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This is O'Keeffe's largest and most ambitious floral work, with her signature emphasis on size and contour.

In 1936 Elizabeth Arden commissioned O'Keeffe to paint Jimson Weed for the exercise room of her New York spa.

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Cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden commissioned Georgia O'Keeffe to paint Jimson Weed, originally titled Miracle Flower, to hang in the exercise room of the new Gymnasium Moderne at Arden's Fifth Avenue Salon in New York City. During stretching exercises, clients of the salon "unfurled" like the flowers in O'Keeffe's painting on the wall behind them. Arden paid O'Keeffe $10,000, considered an astonishing amount at the time, for the largest floral composition the artist would ever create.

The four blossoms are placed in an energetic design that repeats the tight rhythm of the jimson weed's pinwheel-shaped flower. About this plant, which grew near the artist's home in New Mexico, O'Keeffe said, "When I think of the delicate fragrance of the flowers, I almost feel the coolness and sweetness of the evening." She emphasized her subject's fresh beauty with a bright, simplified palette and rhythmic treatment of light and shadow.

O'Keeffe, one of the first American modernists, was at the heart of the group of artists who gathered around Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and art dealer who became her husband. The sheer size of her flowers-an arresting manipulation of scale-represented a radical modernist innovation.

I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.
-Georgia O'Keeffe, 1939

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Georgia O’Keeffe

Jimson Weed, 1936-1937

oil on linen

70 x 83 ½ in.

Gift of Eli Lilly and Company

Learn More

Georgia O’Keeffe was born on a farm in Wisconsin the second of seven children.  She attended Town Hall School in Wisconsin and studied art with a watercolorist.  O’Keeffe enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Art Students League in New York, where she studied under William Merritt Chase.  Her first art job was as a commercial artist, and she also taught art in an elementary school in Texas.  O’Keeffe attended a class at the University of Virginia Summer School where she was introduced to the work of Arthur Wesley Dow.  His free thinking opinions on creating are were a major influence on her.  Without O’Keeffe’s permission, a friend took her drawings to the New York art dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 gallery showed the work of the most advanced abstract artists.  Stieglitz exhibited her drawings.  At first O’Keeffe was upset, but she let the drawings hang. Although Stieglitz was much older than O’Keeffe, he divorced his wife and the two were married.  O’Keeffe began making large-scale compositions containing highly magnified natural forms, which became her signature style.  As a young girl she was fascinated by the minute details of flowers and started painting flowers in 1918 and produced her first magnified flowers in 1924. O’Keeffe said of her enlarged flowers, “A flower is relatively small…If I could paint the flower exactly as 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 at it.” “Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower.  I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”

In 1936 cosmetics executive Elizabeth Arden commissioned O’Keeffe to paint Jimson Weed to hang in the exercise room of the new Arden Sport Salon in New York.  The result was the largest of O’Keeffe’s magnified floral views.  The artist placed the four flowers in an exuberant design that repeats the tight rhythm of the pinwheel-shaped blossoms. She emphasized her subject’s fresh beauty with a light, simplified palette. When Eli Lilly and Company purchased the Arden firm in the 1970s, it also acquired the painting.  In 1987, Lilly sold the Arden subsidiary and loaned the painting to the Indianapolis Museum of Art and then donated it to the museum in 1997.

Reference

Georgia O’Keeffe, Nicholas Callaway. One Hundred Flowers by Georgia O’Keeffe, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.  ISBN-13: 978-0394562186