Footnotes

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Provenance
(with) Doris Bry, New York.
Private collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1965).
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe Collection, Santa Fe (acquired from the above in 1972 through Doris Bry, New York).
(with) Doris Bry, New York.
(with) John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, 1977.
(with) Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York, 1977.
Private collection, New York (acquired in 1978).
Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe (acquired from the above in 2003).
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006.

Exhibited
New York, An American Place, Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings, 1946-1950, October 16 – November 25, 1950, no. 8.
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, The M. Carey Thomas Awards to Hannah Arendt and Georgia O'Keeffe, October 21 - November 2, 1971, no. 19.
San Francisco, John Berggruen Gallery, Georgia O'Keeffe: Paintings and Watercolors, September 7 - October 15, 1977, no. 19.
New York, Seventh Regiment Armory, The International Fine Art Fair, May 10-15, 2002.
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Visions of the Southwest from the Diane and Sam Stewart Art Collection, February 13 - July 3, 2009.
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Wide-Open Spaces: Capturing the Grandeur of the American Southwest, September 17 - March 10, 2012.
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, on loan, October - December 2012 (titled 'Evening Primrose').
Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Simpler, Brighter, Stronger: Southwestern Art and Early Modernism, 1910-1960, October 11, 2013 - July 26, 2014.

Literature
N. Callaway (ed.), Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers, New York, 1988, pl. 90 (illustrated).
B.B. Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, New Haven, 1999, no. 1158 (illustrated p. 723).
H. Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 2004, p. 428.
N.H. Reily, Georgia O'Keeffe, A Private Friendship, Part II: Walking the Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch Land, Santa Fe, 2009, p. 397.


The iconoclasm of Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers remains one of the most forceful and exquisite passages of modern painting by an individual artist, even one hundred years after she produced the first of this monumental sequence. While arguably the greatest, and certainly most iconic painter of flowers in the history of Western art, Nicholas Calloway contended, "Georgia O'Keeffe was not a flower painter" (quoted in N. Callaway, Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers, New York, 1988, n.p.). Rather, O'Keeffe used the flower as a means of challenging the viewer's perception of the natural world. Ethereal and tender, yet commanding and even provocative, her petaled forms read as a transfiguration of sorts, a glimpsing bridge between humanity and nature, between realism and abstraction, between life and death.

One of only two paintings O'Keeffe would complete in 1947, following the death of her husband Alfred Stieglitz, White Primrose is an aesthetic translation of her emotional experience into an object for contemplation: a triumph of pure color, bold scale, and pulsating form. The monumental flower fills the picture plane, and the close cropping of the composition barely contains the delicate, fluttering edges of the primrose blossom's petals. The subtly modulated tones of light and shadow enrich the painting with palpable texture and a lush compositional space that envelops the viewer. Through feathered brushstrokes, O'Keeffe has transformed the soothing movements of the natural world into an artistic poetry, inviting viewers to revel in the monumental beauty of the primula vulgaris. The present work is a powerful example of O'Keeffe's ability to arrest attention exclusively within the space and color of a single object. In White Primrose, the soft undulation of each velvety petal charges the work with a rhythmic energy that seems to emanate off the canvas, undefined by the finite boundaries of the physical world. O'Keeffe emphasizes the flower's delicate texture through the inclusion of a second primrose blossom, captured in profile, at the bottom of the canvas. In using two different perspectives, O'Keeffe articulates the curvature of the blooms as they unfurl outwards into the smooth, nebulous background to reveal their yellow inner core.

The cropped scale and potent palette used in O'Keeffe's flower paintings were initially jarring to viewers, and ever since her first large-scale flower in 1924, Petunia No. 2, became an instant sensation amongst critics and the public. O'Keeffe radically combined intense hues of pure color, creating startlingly inventive readings of natural forms. The magnification of the flowers similarly goes beyond an aesthetic necessity. Rather, O'Keeffe brings the inner 'faces' of her floral subjects into dialogue with the beholder. Every minute feature of the blossom depicted with extreme detail, endowing the grandly proportioned flower with a rapturous effect. The magnified scale of O'Keeffe's flowers was shocking to many because it imbued the small and insignificant with a monumental presence, compelling viewers to reassess how they perceived the world around them. O'Keeffe elaborated on this intention in 1939 when she wrote that:

"In a way – 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. If I could paint the flower exactly how I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small. So I said to myself – 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 as it" (Georgia O'Keeffe, "About Myself," in Georgia O'Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils and Pastels, New York, 1932, p. 2).

O'Keeffe's initial attraction to flowers may have been the challenge they posed to human observation, but the floral subject matter soon became an important method of self-expression for the artist. Throughout her lifetime, she continued to blend realism and abstraction in a manner that resulted in deeply personal statements conveyed through the canvas. To O'Keeffe, objectivity required close, careful observation of the natural world while abstraction related to the visual manifestation of internal thoughts, ideals, and experiences. While most would consider objectivity and abstraction to be mutually exclusive, O'Keeffe viewed the two as deeply intertwined, once writing that: "It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract... objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense... abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint" (Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, 1976, n.p.).

Even as her work began to stray from the pure abstraction of her early paintings and charcoal drawings, O'Keeffe never embraced realism. As she put it in 1922: "Nothing is less real than realism... it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get the real meaning of things" (Georgia O'Keeffe quoted in Bruce Robertson, "Useable Form: O'Keeffe's Materials, Methods, and Motifs", in Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, New Haven, 2009, p. 126). O'Keeffe was not interested in capturing what she saw in nature, but rather using form and color to render the all-encompassing, sublime experience of nature itself. O'Keeffe transformed known objects into lyrical abstractions that communicated the vast inexplicability of life and nature through form, allusion, and the emotive power of color. Abstraction not as a style, but rather, as University of Virginia professor Elizabeth Turner put it: "a practice of perception" (Elizabeth Turner, "O'Keeffe as Abstraction" in Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, New Haven, 2009, p. 65).

O'Keeffe's depictions of flowers, albeit recognizable forms, were still heavily grounded in abstraction and, therefore, resulted in a wide range of interpreted meanings. Many found O'Keeffe's flower paintings rife with sensual undertones and, in some cases, overtly erotic connotations of female anatomy. O'Keeffe deeply disliked the gendering of her work and repeatedly disavowed psychosexual interpretations of her art from men and women alike. O'Keeffe set out to paint her own experiences within nature, regardless of the desires, tastes, and opinions of those around her. In a brochure for a 1939 exhibition of the artist's work, O'Keeffe expressed her distaste for the Freudian interpretations many held of her work, writing that: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flowers as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don't" (Georgia O'Keeffe quoted in Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1999, V. II, p. 1099). Despite her repeated denial of the sexual interpretations of her work, the ambivalent imagery of O'Keeffe's flower paintings shrouded her work, and O'Keeffe herself, in a sensationalized cloud of mystery and intrigue.

White Primrose is an objective depiction of the primula vulgaris species, yet the enlarged, cropped features of the flower add an air of abstract mysticism to the piece. The unique pictorial techniques O'Keeffe used to capture each flower raise interesting parallels to the "straight photography" of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and the modern photography movement in America. Straight photography referred to Stieglitz, Strand, and others' commitment to the medium of photography and the properties that distinguished it from other visual forms like painting. Rather than manipulating or editing their photos, straight photographers directly depicted the world around them in sharp focus, resulting in strikingly simplified photographs despite endless detail. Just as a straight photographer would carefully select and frame the subject within their camera lens, the closely cropped motifs within the boundaries of O'Keeffe's canvas dictated how viewers perceived the work in front of them.

The present work is a testament to the impact avant-garde photographer Alfred Stieglitz had on the life and work of Georgia O'Keeffe. Aside from the obvious similarities in each artist's mission to capture the startling simplicity and striking beauty of the world around them, the couple continued to influence each other in and out of the studio after meeting in 1916. Shortly after seeing her work, Stieglitz exhibited O'Keeffe's drawings at his groundbreaking gallery 291 in May of 1916. From there, they maintained a steady correspondence while O'Keeffe was teaching art in Canyon, Texas. After O'Keeffe returned to New York in June of 1918, the pair's influence on each other's artistic theories and practice became palpable. O'Keeffe's appreciation for the beauty of the natural world inspired Stieglitz to increasingly photograph the nature around him, while O'Keeffe's work became less abstract and more grounded within the world surrounding her. In the summer of 1923, as part of an O'Keeffe show with over one hundred oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings put on by Stieglitz, she exhibited her first small flower paintings. 1924 marked the beginning of a tumultuous marriage filled with great passion, anguish, and inspiration that would endure for over two decades.

Like most of O'Keeffe's flowers, White Primrose is heavily ladened with symbolic meaning that is biographically relevant to the period of its inception. The primrose, or primula vulgaris, is one of the first flowers to bloom each spring and therefore is representative of youth and regrowth in many cultures. Like most flowers though, the primrose comes in a variety of colors, and each of those colors has taken on a special meaning. The white primrose has long been symbolic of mourning and sadness, with the blossom's petals interpreted as a physical manifestation of the stages of life. While O'Keeffe often returned to a certain flower species multiple times throughout her career, the artist only painted the primrose twice: once in the example presented here and again in Spring (1948). Painted immediately following the death of husband Alfred Stieglitz, arguably the most poignant, vulnerable period in O'Keeffe's life, White Primrose is a profoundly delicate and rare work. This mesmerizing, meditative painting is a physical manifestation of grief over the loss of Stieglitz, but also symbolic of regrowth and the liberation O'Keeffe experienced after relocating permanently to New Mexico.

Following his death in 1946, Georgia O'Keeffe was left as sole executor of the Stieglitz estate. As executor, O'Keeffe faced the daunting task of managing the affairs of his gallery, An American Place, and cataloguing his vast collection of hundreds of photographs and approximately 50,000 letters. As a result, her artistic output was drastically reduced, and White Primrose is one of only two works completed by O'Keeffe in 1947. With the help of Stieglitz's longtime assistant, Doris Bry, O'Keeffe was finally able to settle the estate's affairs and return to New Mexico in 1949. Upon her return to Abiquiu, New Mexico, White Primrose remained in New York with Doris Bry, who had since begun working as O'Keeffe's agent, assistant, and dealer. Since its creation, this work has been a cornerstone of three esteemed private collections as well as the artist's personal collection. Bonhams is thrilled to offer White Primrose in its 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale, marking the work's inaugural offering at auction.