Zinnia

In the early 1920s, following a period of experimentation with abstract works on paper, Georgia O’Keeffe returned to the still-life tradition she had studied under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in 1907-08. Living in the rural environment of Lake George, New York, with Alfred Stieglitz, she completed a series of flower, fruit and vegetable still lifes exploring the juxtaposition of supple, organic forms against largely monochrome backgrounds. Elizabeth Hutton Turner writes, “O’Keeffe had long loved the zinnias, dahlias, and cannas she planted and painted at Lake George.” (Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 10) Indeed, O’Keeffe completed her first ever flower series focusing on cannas at Lake George in 1919, anticipating a period of production that would synonymize the subject of flowers with her renowned career. Zinnias, however, are incredibly rare in her oeuvre, with only four known to have been executed yet only two are located: one in the collection of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and the other, the present work.

In Zinnia of 1921, O’Keeffe juxtaposes the organic forms of two zinnias against an angled, minimalistic background. Subtle gradations of naturalistic greens and soft pinks complement the delicacy of the flowers themselves, while their varying heights and myriad of unique forms create a dynamic composition that transcends the confines of traditional still-life painting. Though O’Keeffe denied the direct influence of photography on her art, the cropped quality of the composition here seems to evoke the medium.

Indeed, O’Keeffe painted Zinnia shortly after her contemporary Charles Sheeler spoke in an interview with Vanity Fair on the uses of photography in painting, accompanied by a reproduction of his photograph Zinnia and Nasturtium Leaves of1916-17. O’Keeffe’s painting can be seen as an interpretation of Sheeler’s work, with a slightly more angled perspective and even closer cropping. Sarah Whitaker Peters writes, “She kept a portion of his rectangular table, but tilted hers at an angle. Although she subtracted his two nasturtium leaves, she added another zinnia in the exact position of the missing lower one. She paid attention to her own shadow design, not Sheeler’s, and she ignored his straight, high-contrast presentation of detail. Her focus is almost Pictorial, being soft and diffused. Despite all these changes, it would be hard to dispute the fundamentally photographic character of Zinnias [sic].” (Becoming O’Keeffe: The Early Years, New York, 1991, p. 206)

Though critics have described Sheeler and O’Keeffe’s craftsmanship with similar adjectives, such as “immaculate” and “photographic,” O’Keeffe maintained her distinctive style and artistic vision especially in her iconic images of flowers. The artist once poetically explained why she made her flower paintings, reflecting, “Nobody sees a flower—really it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” (as quoted in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, p. 47) Zinnia is a bold early example of O’Keeffe positioning the flower at the front of the canvas, insistently compelling the viewer to take the time to fully see and appreciate the beauty of nature as she did.