Petunias

Object identity

• Artist: Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986)
• Title: Petunias
• Date: 1925
• Medium: oil on hardboard
• Dimensions: 18 × 30 inches (45.7 × 76.2 cm)
• Catalogue raisonné: CR 491
• Collection: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• Object number: 1990.55
• Credit: Museum purchase, gift of the M. H. de Young Family[1]^[2]

The catalogue raisonné called the support board; the owning museum now specifies hardboard. That refinement should be preserved rather than silently standardised.^[1]

The principal Petunias: flowers, crop and ground

The board is wider than it is high. This matters because the cluster reads almost like a landscape: forms spread laterally, rise and fall, and meet the edges at different heights. The central flower faces the viewer. Larger blossoms press in from the left and right, while a profile bloom at the far right exposes the trumpet-like form that a frontal view conceals.

Buds and leaves interrupt the open petals. The arrangement combines several moments of growth. Fully opened flowers, partially turned blooms and closed buds occupy one compressed field. Five broad lobes form the central petunia, with irregular outlines and edges folding towards the dark throat. Purple shifts from red-violet to cooler blue, while highlights model the upper lobes and darker seams separate overlapping surfaces. The small green centre stabilises the almost symmetrical frontal bloom before the surrounding cropped flowers disturb that order.

At the upper left and top centre, blossoms disappear beyond the board. A flower on the right is cut vertically; another enters from the lower left. Cropping makes the cluster appear larger than the support while denying a complete botanical specimen. The picture presents an encounter already in progress rather than a plant neatly contained for identification.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco treats cropping as a modernist device that renews attention to the ordinary.^[2] The result is magnification through framing as much as through literal size. The background is not white. It moves through cool grey, blue-grey and warmer pale passages. Irregular wedges appear between petals, leaves and buds.

Those intervals help separate flowers that would otherwise merge into one dark mass. They also make the cluster seem suspended close to the picture plane rather than set on a tabletop. The legacy description’s white background conflated this work with another petunia composition. The authorised image and FAMSF record establish a grey ground.^[1][2]

Colour, texture and multiple viewpoints

The collective title suggests one colour family, yet O’Keeffe builds purple from violet, ultramarine-like blue, magenta, muted rose and near-black. Blue rims cool several petals. Reddish centres create warmth, while green stamens and leaves provide complementary contrast. The colour differences establish form without hard illustrative outlines. A reproduction can flatten these shifts or push them towards uniform violet.

Description should recognise the authorised digital image as evidence of composition, not a substitute for direct colour measurement. The flowers appear soft because tones fade gradually and edges darken or glow; thick, tactile paint is not required to imitate velvet. The visible surface is comparatively smooth and thin. Transitions model folds while leaving the board’s flatness perceptible. This is visual observation rather than a technical cross-section: no public object-specific report identifies pigments, ground or layer sequence for CR 491.^[1][24] The frontal central blossom exposes its throat while the right flower turns side-on.

Upper blossoms tilt away, and buds offer closed forms. These viewpoints could not all arise from one fixed photographic instant unless the bouquet already held them. O’Keeffe organises a cluster to display different kinds of petunia visibility at once. The work therefore joins close observation to construction. It need not be either a faithful snapshot or a free abstraction.

Title, inscription and early ownership

Petunias is documented in the Whitney Archive, Downtown Gallery Archive, Abiquiú Notebooks and a backing label.^[1] The title is plural and descriptive. It does not supply a mood, symbolic programme or colour in its current form. McCall’s reproduced the work in May 1927 as Blue Petunias.^[1] That title emphasises a colour visible within the purple range, but the catalogue does not promote it to the principal title.

O’Keeffe wrote her name and “Sumer 1925” in black paint on the verso. The catalogue preserves the single-m spelling as inscription evidence rather than correcting the object.^[1] George Of added a graphite notation, and an Intimate Gallery label identifies the artist, title and year. A circled “OK” appears on the backing.^[1] These marks connect making, framing, gallery handling and later cataloguing.

They also provide firmer dating than the legacy page’s unsupported 1924 claim. Access O’Keeffe cautions that dates in the catalogue raisonné can sometimes remain approximate or reflect later research. Here, however, O’Keeffe’s own painted year and the Intimate Gallery label independently support 1925.^[1][18] The Whitney Archive records O’Keeffe’s recollection that a man on the staff of McCall’s bought the painting and later returned it to her for safekeeping. She no longer remembered his name.^[1]

This is unusually candid provenance evidence. It identifies an event while leaving the owner unresolved. The anonymous purchaser should not be converted into a named collector through guesswork. The gap also explains why the work’s early chain cannot be narrated as a simple passage between galleries. The published provenance begins with O’Keeffe and the Intimate Gallery, followed by An American Place and the Downtown Gallery.

It then returns to the artist, passes through Doris Bry and Robert Miller Gallery, and reaches Esther Johnson Oldwich around 1975.^[1] Richard York Gallery sold the work to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in December 1990.^[1] Brackets in the source record indicate reconstructed or documentary stages. A responsible account retains that degree of certainty rather than presenting every interval as equally evidenced.

Material history and the 1969 varnish

A typed Doris Bry label states that the painting was varnished in 1969.^[1] That record establishes a surface intervention but supplies no resin name, reason, applicator or current condition. It does not prove that the visible gloss or saturation in reproduction comes entirely from that coating. The public record also lacks a full recent condition narrative. The correct boundary is to report the label and withhold a speculative treatment history.

Lake George and the first enlarged flowers

O’Keeffe planted a patch of flowers at the Stieglitz family summer property in 1924, the year she and Stieglitz married. FAMSF identifies Petunias as one of roughly a dozen works made from those plants over the next two years.^[2] The subject was therefore cultivated as well as observed. Gardening created a changing studio resource: blooms opened, wilted, turned and presented different arrangements over time.

This origin makes the series a record of sustained proximity rather than a chance bouquet bought for one still life. O’Keeffe spent summers and autumns at Lake George, often taking canvases back to New York for completion and spring exhibition. Across the decade she made more than two hundred paintings, drawings and pastels there.^[11] Her subjects included flowers, fruit, vegetables, leaves, trees, barns, panoramic landscapes and abstractions.

The site supplied material across genres. Modern Nature challenged the idea that Lake George was merely an inconvenience before New Mexico. It was a productive place central to her professional development.^[11] O’Keeffe and Stieglitz married in December 1924. In 1925 she entered Seven Americans, moved with him to the Shelton Hotel and became closely involved with installations at the newly opened Intimate Gallery.^[12][25]

The petunia works belong to this overlap of domestic, horticultural and professional change. Their garden source was private, but their scale and exhibition context were emphatically public. Biography helps locate the work. It does not turn each flower into a coded statement about marriage. Museum chronology places O’Keeffe’s first close-up flowers on large canvases in 1924 at Lake George.^[12][13]

Enlargement changed the inherited still-life relation between flower and surrounding room. Petals could reach the edge, background could almost disappear, and botanical detail could become abstract structure. CR 491 is comparatively modest in height and includes several blossoms. Its innovation lies in compression, cropping and chromatic scale rather than one flower occupying a monumental canvas.

Photography, seriality and ordinary subjects

O’Keeffe lived within a culture of modern photography. Stieglitz and Paul Strand explored close viewpoints, serial study and cropping; O’Keeffe knew their work closely.^[13][14] The analogy helps explain why her frame can cut through petals without making the flowers seem accidentally incomplete. Cropping produces a stronger design and suggests continuation beyond the edge.

No checked source identifies a particular photograph as the model for Petunias. General photographic influence should not be turned into a one-to-one derivation. Stieglitz photographed the same subject across many exposures, changing pose, crop, print process and emphasis. O’Keeffe understood how variants could preserve different interpretations.^[14] Her petunia group works similarly in principle, though through painting.

One plant yields frontal and profile views, bottles and groundless enlargements, clusters and single blooms. A series is not a factory of near-duplicates. It is a way of testing which relations survive when format, scale and context change. Petunias were familiar garden flowers, readily present at the summer property.

O’Keeffe did not need an exotic specimen to construct a modern image. FAMSF asks what is extraordinary in the ordinary and connects enlargement to the experience of colour.^[2] The museum’s framing usefully shifts emphasis from flower symbolism to acts of looking. The commonness of the plant heightens the challenge. Monumentality is made through attention rather than inherited from rarity.

Flower, colour and interpretive restraint

FAMSF quotes O’Keeffe wondering whether flower or colour was the true focus and linking large scale to her experience of the flower.^[2] The statement does not make botany irrelevant. Petal structure organises the colour, while colour changes how the structure is felt. The painting’s achievement lies in refusing a choice: it remains recognisably petunias while purple becomes an independent field of pressure, depth and rhythm. A familiar summary says O’Keeffe enlarged flowers to reveal their essence, but that word can imply one fixed truth inside the plant.

The series suggests something more open. Each work finds another relation: pale bloom against green field, dark pair against white, cluster across grey, two cropped flowers inside a narrow rectangle. If there is an essence, it is not a single diagram. It emerges from repeated, differing encounters.

Petunia No. 2: composition and documentation

Petunia No. 2 is a 1924 oil on canvas measuring 36 1/16 × 30 1/8 inches (91.6 × 76.5 cm). It is CR 462 and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum accession 1996.3.2, given by The Burnett Foundation and Gerald and Kathleen Peters.^[3] A pale lavender bloom fills the lower centre. Another appears at the top, partly hidden by a wide, dark diagonal arc. A bud rises at lower left against mottled green and blue.

The composition is much larger and more vertically expansive than CR 491. It retains several flowers but makes the foreground bloom an enveloping presence. The arc crosses almost the full width, separating upper and lower blooms. It can resemble a leaf, shadow, barrier or abstract band. Its scale exceeds an ordinary supporting detail.

The form interrupts botanical continuity and gives the canvas a strong non-descriptive structure. That interruption prevents the work from becoming a simple diagram of a flower. Viewer attention moves between blossom and band without fully resolving their spatial relation. The Whitney Archive supplies the current title. Downtown Gallery and Abiquiú records support variants including Petunia #2, Petunia—No. II and Petunia No. II; several exhibitions used Petunia II.^[3]

A torn backing inscription links the work to catalogue number 122 and the 1925 Seven Americans exhibition. Other marks give a price, a Cleveland destination and the title in Stieglitz’s hand.^[3] The record notes no signature on the canvas itself. Attribution and title rest on the documented backing and archive rather than a visible recto signature.

Petunia No. 2: debut, material condition and circulation

Between 9 and 28 March 1925, Stieglitz included the painting in the Anderson Galleries presentation Seven Americans. The full title advertised 159 recently made paintings, photographs and “things” by Dove, Hartley, Marin, Demuth, Strand, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz; the surviving catalogue assigns numbers 101–131 to O’Keeffe.^[3][30] This was the public debut of her enlarged flowers within a programme asserting an American modernism across media, rather than a solo presentation detached from the circle that Stieglitz had assembled.

A contemporary New Yorker review called the canvases glowing and mysterious, observing that O’Keeffe could hold attention whether viewers encountered pure form or flower-and-leaf design.^[31] The language shows that ambiguity between abstraction and botanical reference was already visible at the debut, although the unsigned review discussed her contribution collectively rather than naming Petunia No. 2. Object-specific conservation records identify commercially primed, fine plain-weave bleached linen, shifting the evidence from exhibition rhetoric to the physical painting.

The canvas has protein sizing and an apparent zinc-oxide and lead-white oil primer.^[3] Graphite underdrawing is occasionally visible at raised paint ridges. Thin, generally single-layer colour leaves support texture visible; stiff light paint was scrubbed in short strokes, while darker and more fluid passages were smoothed and edged linearly.^[3] Gradual shifts of hue and value were generally built wet into dry. This technical precision belongs to CR 462 and should not be automatically transferred to the hardboard of CR 491.

At an unknown date, methods associated with O’Keeffe and conservator Felrath Hines lined CR 462 onto Belgian linen with wax-resin and mounted it on a new expansion-bolt strainer.^[3] The treatment may have aggravated planar distortion, raised warp threads and cracking. A historic finger pressure from the reverse caused cracks near the top rail; some areas continue to cleave and require consolidation.^[3] An original synthetic sprayed varnish, apparently applied at O’Keeffe’s direction, is yellowed and contains dark amber inclusions likely introduced by spraying equipment. The work was stable overall in 2016, but stability included active monitoring.^[3]

After later O’Keeffe-family and foundation ownership, the painting entered the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in 1996.^[3] It appeared in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition and The Poetry of Things, later travelling in Modern Nature. From 2016 to 2017 it joined Making Modernism in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.^[3][20][21] That Australian exhibition placed O’Keeffe beside Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith. The comparison treated modernism as several place-bound practices rather than a story owned by one national centre.

Black and Purple Petunias

Black and Purple Petunias (1925) is oil on board, 20 × 25 inches (50.8 × 63.5 cm), CR 490, in a private collection.^[4] Two enormous blooms dominate the surface. Their petals approach black but open into violet, blue and magenta around small green centres. Bright leaves and a broken white background sharpen the darkness. Unlike CR 491’s many overlapping flowers, this painting makes a pair confront the viewer.

Cropping turns their curved edges into the composition’s outer architecture. Whitney, Downtown Gallery and Abiquiú records support the title, with an ampersand variant. Stieglitz’s backing labels identify work, artist, date and address; his handling notes warn against crushing the frame and specify screw-eye placement.^[4] The painting appeared in the 1934 An American Place survey and was mentioned in a New York Times review. A 1937 exhibition and later Two Lives and Poetry of Things presentations extended its record.^[4]

Its published provenance begins with Doris Bry and later dealers rather than with an unbroken chain from 1925. Earlier ownership remains unresolved in the public entry. In 1937 Black and Purple Petunias was one of twelve images in The Work of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portfolio of Twelve Paintings. The portfolio was issued by Knight Publishers and the Dial Press in an edition of 1,050, using hand-printed colour plates on paper made to O’Keeffe’s specification.^[4][28]

This was a different kind of circulation from an exhibition. The portfolio translated a privately held painting into a portable sequence whose controlled colour reproduction could enter libraries and domestic collections. The plate cannot be treated as a transparent record of the painting’s colour. Its value lies in reception history: by 1937 the petunia had been selected to represent O’Keeffe’s work within a deliberately limited published canon. A backing note records varnishing by Felrath Hines in February 1968, redone in June 1969.

Another records Soluvar varnish in June 1988.^[4] These are three documented coating events across twenty years. They may affect saturation and gloss, especially in nearly black passages. The labels do not supply present condition, removal history or layer identification. A current private-owner report would be needed before drawing stronger conclusions.

Purple Petunias and other 1925 works

Purple Petunias (1925) is an oil on canvas measuring 15 7/8 × 13 inches (40.3 × 33 cm), CR 494. The Newark Museum of Art received it through Cora Louise Hartshorn’s 1958 bequest.^[5] Two flowers fill the vertical field. Their petals overlap so tightly that only slim white-grey fragments remain near the edges. Green centres punctuate black throats.

The lower bloom is cropped; the upper turns and folds towards it. Pink and blue highlights prevent purple from becoming one flat mass. The title appears in the Downtown Gallery Archive but not in the Whitney Archive or Abiquiú Notebooks.^[5] George Of’s graphite stretcher notes include dimensions and a number. Stieglitz added a price mark, while the backing carries the Intimate Gallery stamp and O’Keeffe’s name and date.^[5]

This uneven evidence is informative. A title documented in one archive is still usable, but it should not be described as universally confirmed across O’Keeffe’s records. The provenance runs from the Intimate Gallery to Cora Louise Hartshorn in 1926. Newark received the painting through her bequest in 1958.^[5] This is a much earlier museum trajectory than CR 491, which entered FAMSF in 1990.

Different ownership histories affected availability, exhibition and scholarly visibility. The work appeared in the 1934 An American Place survey, mid-century collection exhibitions and a 2011–12 retrospective.^[5] O’Keeffe also painted a small square Untitled (Purple Petunia), a bottle arrangement now in Denver, a single dark bloom, and pink petunias in a white glass.^[6][7][8][9]

Together these canvases range from conventional vessel still life to radical close-up. The plant could remain rooted in an arrangement, lose its container, appear alone or join a dense cluster. This breadth makes it misleading to identify one composition as the template from which all others mechanically follow.

Small paintings, bottles and later enlargement

The square Untitled (Purple Petunia) measures only 7 1/4 inches on each side. A single dark bloom rests against folds of white.^[6] Its scale differs sharply from Petunia No. 2, yet the concentration is complete. Nothing in the record makes it a preparatory study. O’Keeffe could test enlargement and intimacy simultaneously.

The square Untitled (Purple Petunia) demonstrates that physical dimensions do not determine artistic completeness. The Denver Petunia places purple blooms in a shiny green glass bottle against a pale folded ground, while Pink Petunias in a White Glass keeps the vessel and uses a smaller vertical format.^[7][9] These works preserve recognisable still-life supports that the close-ups remove. O’Keeffe could pursue radical concentration in a small square and retain the inherited bottle arrangement elsewhere without making either format subordinate.

A bottle creates scale and gravity; flowers have stems and occupy a surface. Comparing them with CR 491 shows how eliminating the vessel changes flowers from arranged objects into an environment that meets the frame. A 1927 Purple Petunias expands a single rippling flower across a nearly three-foot-wide canvas.

Pale blue light and a green centre animate deep purple petals, with only slivers of white and red around them.^[10] The later work demonstrates that 1924–25 did not exhaust the motif. O’Keeffe could return with a larger support and further reduce the number of blooms. The development is not a straight march from realism to abstraction. Bottle pictures, clusters and single-flower enlargements overlap chronologically.

Anatomy, sexuality and magnification

Petunia petals create broad lobes around a funnel-shaped throat. O’Keeffe uses that structure but alters emphasis through crop, colour and scale. At close range, a lobe becomes a field; the throat becomes a dark interval; stamens become isolated green shapes. Botanical parts remain present while their pictorial roles grow independent. The Met describes this process as magnifying details until shapes and lines appear abstract while remaining rooted in observation.^[13]

Critics have repeatedly treated O’Keeffe’s flowers as female anatomy. Stieglitz’s photographs and promotion helped fuse her body, personality and art in public reception.^[14] The resemblance can be perceptually real, but a universal genital key reduces differences among paintings and makes the viewer’s association stand in for documentary intention. O’Keeffe resisted exclusive sexual readings. Responsible interpretation records their history, allows embodied response and returns to what each canvas actually does with colour and form.

Rejecting a compulsory Freudian reading does not require making the paintings decoratively neutral. Dark openings, enclosing folds and bodily scale can create intimacy or erotic charge. Those effects coexist with gardening, observation, modernist design and technical decisions. They need not cancel one another. The important distinction is between a possible experience and a claim that O’Keeffe encoded one fixed sexual message.

A 2021 Centre Pompidou audio tour offers a revealing French restatement of this tension. It links flower enlargement both to photography and to a desire for sensory union with the subject, describing a pantheistic sensuality before quoting O’Keeffe’s objection that critics projected their own associations onto her flowers.^[33] The interpretation is useful precisely because it does not settle the issue: institutional reception can preserve bodily intensity while acknowledging that the viewer’s meanings are not automatically the artist’s.

A close-up slows the encounter because viewers must follow petal edges, tonal shifts and small centres. The subject may be familiar, but the format denies a quick category glance. The National Gallery’s close-looking material describes O’Keeffe’s later flower series as moving from plant and surrounding leaves towards internal detail, making the overlooked monumental.^[23] CR 491 performs that work across a cluster. It asks the eye to compare several blooms rather than disappear into only one.

Modern still life and exhibition history

Traditional flower still life often announces vase, tabletop and room. Petunias removes all three. The flowers are still objects selected and arranged by an artist, yet they no longer sit at a comfortable distance. The cluster becomes the viewer’s visual field. FAMSF describes the work as challenging metaphorical still-life tradition.^[2]

Its modernity lies partly in denying the spatial furniture that once made flowers safely containable. Petunias, Petunia No. 2, Black and Purple Petunias and the small untitled flower all entered the orbit of the 1999–2000 exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things.^{[1][3][4][6][19]} The exhibition’s title is apt because O’Keeffe did not discard things when she abstracted them. She concentrated their relations until object and formal structure reinforced one another.

Archival records at the Phillips preserve the exhibition’s institutional history and offer a route for recovering object files in the final research pass.^[19][27] The finding aid identifies separate object-research folders for Black and Purple Petunias, Petunia No. 2 and a 1925 Petunia. That division indicates object-by-object curatorial work rather than one generic flower file, even though the folder contents are not reproduced online.^[19]

Reviewing the San Francisco installation in 2000, Christopher Knight described its organisation by dominant hue, including a purple wall of petunias. He valued the exhibition’s tight focus on objects and colour while criticising the surrounding biographical photomurals as another reinforcement of the O’Keeffe personality cult.^[29] The review matters because it records both display and disagreement. The petunias were received as a chromatic group, but the exhibition’s attempt to redirect attention towards things did not wholly escape the mythology built around their maker.

The 2013–14 Modern Nature exhibition travelled from the Hyde Collection to Santa Fe and San Francisco. It reunited botanicals, fruit, trees, leaves, barns, landscape and abstractions from the Lake George years.^{[1][3][6][11]} That breadth corrects the tendency to isolate flower paintings from the site that produced them. Gardening existed beside walking, fruit picking, architectural observation and studio revision. CR 491’s San Francisco venue returned it to its owning institution within a reconstructed ecology of work.

Earlier, Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern carried CR 491 from London and Mexico City to Yokohama. The Japanese venue ran from 31 October 1993 to 16 January 1994 and presented seventy-eight works as the country’s first substantial survey of O’Keeffe.^[1][32] Its description celebrated a uniquely American modernism supposedly made without European influence. That national claim records the exhibition’s framing rather than an uncontested account: O’Keeffe’s originality developed within transatlantic debates even when her work resisted simple dependence on European models.

Photography and contemporary dialogue

The Musée de Grenoble displayed CR 491 in Georgia O’Keeffe et ses amis photographes from 7 November 2015 to 7 February 2016.^[1][34] The title placed the painting among works associated with Stieglitz, Strand and other photographers, making the comparison itself the exhibition’s premise rather than a later analogy. The public record does not show the precise neighbour hung beside Petunias. Medium difference therefore remains essential: a camera frames reflected light through a lens, while O’Keeffe could revise colour, contour and relation throughout the painting process.

CR 491 travelled in The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art from Crystal Bridges to North Carolina and New Britain in 2018–19.^[1][22] The exhibition placed O’Keeffe beside twenty living artists through themes including flowers, still life, landscape, the intangible and abstraction. Curators rejected simple one-to-one lineage claims.^[22] That approach lets Petunias function as an active contemporary reference rather than a historical illustration of feminine nature painting.

The O’Keeffe Museum paired a small petunia with Andy Warhol’s flower imagery in Flowers of Distinction.^[6][26] The comparison brings different systems of repetition into view. O’Keeffe varied observed forms through painted encounters; Warhol’s flowers raise questions of photographic source, screen repetition and mass circulation. The link does not make O’Keeffe a proto-Pop artist. It shows how a common subject can expose changing relations among originality, seriality and reproduction.

Conservation evidence and close looking

CR 462 has an extensive technical report, CR 490 has varnish notes, CR 491 records a 1969 varnish, and CR 494 publishes no comparable treatment narrative.^[1][3][4][5] These differences define the limits of knowledge for each work. Broader studies describe thin O’Keeffe paint, commercial grounds and metal-soap protrusions, but no corpus-level result proves a condition in CR 491.^{[15][16][17][24]} Start with the central green stamens, move through the purple lobes, and compare their warm and cool passages before following the overlaps towards the edges.

Notice each grey opening between forms. Count buds as well as blooms. Let the profile flower at the right show how different a petunia looks when its trumpet turns away. Then compare the three absorbed works. Scale, darkness and cropping change so extensively that the repeated plant becomes a method rather than a repeated image.

What the series establishes

The petunia paintings show O’Keeffe working through a cultivated subject across two formative summers. They join garden labour, close observation, photographic culture, gallery ambition and serial thought, while their histories resist a single story. One entered Newark early; another remained with O’Keeffe’s family; one passed through an unknown McCall’s employee; a private canvas accumulated several varnishes. Petunias is both a concentrated image and the centre of a dispersed object history. Its cluster does what the wider series does: it keeps difference visible inside repetition.