Sunday, July 25, 2004

The Gynecology of Flowers: Flowers have long been popular subjects for painting, from still lifes to landscapes. But when Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers, she caused a sensation. For O'Keeffe didn't paint flowers from a man's eye view, or even a woman's eye view. She painted flowers from a butterfly's eye view. Many of her flower canvases were huge (the largest was six by seven feet), with the flower in complete domination - a close-up view that even today gets closer to the essence of a flower than even a camera can.


Pink Sweet Peas, Georgia O'Keefe 1927

To many critics, that butterfly view was outrageously sexual, even pornographic. They looked at the luscious folds of petals, and dangling carpals and anthers in them and saw not plant genitalia, but female genitalia. It was the Jazz Age when Freud and his theories were all the rage, and so many of those theories got applied to O'Keeffe and her flowers. It didn't help that she already had a reputation for eroticism thanks to the photographs taken by her lover (later husband), Alfred Stieglitz.

But O'Keeffe always denied the gynecological metaphor, telling her critics: ".. 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." She painted her flowers not to shock but to record the play of shapes, color, and light that she saw when she looked at a flower closely. Her brain didn't think in words so much as it did in patterns and colors:

The meaning of a word - to me - is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with words. I have often been told what to paint. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what I have painted.

Which is why her flower paintings transcend the label of flower porn. They are visual poetry. Keats' described the sweet pea flower as "wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white." O'Keeffe's vision of the flower is the same. She may have not have been able to express it in words, but she felt it just the same. Lucky for us, she could turn that vision into a picture worth more than a thousand words.

 

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