How the art world got Georgia O’Keeffe so wrong

“My New Yorks,” the show title for a new Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit, may have you scratching your heads.

When you think of O’Keeffe, a monastic life in a stark adobe in New Mexico likely comes to mind, not a New York hotel room in midtown Manhattan.

Yet, O’Keeffe was a New Yorker for 31 years living in the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue. Even the subject of her most famous work – colossal close-ups of flowers – was painted there.

Besides the flowers, O’Keeffe painted skyscrapers she saw outside her hotel window, and even titled “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” One hundred of these big city works are on view at the Chicago Institute of Art through Sept. 22.

O’Keeffe’s urban landscapes are not unlike those she painted of the plains in the Southwest – bold, flat, colorful and nearly abstract. Form is form, whether mountains or marigolds, she seemed to say.

That’s why she enlarged flowers as big as buildings, she said. “I will make every busy New Yorker take time to see what I see of flowers...People will be startled. They'll have to look at them.''

But the art world didn’t see any of that. Rather than flowers as tall as skyscrapers "so New Yorkers couldn't ignore their beauty,” the cognoscenti saw female anatomy.

Typical reactions include the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman describing her flowers as “seductive bands and furrows” with “obvious sexual interpretation.” Art Digest tagged her flowers “primordially libidinous.” And as far as Andy Warhol was concerned, “All she does is paint vaginas.”

Even O’Keeffe’s husband, photographer and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz, got her flower paintings wrong. “You aren't planning to show it, are you? I don't know how you're going to get away with anything like that.”

O'Keeffe ignored the art world’s opinion and by so doing, move flower painting out of the traditional “lady-painter' niche. She believed that form, color and pattern were her subject. Van Gogh, celebrated for his "Sunflowers,'' would have understood.

But she was so embarrassed by the likening of her flower paintings to a female body part that she told New York art critic Emily Genauer, "I hate flowers. I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don't move.''

Continuing to stand up to the attacks, O'Keeffe explained her work to biographer Roxana Robinson: “There was a flower. It was perfectly beautiful, but it was so small, you really could not appreciate it. So, I thought to make it big...

"If I could paint that flower on a huge scale, then you could not ignore its beauty. People would be startled. They'd have to look at it.''

O’Keeffe denied the sexual connotation of her work to her death, and I'll do the same to mine. Her flowers are about aesthetics, not anatomy.