Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which argued that all art is fueled and driven by sexual energy, seemed to influenced Stieglitz the most, when he suggested that O’Keeffe’s flowers are metaphorical studies of vulva. This included the reading of Sigmund Freud’s books, among other popular literature on sex and psychology. At the time Stieglitz was a member of a circle of New York creatives who used themes of sexuality in their works as a mean through which they declared their belonging to the avant-garde. The theory mentioned above, which links Georgia O’Keeffe flower paintings with the metaphorical representations of female genitalia, was first proposed by Stieglitz, in 1919, before they got married. Impressed by her works, Stieglitz held a few exhibitions of her work in his 291 Gallery, and the pair married in 1924. In autumn 1915 she sent some of her charcoals to a friend in New York, who showed them to a prominent photographer, Alfred Stieglitz. After her initial art training at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York, she worked as an illustrator as she was unable to continue her studies due to financial difficulties. She was a very passionate and highly intelligent woman, who was primarily interested in beauty, form, and design. The life of Georgia O’Keeffe is well documented.
Image via Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz - From Vagina to Marriage In recent years, however, there are attempts to shift the interpretative framework of Georgia O’Keeffe flowers away from gendered readings, which are considered conservative and outdated. Being another extreme of the reductive readings of gender and sex, O’Keeffe’s flowers served as a battlefield for opposing interpretations in which the artist herself often took an active part. In the 20th century rife with male artistic geniuses and expressive power of splotched masculinity, as in drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the femininity became the prerogative of the sensual, delicate, and vulva-like flowers.
These are just some of the legitimate questions the search results may provoke, but the answer to them requires a much deeper exploration of O’Keeffe’s flowers and contextual background that surrounds them.
But how the link between Georgia O’Keeffe flowers and vagina became so strong that is unavoidable today, and more importantly, how much veracity is in it? Can we ascribe her work to this singular interpretation, leaving aside all others, and how did this perspective start to dominate over others, especially if we had in mind that the artist rejected it herself? They put these three words in conjunction with the word vagina, or vulva, as if something that naturally comes together. The majority of texts on the first several pages of the results will be with similar titles. For anyone not familiar with Georgia O'Keeffe's art and its readings, a search of the internet with just three keywords - Georgia O’Keeffe flowers – may come with surprising results.