Georgia O’Keeffe employed modernist artistic strategies to inspire wonder in the natural world. She is perhaps best known for her flower paintings, which challenged traditional associations with still-life painting. Instead, O’Keeffe’s monumental blossoms suggest personal narratives, elaborate metaphors, and radical self-expression: “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way . . . things I had no words for.”

"Petunias" was inspired by a patch of purple petunias that O’Keeffe planted at the Stieglitz family summer home near Lake George in upstate New York the year that she and Alfred Stieglitz were married. She began painting the flowers in the summer of 1925, and this is one of a dozen works of various sizes and perspectives that she painted from those plants over the next two years.

This work is the most complex in the series: featuring six blossoms posed at different angles and at various stages of blooming, it almost seems like a dynamic portrait of a single flower moving through space and time. O’Keeffe animated each petal with velvety textures and crisp contours, and the immense scale of each blossom confronts the divide between representation and abstraction.

The flowers fill the composition, touching every edge of the picture. This cropping effect, and the composition’s resemblance to a close-up image, might be attributed to the influence of modern photographic techniques. Petunias may also signal the influence of Luther Burbank’s dramatically illustrated seed catalogues, which O’Keeffe consulted while selecting plants for the orchards and gardens around the Stieglitz property. [Lauren Palmor, de Young 125]