Georgia O'Keeffe American, 1887-1986

Painted in New Mexico in 1937, A Sunflower from Maggie testifies to Georgia O’Keeffe’s career-long investigation into the material and conceptual possibilities that arise between representation and abstraction through the lens of the still life genre. In this resplendent example, O’Keeffe varied her application of paint to reflect the texture of a sunflower. Thick, vibrant yellow brushstrokes radiate outward, each corresponding to a flower petal, while delicate dots of paint indicate seeds that progressively evaporate toward the center. These subtle technical devices enhance the portrayal of the sunflower and, upon closer look, emerge as abstract subjects within themselves in a modernist tour de force.

A Sunflower from Maggie has been recognized as a critical episode in O’Keeffe’s artistic development by scholars and curators and has been shown at major institutions internationally, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Japan; and Theocharkis Foundation for the Fine Arts, Athens, Greece. The painting also held a position of central significance to the artist—O’Keeffe reacquired it in 1963 and bequeathed it to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1987.

The sunflower is an important subject in the art historical canon, the focus most notably of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous series and a deeply meaningful symbol for many American modernists including Charles Burchfield. O’Keeffe’s most desired paintings are her flower subjects, and the sunflower in particular is quite rare within her body of work. She painted only six examples, one of which is now held in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (Sunflower, New Mexico I; 1935). The sunflowers O’Keeffe painted in the 1930s, including the present work, reveal an evolution in focus in the artist’s approach to flower paintings. “More moods and attitudes were evident in flowers that were either large and hearty or tiny and artificial. The Sunflower Series…had the thickly painted richness of a Van Gogh sunflower with its lucid yellow petals,” Jan Castro observed in her biography of O’Keeffe.”[1] The rich salmon ground and vibrant green of the stem in A Sunflower from Maggie reappear as careful brushstrokes within the petals of the flower, accentuating O’Keeffe’s masterful skill as a colorist.

One of six flowers O’Keeffe painted in 1937, A Sunflower from Maggie depicts a sunflower given to her by her friend and Ghost Ranch neighbor Margaret “Maggie” Johnson, who was married to Robert Johnson, president of the pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson. O’Keeffe was famously reclusive, but she counted “energetic, vivacious” Maggie Johnson as part of a very select few with whom she dined and socialized in the summers at Ghost Ranch.[2] During this period, O’Keeffe frequently painted her surroundings and elements from the natural world from her life in New Mexico, including landscapes, deer horns, and flowers. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz from July of that year, O’Keeffe described her life and painting practice in New Mexico:

“I was up early—painted all day—out in the car from 7 till 11—then the rest of the day indoors—and there it hangs on the wall looking at me—and I don’t know what it looks like but I think I’ll paint it again tomorrow—just some red hills—At 5:30 I went out and walked—just over the queer colored land—such ups and downs—so much variety in such a small space…Maggie Johnson was at the house for supper—back from their pack trip…I’ve been up on the roof watching the moon come up—the sky very dark—the moon large and lopsided—and very soft—a strange white light creeping across the far away to the dark sky—the cliffs all black—it was weird and strangely beautiful.”[3]

Maggie Johnson and her nephew Seward visited O’Keeffe one day as she was working on A Sunflower from Maggie. “She had just finished a painting of a sunflower. But instead of the painting, she came back to me with the sunflower, the ‘model.’ O’Keeffe tied a handkerchief around it and gave the sunflower to me,” recalled Seward. Forty years later, they met again, and he asked O’Keeffe if she remembered: “O’Keeffe got a twinkle in her eye, and nodded and laughed.”[4]

[1] Jan Garden Castro, The Art & Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1985, 71.

[2] Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2005, 111.

[3] Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, New York: Harper & Row, 1989, 417-418.

[4] Lesley Poling-Kempes, Ghost Ranch, Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 2005, 125-126.