White Pitcher—Red Flower

As epitomized by White Pitcher—Red Flower of 1920, Georgia O’Keeffe transformed the classic still life into a thoroughly modern and innovative subject. With a photographic perspective and a bold palette, O’Keeffe elevates a tabletop composition of a red dahlia into a meditation on color and shape, originating an early form of the abstracted flower paintings that would become the artist’s signature motif.

In the early 1920s, following a period of experimentation with abstract works on paper, O’Keeffe returned to the still-life tradition she had studied under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in 1907-08. Living in the rural environment of Lake George, New York, with Alfred Stieglitz, she completed a series of flower, fruit and vegetable still lifes exploring the juxtaposition of supple, organic forms against largely monochrome backgrounds. Elizabeth Hutton Turner writes, “O’Keeffe had long loved the zinnias, dahlias, and cannas she planted and painted at Lake George.” (Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 10) Indeed, O’Keeffe completed her first ever flower series focusing on the canna lilies at Lake George in 1919, creating innovative oils such as Red Canna (Lot 9). Painted the following year in 1920, the present work is a rare example of O’Keeffe depicting the brilliantly explosive, rotund form of the dahlia blossom.

Here, O’Keeffe sets the fiery red flower within a neutral setting of a silvery tabletop and a white pitcher acting as a vase. These cool tones in the background create the effect of the warm-hued bloom pushing forward out of the picture plane against the top edge of the canvas, adopting an almost sculptural quality. The resulting composition also evokes the medium of photography with its cropped composition. Though O’Keeffe denied the direct influence of photography on her art, it is hard not to see the impact of the medium. Indeed, White Pitcher—Red Flower’s steep perspective, creating an almost vertical table surface, as well as the emphasis on the sumptuous curved lines between forms, recall the work of photographer Paul Strand. Strand was, along with O’Keeffe, a member of Stieglitz’s circle and a close friend of the artist. Jonathan Stuhlman furthers, "The traditional subject matter, simplified forms, carefully constructed compositions, spatial compression, and tipped-up perspective call to mind not only Strand's photographs of 1916, but also the work of Cézanne, who by the 1910s had come to be known as one of the fathers of modernism." (Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction, exhibition catalogue, West Palm Beach, Florida, 2007, p. 24)

Of course, while the lower half of O’Keeffe’s composition is in photographic monochrome, the upper half bursts with the bright red and green hues of the dahlia and its leaves. O’Keeffe would later write, “Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know that the flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower—and what is my experience of the flower if not color.” (as quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, p. 75) Red was a key color of inspiration throughout O’Keeffe’s career, from the red cannas and dahlias that were her first flowers, to the maple trees and leaves that fascinated her during Lake George autumns, to the rust red hills that would captivate her during her later years in the American Southwest. Here, O’Keeffe displays her fluid dexterity with the bold hue, forming a pom of countless, curvaceous petals in a full range of tones from darkest burgundy at the center of the blossom to pale pink highlights along its edges.

These wondrous shapes in the dahlia flower completely draw the viewer in, anticipating the more abstracted flowers O’Keeffe would famously develop in the immediately following years. The artist once poetically explained why she made her flower paintings, reflecting, “Nobody sees a flower—really it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” (as quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, p. 47) White Pitcher—Red Flower is a bold early example of O’Keeffe positioning the flower at the front of the canvas, insistently compelling the viewer to take the time to fully see and appreciate the beauty of nature as she did.