A paper (plus bibliography) analyzing the Georgia O'Keefe painting Oriental Poppies. Two sources.

Essay by JiggawifeyUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, May 2004

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Georgia O'Keefe's Oriental Poppies

A paper (plus bibliography) analyzing the Georgia O'Keefe painting Oriental Poppies. Two sources.

During my visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I encountered some art by the American abstract painter Georgia Totto O'Keefe. When studying this artist I found that he enjoyed a long life, living from 1887 to 1986. She received worldwide admiration for her still-life masterpieces that detailed elaborate, vibrant and lifelike flowers and landscapes with Southwestern themes. Oriental Poppies (1927) was one of O'Keefe's most noted masterpieces and was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during my visit. This paper will provide an analysis of Oriental Poppies.

O'Keefe was born on a dairy farm in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin in 1887. She studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago. While teaching art in Texas, she met and married the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The couple moved to New York City, but O'Keefe traveled to New Mexico every year to paint the Southwestern desert.

When Stieglitz died in 1946, she moved to New Mexico. She pursued a life of travel and painting for the next 25 years. O'Keefe's work flourished in the 1970s, as art lovers showed an admiration of her style. In 1972, O'Keefe stopped painting when her eyesight began to fail. She died on March 6, 1986 at the age of 98. (Georgia O'Keefe website)

In 1923, O'Keefe began painting flowers and leaves, creating some of her best-known work. Oriental Poppies, created in 1927, is an oil-on-canvas painting. Oriental Poppies is just one of the many flower paintings created by O'Keefe. Her flower paintings have been viewed by some scholars as her response to such modern photographers as her husband Stieglitz and Paul Strand, who focused on and closely cropped their subjects in an attempt to...