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Lot Essay
The flower is inarguably the subject that established Georgia O’Keeffe as a 20th Century art icon, and her explorations in flower painting all began with the red canna lily. In 1919, O’Keeffe created her very first flower series in oil when she painted eleven known red cannas, all of intimate scale, including the present work. As Hunter Drohojowska-Philp writes, “This important series of the canna lily marked the first time that O’Keeffe works from a realistic representation of a flower in oil, through…variations, to a geometric, even Cubist design.” (Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, New York, 2005, p. 183)
In 1918, O’Keeffe began to regularly depart New York City to spend time at the family estate of her dealer and later husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, in Lake George, New York. On her first trips, she was particularly attracted to the colorful cannas that bloomed in the area in late summer and painted a series of six watercolors that depict a bouquet of the red blooms. Examples are in the collections of the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.
In 1919, O’Keeffe revisited the red canna subject, creating her first series of flower paintings in oil. The works are all vertically oriented and small scale, most the 12 x 8 ½ in. size of the present work or the smaller 8 x 6 in. Some of the paintings build upon the perspective of the watercolors, depicting multiple blooms in profile, just more closely cropped than the works on paper. In others, notably including the present Red Canna, O’Keeffe for the first time centers the flower in the composition. She elevates the blossom from the ground, allowing the viewer to look directly into the heart of its vibrant petals. As in the closely related Red Canna at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, here O’Keeffe also places the flower against an amorphous green background, which suggests foliage but artistically isolates the bloom. O’Keeffe is not painting the flower as part of a scene; rather, this is the first series where she develops her famous approach of making the flower alone her primary subject. Indeed, by the end of the 1919 series, her works like Red Flower (Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida) allow the petals to almost completely take over the picture plane, abandoning realism in favor of capturing an abstracted essence of form and color.
Red Canna and six other works from the series made their debut to the public in O’Keeffe’s watershed 1923 retrospective exhibition at Stieglitz’s Anderson Galleries. Based on this show, O’Keeffe’s floral subjects exploded into a sensation in the art world, largely due to the sensual associations that Stieglitz encouraged and critics and the public made notorious. While the intimate perspective of her flower paintings—here juxtaposing the voluptuous open petals of the bloom and leaf with sharp vertical stems—drew these comparisons, O’Keeffe always denied such interpretations. Barbara Buhler Lynes writes, “Seeing O’Keeffe’s flower paintings as manifestations of her sexuality—as depictions of her sexual anatomy—or as an attempt to convey the nature of womanhood misses her point. The highly charged, vital, androgynous reality of flowers that O’Keeffe depicted in her work is presented in beautiful forms that are sensual, sexual, and simultaneously powerful and delicate—forms both vulnerable and strong in which she invites us to confront and celebrate the animate, vital, androgynous forces of nature.” (“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction Nature,” The Scharf Collection: A History Revealed, New York, 2018, p. 140)
Throughout the rest of the decade, O’Keeffe would continue to revisit the red canna lily as one of her favorite inspirations, painting seven more works between 1922-27. In her later explorations of the subject, she further abstracts and crops her compositions until the flower almost dissolves into allover patterning, as in Red Canna (1925-28, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson). An early work of this important first flower series, the present painting moreover represents the beginning of the entire flower painting oeuvre that would forever establish O’Keeffe as one of the greatest artists in American art history.
In 1918, O’Keeffe began to regularly depart New York City to spend time at the family estate of her dealer and later husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, in Lake George, New York. On her first trips, she was particularly attracted to the colorful cannas that bloomed in the area in late summer and painted a series of six watercolors that depict a bouquet of the red blooms. Examples are in the collections of the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; and Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio.
In 1919, O’Keeffe revisited the red canna subject, creating her first series of flower paintings in oil. The works are all vertically oriented and small scale, most the 12 x 8 ½ in. size of the present work or the smaller 8 x 6 in. Some of the paintings build upon the perspective of the watercolors, depicting multiple blooms in profile, just more closely cropped than the works on paper. In others, notably including the present Red Canna, O’Keeffe for the first time centers the flower in the composition. She elevates the blossom from the ground, allowing the viewer to look directly into the heart of its vibrant petals. As in the closely related Red Canna at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, here O’Keeffe also places the flower against an amorphous green background, which suggests foliage but artistically isolates the bloom. O’Keeffe is not painting the flower as part of a scene; rather, this is the first series where she develops her famous approach of making the flower alone her primary subject. Indeed, by the end of the 1919 series, her works like Red Flower (Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, Florida) allow the petals to almost completely take over the picture plane, abandoning realism in favor of capturing an abstracted essence of form and color.
Red Canna and six other works from the series made their debut to the public in O’Keeffe’s watershed 1923 retrospective exhibition at Stieglitz’s Anderson Galleries. Based on this show, O’Keeffe’s floral subjects exploded into a sensation in the art world, largely due to the sensual associations that Stieglitz encouraged and critics and the public made notorious. While the intimate perspective of her flower paintings—here juxtaposing the voluptuous open petals of the bloom and leaf with sharp vertical stems—drew these comparisons, O’Keeffe always denied such interpretations. Barbara Buhler Lynes writes, “Seeing O’Keeffe’s flower paintings as manifestations of her sexuality—as depictions of her sexual anatomy—or as an attempt to convey the nature of womanhood misses her point. The highly charged, vital, androgynous reality of flowers that O’Keeffe depicted in her work is presented in beautiful forms that are sensual, sexual, and simultaneously powerful and delicate—forms both vulnerable and strong in which she invites us to confront and celebrate the animate, vital, androgynous forces of nature.” (“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction Nature,” The Scharf Collection: A History Revealed, New York, 2018, p. 140)
Throughout the rest of the decade, O’Keeffe would continue to revisit the red canna lily as one of her favorite inspirations, painting seven more works between 1922-27. In her later explorations of the subject, she further abstracts and crops her compositions until the flower almost dissolves into allover patterning, as in Red Canna (1925-28, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson). An early work of this important first flower series, the present painting moreover represents the beginning of the entire flower painting oeuvre that would forever establish O’Keeffe as one of the greatest artists in American art history.