a sculptural “plate” featuring vulvar iconography--i.e., the plate looks like a vulva. According to Judy Chicago, she included O’Keeffe as an inspiration, or an aspiration-- the exemplar of a successful artist who was a woman. But, as Chicago added, O'Keeffe was also instrumental, quote, “in pivotal in the development of an authentically female iconography,” unquote. O’Keeffe, for so many, represents the ultimate in flowers and power.
Coming up next time on ArtCurious, Colin Firth and Scarlett Johannson sold me on this idea that Vermeer was enamored of his most famous sitter. But was she actually a maid in his household? We’re continuing to discuss facts and fictions in art history in two weeks. Join us then.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. HUGE thanks to Mary Manfredi (CONFIRMED) for her awesome research and writing help with this episode. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast services are provided by our friends at Kaboonki. Subscribe now to their new show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies, hosted by Josh Dasal, and visit subgenrepodcast.com for more details. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
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Check back with us soon as we explore the facts, and the fictions, of the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history.
