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In 1883, a cantankerous male contributor to The Massachusetts Ploughman complained that women had come to believe themselves endowed with an “innate comprehension” of flowers. For centuries, excess floral emphasis gaslighted the fairer sex into overidentification. O’Keeffe was not the first to lament the expectations flower painting placed on women. I fancy this all hasn’t much to do with painting.” Certainly, it would seem to have something to do with Stieglitz, but perhaps even more with the flowers themselves.
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Jimson weeds and irises overwhelmed and overshadowed her later renderings of deserts and red hills, “because,” as she wrote in the same introduction, “a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has. . . . In this way, flowers became for O’Keeffe a kind of prison. In an introduction to a catalogue for a 1939 exhibition in New York, O’Keeffe made a bitter address to fans of her floral paintings: “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.” His association of her floral portraits with vaginas was, in retrospect, a brilliant bit of marketing, in many ways leading to the financial success of a work like “Jimson Weed.” It was also a brand that O’Keeffe struggled to escape for the rest of her life. This Freudian interpretation of her flowers originated not with her but with Alfred Stieglitz, the powerful photographer and gallerist who launched O’Keeffe’s career and who later became her husband. A companion piece, less expensive, less vaginal, belongs to the Indianapolis Museum of Modern Art, about twenty minutes from where I grew up, in a suburb where fathers presented their daughters with promise rings.įor her entire career, O’Keeffe vehemently denied that her paintings had anything to do with female sex organs. A single white trumpet flower, cropped so close against an emerald tumult as to seem almost like a periscope peering out of a sea, it now hangs in the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas. 1” holds the record for the highest price ever paid for a painting by a woman. Maybe the word most associated with Georgia O’Keeffe is “vagina,” but it could just as easily be “cash.” Sold in 2014 for $44.4 million, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No.