CELEBRATING THE INTIMATE ASTRAL ART & BEAUTY OF FLOWERS
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
“I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.”
--- Georgia O'Keeffe
Flowers start, live, & end life in beauty. It doesn’t take much to see it. It doesn’t even take much to take a photo, make a drawing or a painting of a flower and have it turn out beautifully. But Georgia O’Keeffe has elevated them to a heavenly place. Her flower painting are perhaps the most iconic of all time.
The major retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work opened recently at the Tate Modern, in London. I was lucky enough to see it in person.
While O’Keeffe’s flower paintings are her most famous, they are just one part of the exhibition, occupying just 1 room.
Curator Tanya Barson organized O’Keeffe’s works chronologically, so we can see when, in the artist’s evolution, she became enamored with flowers.
Born in 1887, in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe was quite progressive for her time -- in her style, her subject matter, and her personal life.
She was heavily influenced by photography. She was married to photographer Alfred Steiglitz and counted others, such as Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, among her good friends. The exhibition includes several of their photographs.
O’Keeffe got up close and personal with flowers. She painted them on large canvasses, in extreme close up, as a macro photo lens might view them. So close, in fact, with such intimacy, that their central reproductive parts evoked heavy sensuality.
While Steiglitz promoted the idea of eroticized flowers in O’Keeffe’s paintings, she strenuously denied that this was her intention.
O’Keeffe is one of the few women artists in history to reach notoriety. A reproduction of her “Red Poppies” painting appeared on a US postage stamp.
O’Keeffe O’Keeffe died in 1986 aged 98. She was a role model for many women artists.
O’Keeffe’s “Jimson Weed,” painted in 1932, sold at auction in 2014 for $44.4 million, the most expensive work ever produced by a female artist.
This is an extraordinary show, displaying a collection of nearly 100 works.
The Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition continues at Tate Modern, in London, until October 5, 2016.
Read more about Beautiful Flora in 10 New Beautiful Books Now, Wow! Flower Power is Happening Now!, Beautiful Edible Flora Now!, Beautiful Interpretations of Beautiful Flora and Take A Beautiful Floral Adventure Now.
And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact Daily Fix posts.
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IMAGE CREDITS:
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Light Iris.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Black Hollyhock - Blue Larkspur.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Red Canna.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Flower Abstraction.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Hibiscus With Plumeria.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Two Calla Lily on Pink.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Heliconia - Crab Claw.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Yellow Calla.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Black Iris No. 2.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Oriental Poppies.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Red Hills and White Flowers II.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “Grey Blue & Black – Pink Circle.”
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “White Rose with Larkspur No. 2.”
- Image: by BN App - Download now!
- Image: by Georgia O’Keefe. “The White Flower.”
