Red Snapdragons 1923

Curator: Immediately striking! The magnified, almost aggressively red petals… it’s really quite something. Editor: Yes, it is. We're looking at Georgia O'Keeffe’s “Red Snapdragons,” painted in 1923. It's an oil on canvas, depicting the flower on a monumental scale. Curator: "Monumental" is the word. I'm immediately thinking about the period she painted this, the Roaring Twenties, that radical sense of breaking from the past, an overwhelming sense of energy, really captured in this explosive use of scale and color. But what about you? What’s your take as you look at it? Editor: What I see is O’Keeffe really pushing at the boundaries of oil paint itself. The texture isn't perfectly smooth. You can almost feel the individual strokes and layers, this working of the pigment, a tension in building up form, rather than simply depicting it. What processes might she have used to apply these layers of oil? Was she interested in masking the labor? I suspect not. Curator: That's a great point. And what interests me about O'Keeffe, is how she, and Alfred Stieglitz, strategically positioned her as this kind of singular, almost mythical artistic genius, working in isolation to create these works of nature and feeling. Editor: Interesting that you call it nature. Look closely—notice how abstracted the forms are? It’s playing with the representational quality, right? Isn’t there an element of manufacturedness at play in these images? It isn't purely derived from raw "nature" as this unedited reality. Curator: Definitely! And I think that ties into O'Keeffe's role in shaping a uniquely American form of modernism. This move to abstract forms, a radical simplification that set her apart on the art stage of New York and beyond. But let's talk more about the color here, about the specific hues that grab us… Editor: This is clearly more than a red flower, isn't it? There are hues that verge toward deep pinks and even purples, they evoke depth and form...a play of dark and light within the single petals. I think we are getting to the bottom of how her meticulous application and mixing created such striking effect, this monumentality. Curator: It also calls into question, what were the means by which she made and distributed these monumental forms to become iconic American images? It seems like O’Keefe challenged traditional perceptions of the scale and what flowers represent culturally and artistically. Editor: In effect she reframed flowers altogether. By shifting how we approach production of imagery, perhaps we could move away from some art-historical narratives of who is a ‘genius’ to examining what ‘genius’ is and how it comes to exist!