Georgia O'Keeffe, Manner of: Squash Blossom

Georgia O'Keeffe, Manner of: Squash Blossom
Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) Manner of: Squash Blossom. Oil on canvas, signed, dated (1946), and titled verso, marked with a star and the artist's initials.

Georgia O'Keeffe was an American modernist painter known as "The Mother of Modernism". She is most recognized for her paintings of flowers, the desert landscapes of New Mexico; and the skyscrapers of New York. Garnering legendary status as early as the 1920s, O'Keeffe's work is instantly recognizable and her Jimson Weed/ White Flower No. 1 (1932) holds the record for highest price paid for a painting by a woman.

O'Keeffe's still lifes from the early 1920s are a series of explorations in looking at things close at hand--the fruit and vegetables grown at Lake George, the leaves picked up and examined in all their various shapes, the clam shells gathered in Maine, the flowers bought in New York. Yet if we compare them to the real things or other artists' representations of such things, it rapidly becomes evident that O'Keeffe has made these objects uniquely hers. She has recognized, as most modern artists, that the work of art is an object itself, a thing apart from that which is represented" (in E.H. Turner, Georgia O'Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 53).