Red Canna 1923 Oil painting

O’Keefe’s flower
paintings, many executed in the 1920s, are bee’s-eye views. They carry us through undulating landscapes of petals, stamen,
pistil, a super-reality of female “privates.” Warhol’s silkscreened flowers blow hibiscus (or are they marigolds?
impatiens?) up to tire-size. Foliage retains some photographic detail but the flowers themselves, like Warhol’s icons
of Mao and Marilyn, are purposefully generic, the artist splashing them with color, often printing them in grids. Warhol’s
flowers, the equivalent of mass plantings, may even have been satirizing O’Keefe’s works, her burrowing bloom-by-bloom
intensity.
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