Seeing Georgia O'Keeffe's Floral Studies in a New Light

For decades, Freudian interpretations of O'Keeffe's floral studies have reigned supreme. There's just one problem: the artist spent her entire career denying them.

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Jimson Weed, Georgia O’Keeffe ca. 1932. Via georgiaokeeffe.net.

In 2016, the Tate Modern in London hosted a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art, in what was the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in the United Kingdom. The 2010s were a big decade for O’Keeffe—in 2014, Jimson Weed (1932), one of her many floral paintings, sold at auction for $44.4 million. It was the most expensive painting by a female artist to be sold.

O’Keeffe’s studies of flowers inspire much blushing from viewers. For decades, they have been interpreted as erotic works that resemble female genitalia. Critics in the mid-twentieth century saw them through a Freudian lens; to them, these were works of female anatomy by a female artist.

There’s just one problem: O’Keeffe spent her entire career vigorously denying this interpretation.

Georgia O’Keeffe was born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887. She moved to Chicago at eighteen years old to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, then later the Art Students League of New York, the University of Virginia, and again in New York at Columbia University’s Teachers College. By 1916, she had lived all over the country and worked as an art teacher.

The trajectory of her career would change that year. She had produced a series of abstract charcoal drawings, which caught the eye of photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. “At last, a woman on paper!” he cried out. Her work could soon be found at Stieglitz’s gallery, 291—an institution that introduced New Yorkers to many avant-garde artists of the period.¹