Last Friday I went to go see Georgia O'Keeffe's exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was fantastic. Earlier that day I had also gone to the Guggenheim to see Kandinsky's display but I found that I could not connect with it as well as I could with O'Keeffe's work.  In her collection, the main focus of her paintings were flowers.  Sometimes the image would be of a flower explicitly and other times it would be depicting more the essence of what a flower is. Each time though, it would be as if the viewer was looking through a microscope to see what the flower Through her modernist take on painting she expanded the way that nature was viewed. she imbibed her depictions of flowers with sexual undercurrents. All throughout her career she was plagued by assumptions that her work was meant to represent the female genitalia but she persistently denied this.  When I engaged with the paintings however, I found it impossible to believe that this was not her intention. Her interpretation of her subject matter was so unconventional and striking that I could understand why so many had assumed the intention of her work. Although her subject was nature, she endowed such strength into her lines and vibrancy to color value that there was something absolutely breathtaking about the forms. It was a coalition of gentleness and innocence of the subject and the vibrancy of the colors and their boundaries.

 A painting would generally be portrait oriented, about four feet wide by four feet tall and have one flower form on it. The flower would be soft and multihued and would take up the whole canvas. It would have many petals and layers each of a different color. At the root of the flower would be the ovary, pistil and the stigma. Although these are generic components of a flower, the way that O'Keeffe saw these in her art is very suggestive. if you look at the picture below, the resemblance of the womb of the flower to a woman's private parts is striking.  

Regardless, if O'Keeffe insisted that her artwork was not meant for that interpretation then so be it. I suppose that we must respect the wish of the artist and assume that our eye cannot understand her intention properly. I was just surprised by how strongly I was affected by her paintings. They were insightful and striking and I remember my visit to the Whitney with gratefulness for opening my eyes to an interpretation I had never imagined before.