Jimson Weed, 1932

Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) grew up on a farm in Wisconsin with six brothers and sisters. She studied painting in traditional styles at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York.

When she encountered European modernism and abstraction, she immediately began exploring this new approach to art making. Alfred Stieglitz, a leading advocate of modernism in the United States, saw some of O’Keeffe’s innovative drawings and admired their mysterious, pure forms.

Stieglitz’s New York City gallery, founded in 1905, was known as the 291 because of its street address on Fifth Avenue. It was the first American gallery to promote the shocking European avant-garde movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism.

Many inventive American artists spent time there exploring these new ideas. Stieglitz exhibited O’Keeffe’s drawings at his gallery in 1916. It was the first time he gave a solo exhibition to a woman.

Stieglitz gave her many more solo exhibitions over the years, and they eventually married in 1924. By the 1920s, O’Keeffe and her work were very famous. She completed much of her work in New Mexico and upstate New York.

O’Keeffe used simple shapes and colors to depict the natural world. She began developing one of her best-known motifs during the 1920s: large closely cropped images of flowers. The paintings were highly innovative and nearly abstract, with flattened forms and compressed space.

O’Keeffe paints her 1932 work Jimson Weed in a representational, or recognizable, manner. She simplifies and stylizes the lines, creating a composition that appears to be full of movement. The large scale of the image transforms the flower from fragile and delicate to bold and monumental.

O’Keeffe does not include many details, such as the flower’s veins and imperfections, instead focusing on its primary visual features.

This helps to convey the flower’s essence. The picture plane is shallow, with only a hint of sky in the background. She modulates the color on the surface of the plant to create shadows and highlights, giving limited depth to the simplified form.

• How does O’Keeffe stylize the flower in Jimson Weed?
  (She simplifies the forms, creating broad expanses of color, and emphasizes the curving shapes, such as the leaves, with clearly defined lines.)

• What aspects of this work make the flower monumental?
  (O’Keeffe crops the image closely to help viewers focus on the work’s formal qualities. She also simplifies the flower, reducing it to its most basic form, to emphasize its color and shape.) 

• Why might O’Keeffe have painted the sky instead of a garden in the background? 
  (The simple blue background keeps viewers from getting distracted by other plants and allows viewers to focus closely on the relationships among the forms in the composition.) 
  

Click here to preview and download a poster-size version of Georgia O'Keeffe's Jimson Weed.