From the Old Garden No. I

Georgia O’Keeffe’s most iconic subject is the flower—magnified to confront the viewer with femininity in its boldest form. O’Keeffe began painting her flower pictures in 1918, and they were exhibited for the first time by her dealer and future husband Alfred Stieglitz in 1923. They immediately caused a sensation. From the Old Garden No. I of 1924 dates from this key moment as O’Keeffe emerged as the most famous woman artist in America. The present work epitomizes her transformation of one of nature’s most delicate objects into a strong artistic statement, at once both intimate and monumental. As Roxana Robinson declares, "Though the work is explicitly feminine, it is convincingly and triumphantly powerful, a combination that had not before existed" (Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, New York, 1989, p. 278).

In the rapidly industrialized atmosphere of New York City in the 1920s, O’Keeffe’s flower imagery stood out amidst the hard-edged architectural paintings explored by her male contemporaries. Each summer and fall, O’Keeffe would visit Lake George in Upstate New York with Stieglitz, taking long walks along paths throughout his family’s rural estate. The wooden landscape not only provided the artist peace, but importantly inspiration as she gathered pieces of nature that captivated her. From the Old Garden No. I perhaps represents the findings from one of these wanderings, combining a bold yellow lily with a bouquet of white daisies, pink blossoms, and vibrant green leaves, all set against a blue sky background.

I'll paint what I see—what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it. Georgia O’Keeffe

For O’Keeffe, the flower subject was a tool to respond to nature’s energies in varying languages of representation and abstraction. She employed techniques of photography, including cropping, isolation and magnification, to break down the conventions of still-life painting and transcend into a new conception of natural ephemera as everlasting muse. Barbara Buhler Lynes writes, “The highly charged, vital, androgynous reality of flowers that O’Keeffe depicted in her work is presented in beautiful forms that are sensual, sexual, and simultaneously powerful and delicate—forms both vulnerable and strong in which she invites us to confront and celebrate the animate, vital, androgynous forces of nature” (“Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction Nature” in The Scharf Collection: A History Revealed, New York, 2018, p. 140).

From the Old Garden No. I manifests this often-gendered duality of delicacy and strength. The yellow lily is a beacon at the lower center, drawing the eye to the middle of its soft petals where the distinctive stamens of the lily project out toward the viewer. A similar contrast of masculine and feminine energy is encoded in the juxtaposition of the tall, angular green leaves dominating the upper center with the surrounding soft petals of the pink blossoms. The sunny yellow centers of the white daisies and the clouds of smaller blooms create a dreamy setting that almost seems to dissolve into overall patterning at the edges. Indeed, the related From the Old Garden No. 2 (Private collection), also painted in 1924, can perhaps be seen as an abstracted version of this vibrant bouquet.

…even as she added representational images to her repertoire, O'Keeffe would continue to ground her aesthetic in dynamic, linear rhythms… Barbara Haskell

This element of duality also extends beyond the composition to the canvas itself; on the reverse of this work is a second oil painting that exhibits O’Keeffe as pioneering abstractionist—arguably the first female American painter to explore non-representational art in the 1910s. The geometric reverse image closely relates to O’Keeffe’s series of 1919 paintings of “the Black Spot,” including an example in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The artist described her inspiration for these abstract works: “I never knew where the idea came from or what it says. They are shapes that were clearly in my mind — so I put them down" (qouted in B.B. Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven, 1999, vol. 1, p. 152). An inscription in O’Keeffe’s hand on the stretcher of “Winter 1920 – about Feb” supports that the reverse painting follows from this 1919 series.

I never knew where the idea came from or what it says. They are shapes that were clearly in my mind… Georgia O’Keeffe on her 1919 Black Spot paintings

O’Keeffe carried forward her attention to line, color, and the energies inherent within even when focusing again on nature inspired compositions, rather than pure abstractions. As Barbara Haskell writes, “For the rest of her life, even as she added representational images to her repertoire, O'Keeffe would continue to ground her aesthetic in dynamic, linear rhythms... Building on these tenets, O'Keeffe invented for herself a new and original language of form and color that approximated the fluid rhythms and sublimity of nature, thereby allowing her to express the intangible things in herself for which she had no words” (Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, New York, 2009, p. 13).

Together, From the Old Garden No. I represents the constant play along a spectrum of hard-edged masculinity and feminine softness, representation and abstraction with which O’Keeffe innovated throughout her career. O’Keeffe was a pioneer with her works of the 1920s—both as flower painter and abstractionist—and her legend lives on a century later as one of the leading women painters of the twentieth century.