Georgia O’Keeffe Flower Paintings

Taking time: scale, crop and colour

O’Keeffe’s often-paraphrased explanation of the large flowers began with an ordinary problem: people were too busy to look. Enlarging a small bloom to the scale of a building or face made attention unavoidable. That claim is neither a confession of secret symbolism nor a guarantee of pure botanical neutrality. It describes a strategy directed at urban spectatorship.^[2] The close view slows recognition.

A petal stops being a label—iris, calla, poppy—and becomes a field of gradients, folds, cavities and edges. Cropping removes stem, vase and tabletop, the conventions that tell viewers they are safely looking at still life. The flower approaches abstraction while remaining insistently specific. A viewer moves between knowing the plant and experiencing colour as structure. The flowers arose inside a culture of modernist photography.

O’Keeffe knew the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Steichen; the National Gallery also points to Imogen Cunningham and to parallels in Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley.^[3][5] A camera could isolate, magnify and crop a natural object, and straight photography increasingly valued graphic clarity over painterly haze.^[33] Influence does not mean that the canvases imitate photographs.

Oil builds transitions through pigment and touch; a thirty- or forty-inch canvas confronts a body differently from a print. O’Keeffe converted photographic framing into painted duration. The edge seems to continue beyond the support, but the gradients require slow construction. The useful comparison is therefore a shared modern vocabulary of close view, serial study and fragment, not a claim that the camera mechanically generated the paintings.^[7][31]

Many celebrated flowers measure roughly 30 by 40 inches, but physical dimensions alone do not produce monumentality. A bloom cropped at four edges can feel larger than a complete flower on a still bigger canvas. A narrow vertical support can make a pansy and stem feel tall; paired flowers can establish internal scale; a small pastel can feel intimate rather than expansive. O’Keeffe varied the relation between depicted object, support and viewer. That is why reproductions are treacherous.

A book can equalise a twelve-inch board and a forty-inch canvas, while a screen can enlarge a graphite sheet beyond an oil. Dimensions, medium and frame must remain part of interpretation. These works model flowers through colour rather than enclosing outlines. Whites are rarely blank: they shift through grey, cream, pink, green and blue. Black can be plum, red-brown or blue-black.

Background colours press forward and enter petals, preventing a simple figure-ground division. Broad transitions may look airbrushed in reproduction, yet the surfaces retain decisions about brush load, adjacent paint and low relief. The National Gallery’s technical account of Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV describes precise application on a commercial white ground, colours placed largely beside rather than over one another, and low impasto marking edges.^[34] That evidence replaces the myth of effortless, disembodied smoothness with controlled material labour.

Botany and identification limits

Botanical names matter because they reveal different structures: a calla’s apparent “petal” is a spathe surrounding a spadix; a jack-in-the-pulpit belongs to the same arum family; a cactus flower sits against a spined pad; larkspur produces many small florets. Yet these are paintings, not herbarium specimens. O’Keeffe could simplify, combine, rotate, crop or alter colour.

Identification should therefore begin with catalogue titles and object-owner research, then compare form cautiously. It should not turn every curve into an anatomical code, nor insist that fidelity to a species was her sole measure of success. The White Calico Flower, which depicts an artificial cloth bloom, makes the point sharply: sustained looking can animate a constructed object as forcefully as a living plant.^[6]

Gendered criticism and resistance

Early reception did not meet O’Keeffe on neutral ground. Stieglitz exhibited her work and produced a composite photographic portrait of her body and face across hundreds of images. Critics often fused that eroticised public image with the abstractions and flowers, treating formal decisions as direct emissions of female sexuality.^[31][33] This framing made the artist’s gender into an interpretive master key. Male peers could crop organic forms without being reduced to anatomy in the same way.

The National Gallery notes that O’Keeffe became more closely identified with flowers than male artists working with related imagery.^[5] That imbalance is part of the work’s history, even when a present viewer sees erotic form. O’Keeffe objected that spectators attached their own flower associations to what she had made. Her position deserves full weight: an artist who spent years controlling scale, colour, title and display rejected a critical habit that collapsed her paintings into biology.

Museums including Philadelphia now present the sexual interpretations alongside her resistance, describing them as limiting rather than as settled fact.^[8] Intention does not end reception. Images acquire meanings through exhibition, criticism and later political use. The sound method distinguishes claims. We can document what O’Keeffe said, reconstruct what critics wrote, and describe what forms invite without pretending those categories are identical.

Feminist reclamation and disagreement

Second-wave feminist artists and historians later found in O’Keeffe a predecessor who had monumentalised forms associated with female sexuality. Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party gave her a place setting based on flower and vulval imagery. The Brooklyn Museum notes that O’Keeffe declined participation in a context centred on gender.^[30] That disagreement is historically productive.

O’Keeffe’s refusal exposes the professional cost of being confined as a “woman artist”; Chicago’s tribute records a later generation’s need for female genealogies. Neither should be used to cancel the other. The flowers became feminist icons partly against the artist’s stated wishes, and that afterlife belongs to reception rather than proof of original intent.^[28][29]

Series, repetition and difference

O’Keeffe rarely exhausted a subject in one canvas. Callas, irises, poppies, jack-in-the-pulpits and cactus flowers return with changes of scale, colour, support and orientation. Series transform recognition into comparison. What looks like an emblem in isolation becomes an experiment when placed beside its neighbour. The Jack-in-the-Pulpit group makes the procedure unusually legible.

Six paintings move from a comparatively complete plant towards the spadix and the dark interior of the spathe. Five are now at the National Gallery; the first remains elsewhere. The sequence is not simply a zoom. Leaf, sky, aperture and central axis are redistributed until the flower’s identity survives at the edge of abstraction.^[3][4]

Jack-in-the-Pulpit and Pineapple Bud

Painted at Lake George in 1930, Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV is oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches. A long blue central form rises through a dark purple chamber, divided by a narrow white line, while green and fragments of cloudy sky survive at the upper corners.^[3] The present numbering hides a history. O’Keeffe and Doris Bry renumbered the group in 1970; the painting now called No. IV had originally been No. VI. Its backing preserves the earlier designation.

Provenance also moved through exchange, private collections, dealers and return to the artist before her 1987 bequest to the National Gallery. Titles and sequences are curatorial evidence, not timeless labels. Technically, the commercial ground and mainly adjacent colour fields support an account of deliberate construction. A later glossy spray varnish does not accord with the artist’s aesthetic, so current appearance includes an intervention.^[34] Interpretation must therefore include the altered surface as well as the 1930 design.

Pineapple Bud belongs to O’Keeffe’s 1939 journey to Hawai‘i, undertaken after the Hawaiian Pineapple Company invited her to make images for advertising. The commission promised access to a pineapple plantation, yet company restrictions initially denied her the very plant she was expected to paint. She eventually received a pineapple after returning to New York and completed the image there.^[12] The work is oil on canvas, 19 by 16 inches, now in a private collection. The New York Botanical Garden identifies it among the 1939 paintings and notes that it and Crab’s Claw Ginger were used in the company’s advertisements.^[12]

The episode complicates the language of direct observation. Travel, corporate hospitality, colonial plantation agriculture and studio reconstruction all stand behind the concentrated bud. Hawai‘i was not an exotic blank awaiting a visiting artist. O’Keeffe travelled through inhabited islands shaped by Indigenous Hawaiian history, US annexation, tourism and plantation capital. Her paintings record an individual encounter within those systems; they do not represent the totality of place.^[11][36]

Banana Flower and Bleeding Heart

Banana Flower dates from 1934, before the Hawaiian commission, and the catalogue record connects it to O’Keeffe’s 1919–34 exhibition history.^[13] The pendant-like inflorescence offers a structure different from the radial flowers most associated with her. Layered bracts descend rather than opening towards a central cavity. The work demonstrates that “flower” was not a single formal template. The banana’s weight, vertical drop and overlapping sheaths generate a composition through gravity.

Later works such as Pink Ornamental Banana return to related plant architecture, but date, title and object should not be merged. The catalogue record is the safest way to separate repeated tropical motifs. Bleeding Heart of 1932 is pastel on paper-faced grey cardboard, about 15 by 10 inches, now at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.^[14] Two pink flowers rise above green leaves.

Its scale and medium create a different encounter from the monumental oils: powder sits on a fibrous, grey support, and the vertical sheet holds the blossoms like a close study. The reverse bears O’Keeffe’s star initials and Stieglitz’s graphite identification. It appeared in the 1933 An American Place exhibition and later passed through the artist’s family, auction and a private collection before the 1996 museum gift.^[14] Those records matter because pastel is especially vulnerable to abrasion and vibration. “Softness” is a material condition, not only a visual metaphor.

White Bird of Paradise and Calico Flower

White Bird of Paradise was painted in 1939, oil on canvas, 19 by 16 inches. The catalogue describes a large white flower against purple, purple-grey and reddish-grey; inscriptions connect it explicitly to Hawai‘i. It was shown in 1940 as White Bird of Paradise Flower and later entered the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.^[10] The painting belongs with coastlines, waterfalls, lava and other island plants rather than functioning as an isolated tropical souvenir.

Museum research emphasises that O’Keeffe travelled across O‘ahu, Maui, Kaua‘i and Hawai‘i Island and painted most extensively from island flowers.^[11] The restrained scale is notable: the flower fills its support, but the canvas is far smaller than many New York blooms. Intensity does not depend on monumentality. The White Calico Flower of 1931 is oil on canvas, roughly 30 by 36 inches, purchased by the Whitney in 1932.^[6][15]

It depicts a constructed cloth flower, probably made in New Mexico. The distinction overturns the expectation that O’Keeffe’s close looking always began with botanical life. Wanda Corn’s Whitney interpretation draws attention to individually inflected petals and to whites shifted with pink, tan and grey.^[6] The artificial origin makes variation especially intriguing: O’Keeffe studies another maker’s fabrication and then remakes it in paint.

Craft, painting and nature are placed in a chain rather than a hierarchy. Its early museum purchase also matters. Acquired within a year of its making, it entered institutional history while O’Keeffe’s flower identity was still being consolidated. The provenance is short, but the exhibition record is extensive. The 2021 Spanish Thyssen checklist confirms the work’s international retrospective circulation and gives its title as La flor de calicó blanca.^[32]

Calla lilies: pairing, colour and market

2 Calla Lilies on Pink was painted in 1928, oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches, and remained in O’Keeffe’s collection until her 1987 bequest to Philadelphia.^[8][9] The catalogue preserves alternate title forms and a backing inscription with a tentative date. Two white spathes curve across a pink field, each holding a yellow spadix.

Pairing introduces comparison and mutual pressure. The flowers are not duplicates: one turns and overlaps the other, while green undertones make “white” spatial. Philadelphia acknowledges sexuality and gender as recurring interpretations but records O’Keeffe’s resistance to their specificity.^[8] The responsible reading sees why the forms invite bodily association while preserving their botanical and formal organisation.

A historical conservation label records a 1962 synthetic-resin treatment.^[9] Such evidence cautions that apparent gloss and saturation may include later surface history. Calla Lilies on Red also dates from 1928. White callas stand against a flowing red field, sharpening the contrast between cool petals, yellow centres and saturated ground. Its recognisability helped produce O’Keeffe’s “Lady of the Lily” public identity.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum later deaccessioned the painting in 2018 to support its acquisitions fund. That institutional episode belongs to provenance, not to aesthetic judgement. Deaccession changes custody and visibility; it can also detach a familiar work from the museum most closely associated with the artist. The title should not be confused with the Philadelphia pair simply because both were made in the same year.

Calla Lily Turned Away (1923; CR 423) is a fourteen-inch pastel whose flower spirals away from the picture plane instead of opening frontally. A graphite backing inscription supplies the present title; Calla is an archived alternative. Its 1928 display among six small calla paintings, later appearance in O’Keeffe on Paper and inclusion in the 2002–03 calla-lily exhibition show how a modest sheet moved between series, medium and botanical theme. Its provenance returns from Mitchell Kennerley through An American Place to the artist before entering the museum.^[39]

Camellia and Old Garden

A White Camellia is a pastel on paper mounted on cardboard, 21½ by 27½ inches, in a private collection.^[23] The catalogue dates it 1938 on the combined evidence of archives, its 1939 exhibition and correspondence. A backing inscription calls it White Camellia (1939). This is a useful case where inscription and scholarly dating diverge. The flower’s nested white petals surround a yellowish centre, with green leaves occupying the intervals.

Pastel permits opaque light and blended transitions, but mounting and handling are crucial to survival. The Whitney Archive records a sale to cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden, connecting the work to a patron who also commissioned O’Keeffe’s famous large jimson weed. The two inherited paths /white-camellia/ and misspelled /white-camelia/ refer to the same work. They require one documented section and two redirect obligations, not the invention of a second painting. From the Old Garden No. 2 of 1924 is a pastel whose interlocking violet, white, yellow and green forms hover between a flower cluster and abstract design.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum teaching research uses it specifically to explore the duality of realism and abstraction.^[27] The old garden in the title supplies a source without dictating a diagram. Pastel allows velvety colour, abrupt accents and blended passages on one surface. Rather than asking at what point the picture stops being a flower, it is more productive to ask how recognition flickers. O’Keeffe makes plant structure available as rhythm, while the title keeps the composition from floating free of experience.

New Mexico flowers

O’Keeffe painted Black Hollyhock, Blue Larkspur during her first New Mexico summer, from flowers along the path near Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos guest house. The Met’s vertical oil is dated 1929 in its object and scholarly records, while some catalogue interfaces and related horizontal versions can produce 1930 references.^[16][17] Exact object identity must therefore accompany the title. Met scholarship relates the composition to White Rose with Larkspur II and compares vertical and horizontal versions.

In the vertical painting, the dark hollyhock swells through the upper area and compresses the smaller blue larkspur. In the horizontal, the same relation is redistributed across width.^[17] O’Keeffe reportedly considered the design effective under rotation, making orientation itself an experiment. The work also disrupts a simple geography in which flowers belong to New York and bones to New Mexico. She carried a developed floral method west, then answered plants found in Taos.

Red Amaryllis (1937; CR 921) compresses bright red petals against yellow, with one green leaf entering at the top. The stretcher inscription spells the flower “Amarillis” and dates it 1937; the Downtown Gallery archive once proposed 1930, whereas the catalogue uses its documented display during An American Place’s 1937–38 season to support the later date. Its small twelve-by-ten-inch scale checks the assumption that intense enlargement always required a large canvas. Its route through the Downtown Gallery and Henrietta Roig to the Terra Foundation preserves a distinct collection history.^[40]

Poppy, rose and calla

The inherited title Untitled Poppy points to a work whose catalogue identity must be distinguished from O’Keeffe’s separately titled Poppy, Red Poppy and Oriental Poppies. “Untitled” may be a later descriptive label, while “poppy” records visual identification. Those terms should not be silently upgraded into an artist-given title. Object-level caution is especially necessary because O’Keeffe revisited poppy forms and because reproductions circulate under shortened captions. The useful conclusion is not uncertainty for its own sake: the legacy query belongs in the broader flower history, while publication should retain catalogue number, date, medium and owner once matched.

Search convenience does not justify combining distinct canvases.^[1][35] White Rose with Larkspur No. II is a 1927 oil on canvas, 40 by 30 inches, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.^[18] Catalogue variants include “No. 2” and shortened forms. The reverse and backing retain O’Keeffe’s date and several Stieglitz labels, showing how a title accumulated through studio, dealer and exhibition use. A large white rose occupies the lower field while delicate light-purple flowers rise above it.

The catalogue description calls those upper blooms sweet peas even though the established title says larkspur, a discrepancy worth preserving rather than smoothing away.^[18] The object remained with the artist until she sold it to the MFA in 1980. Long retention gave O’Keeffe unusual control over its eventual institutional home. Yellow Calla, Green Leaves turns a familiar arum structure into a concentrated relation of warm spathe and cool foliage. The title is descriptive rather than narrative: hue and plant part organise the encounter.

That economy is typical of O’Keeffe’s naming, which often gives viewers enough information to look while withholding a prescribed story. The work must remain separate from the white callas of 1928 and from the jack-in-the-pulpit series, despite their botanical relation. Comparison across the arum family is useful because it reveals how similar structures—spathe, spadix and enveloping leaf—support radically different colour architectures. Catalogue verification should control date, owner and dimensions before publication, since popular poster captions often omit those fields.^[1]

Drawn and modest flowers

Untitled (Lily) is graphite on paper, approximately 24 by 18¼ inches, dated broadly c.1930–36.^[20] It is not an oil flower painting. A six-petalled bloom sits above the sheet’s centre; darker axes and reserved stripes divide the petals. The drawing entered the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum through the Foundation in 2006.

The wide date range and image-derived title are evidence, not defects. The work is absent from the main dealer and notebook records used by the catalogue. Graphite strips away the chromatic abundance associated with O’Keeffe’s flowers and reveals selection through pressure, contour and untouched paper. Its inclusion prevents the theme page from equating floral practice with colour alone.

Squash Blossoms I of 1925 is oil on board, 18 by 14 inches, at Smith College Museum of Art.^[21] Two yellow blossoms and a green leaf sit against white. Catalogue variants include Squash Flowers No. 1, and records disagree over whether the support is best described as board, paperboard, cardboard or pressed wood.

That vocabulary is materially consequential. Each support responds differently to humidity, handling and ageing. Conservation documentation reports analysis and recommends eventual surface cleaning, while noting no treatment at Smith. The modest dimensions also correct the assumption that every 1920s flower was monumental. Here enlargement operates inside a compact, object-like field.

Cactus, iris, pansy and uncertain titles

The inherited Yellow Cactus is best matched to the 1929 oil on canvas, 30 by 42 inches, now at the Dallas Museum of Art.^[22] Two brilliant blossoms fill the horizontal field, their centres intensifying to yellow while outer petals approach white. The catalogue documents a complex path through private ownership, a foundation, the Fort Worth Art Museum, deaccession, dealers and a bequest to Dallas. Other O’Keeffe works share the title, including 1935 and 1940 paintings.

The 1940 version uses oil and tempera on canvas-covered board and shows four flowers on prickly-pear pads. A title alone is therefore insufficient. Date, catalogue number 675 and present owner distinguish the 1929 painting required here.^[22] Iris of 1926 is a distinct catalogue object, with Stieglitz inscriptions recording the title, date and a historical price.^[24] It must not be merged with Black Iris, Black Iris III, Light Iris, White Iris or the untitled white iris.

O’Keeffe’s serial attention makes generic search terms unusually hazardous. The iris supplied folds, flares and deep interiors that could be rendered naturalistically or pushed towards abstraction. The repeated motif also became the chief site of sexual interpretation. Reading this work responsibly means naming the exact painting before importing commentary written about another iris. Similarity supports comparison; it does not make evidence transferable without qualification.

Several works bear the catalogue title Untitled (Flower), including records dated 1923, 1928, c.1932 and c.1930–36.^[25][26] The inherited path cannot be resolved merely by matching words. Image, former title, dimensions, medium, provenance and any old page illustration must be compared against the catalogue. This is a case where intellectual honesty requires a visible caution. A consolidated theme page can retain the search intent and explain the ambiguity, but it should not manufacture a biography for the wrong object.

Once the legacy image checksum or caption is recovered, the section can be locked to the correct record. Until then, the catalogue plurality is itself the most useful supported finding. Pansy of 1926 is oil on canvas, about 27⅛ by 12¼ inches, at the Brooklyn Museum.^[19] A dark pansy with a yellow centre occupies the lower part of a tall, narrow field; a stem and blue forget-me-nots rise above.

Alternate titles make those companion flowers explicit. The support’s proportions make the small plant feel architectural. Instead of cropping a blossom across every edge, O’Keeffe lets the stem measure vertical space. Clara Lewisohn Rossin acquired the work by March 1927, and it reached Brooklyn in 1928, making it an early public placement. Corrected museum files also preserve the change from an erroneous 1927 date to 1926.^[19]

Market, institution and conservation

O’Keeffe’s flowers succeeded in galleries and later at auction because they were immediately recognisable while retaining formal ambiguity. That success can distort scholarship. Record prices turn a complex object into a headline, and licensing turns one cropped detail into a logo for the whole career. Provenance reveals more useful structures: early purchases by museums, Stieglitz’s gallery labels, O’Keeffe’s long retention of particular canvases, gifts through her estate, and recent deaccessions.

The flowers moved through networks shaped by patrons, women collectors, dealers, universities and regional museums. Their fame was produced institutionally as well as aesthetically.^{[1][6][15][35]} O’Keeffe’s controlled gradients can make damage unusually visible. Cracking, protrusions, discoloured varnish, abrasion or a changed mount interrupt fields that depend on minute tonal continuity.

Technical notes show that supports range from commercial canvas to cardboard, paper-faced board and mounted paper; treatments include synthetic coatings and spray varnish.^{[9][14][21][34]} Conservation should not be reduced to keeping colours “bright”. Decisions about removing varnish, separating mounts or cleaning pastel can alter evidence and pose risk. Object records may also disagree because one institution updates terminology after analysis. The honest manuscript names those changes rather than forcing false consistency.

Place, gardens and inhabited land

The Lake George flower practice grew within cultivation rather than an abstract realm of “nature”. The Modern Nature exhibition reconstructed a working environment of garden flowers and vegetables, orchard fruit, woods and farm buildings, and counted at least twenty-five tree compositions and roughly twenty-nine leaf canvases.^[37] This breadth changes the close-up flowers: they belong to seasonal labour, picking and repeated observation alongside barns and panoramic views. Lake George was one of the most productive laboratories of the career, not merely a place O’Keeffe endured before New Mexico.

Archive displays add horticultural evidence without turning the paintings into botanical diagrams. O’Keeffe retained garden sketches, photographs, planting ephemera and heavily marked books; an annotated rose catalogue and handwritten bookmarks in Roses of the World in Color record planned varieties.^[38] Such material supports an informed, practical interest in cultivation and selection. It cannot prove that every rose, iris or lily canvas transcribes a plant she grew. The archive instead connects studio looking with gardening choices while preserving the transformations of crop, scale and colour that separate a painting from a specimen record.

Flowers came from distinct environments: Lake George gardens and woods, New York florists and studios, Taos garden paths, Hawaiian plantations and island travel, and New Mexico cactus country. O’Keeffe’s isolation of a bloom removes visible social geography, but research can restore it. In Hawai‘i, corporate sponsorship and plantation systems frame the pineapple.

In Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s property and Pueblo homelands complicate the idea of untouched wilderness. In New York, gallery culture and photography shape the close-up. Context does not diminish formal power; it prevents a floating universal from erasing the conditions of encounter.^{[11][12][17][36]}

Beyond fixed symbols

A symbol has a relatively stable substitution: one form stands for one meaning. O’Keeffe’s best flowers frustrate that economy. They can be botanical and bodily, observed and invented, intimate and monumental. White can be cloth, petal, light or paint. A cavity can read as plant anatomy, spatial depth or abstraction without settling permanently.

Their historical force lies in this mobility. O’Keeffe demanded attention through enlargement, while critics converted attention into biography. Feminists later converted critical reduction into empowerment. Museums now use conservation, provenance and catalogue research to reopen objects flattened by fame. No single stage owns the paintings.

Close looking and historiographic caution

Begin with the whole support and its dimensions. Notice what the frame cuts, where the flower meets an edge, and whether background behaves as distance or colour field. Follow gradients before naming anatomy. Compare white passages for green, pink, grey or cream. Ask whether the centre is structural, optical or symbolic—and identify which kind of evidence supports the answer.

Then read the label critically. Check date, medium, catalogue number, title variants and present owner. Compare related versions rather than assuming the most reproduced one defines the series. Finally, allow association without converting it into fact. The paintings reward interpretation most when looking remains longer than recognition.

O’Keeffe’s own later statements are indispensable but retrospective. Museum descriptions are authoritative for objects yet can change as conservation and provenance research advances. Exhibition catalogues reflect the questions of their moment. Auction records can clarify ownership and inscriptions but are commercial documents. Feminist and queer readings illuminate reception while differing about intention.^{[27][28][30][31]}

The strongest account therefore triangulates. Catalogue data establish the object; technical study establishes materials; archives establish historical language; criticism establishes reception; close looking tests what those sources can plausibly explain. Where identification remains unresolved, the uncertainty should stay visible. O’Keeffe did not invent flowers, close-up vision or organic abstraction.

She made their combination unusually consequential. By changing scale and crop, she forced still life into the physical space of modern spectatorship. By repeating subjects, she made attention serial. By controlling colour, she allowed specific plants to approach abstraction without disappearing. The flower paintings also expose how reputations are made.

They became sites where gender, sexuality, photography, commerce, feminism and museum stewardship collided. Their familiarity is therefore an invitation to research more carefully. The closer the object is examined—its support, title, route through collections and relation to neighbouring versions—the less generic “an O’Keeffe flower” becomes.