Black Iris III: Imagery and Interpretations
-- Georgia O’Keeffe
Harper Haase
Denise Johnson
AH 401
Black Iris III: Imagery and Interpretations
A quick search of the name Georgia O’Keeffe shows that she is a highly established artist from the modern period with paintings that play with the idea of abstraction as a means of expression. She is most well-known for her paintings of flowers, though she also has pieces depicting bones, New York skyscrapers, landscapes from New Mexico, and clouds.
O’Keeffe began her professional art studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually finishing at the Art Students League in New York City. Despite winning a prize for one of her oil paintings in 1908, Georgia was discouraged and gave up her dream of being a imaginative realism painter. She began work as a commercial artist in Chicago. She became a teacher at Columbia College initially teaching Dow principles of art but eventually evolving into abstraction. She sent her work to a former classmate who sent it to an avant-garde art gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz. Impressed by her work, he featured 10 of her drawings in a group exhibition as well as a sponsored show of her own. After moving to Texas for a couple years, Stieglitz offered to support O’Keeffe’s painting activity for a year. She moved to New York and quickly fell in love with Stieglitz and moved in with him. Stieglitz was progressive in the sense that he believed women were highly capable of great art, but his views of female art were questionable as well as the way he treated O’Keeffe: as a woman in his terms rather than a woman with agency. He exhibited photographs he had taken of O’Keeffe, many in nude, alongside her paintings and without her permission.[1] In doing this Stieglitz violated O’Keeffe’s privacy while also taking control of her individual artistic voice in order to make it match what he saw. O’Keeffe’s work thus took a very Freudian perspective to art historians despite her insistence that this was not her intention.
One of Georgia’s paintings that seems to be Freudian is Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Iris III (1926). This, as the name describes, is an oil on canvas painting of a black iris flower. In the center of the picture, the darkest color is featured: a black hole that seeps downward through the middle of the dark purple petal below. This petal opens up to create two sides, further revealing the dark center of the flower. Behind this petal there are two more petals, one on each side, that open outward further. Moving upward, we see a small eggplant colored hood just above the black center of the flower. Above that the painting takes a sharp contrast in color, using light shades of blue and purple to craft the gracefully draped petal that overarches and almost mirrors the deep colored petals below. Finally, we see the outside petals of the flower in the background softly encasing the foreground.
It doesn’t take an artistic genius to see the yonic imagery in this—it jumps out at the viewer upon first glace. Upon some shallow analysis, one can tie a connection to the clitoris as the black center; the center of attention and in my words, the ‘star of the show.’ Moving downward we can see the petals below to be symbolic of the labia minora and the larger leaves behind it as the labia majora. In female anatomy, the clitoris often has a small hood that covers it up, comparing to the eggplant colored hood above the ‘clitoris’ in Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting. Thus, art lovers and historians have taken the Freudian perspective and ran with it—and not to their discredit; it seems impossible that it wouldn’t be symbolic of female genitalia based on the seemingly obvious parallels. Linda Nochlin, a respected feminist art historian, was the person to fully solidify this claim into art history. Nochlin equated the painting to “the unity of feminine and the natural order.”[2] Her analysis and description of the yonic symbolism in O’Keeffe’s Black Iris III (1926) essentially cemented the label of ‘feminist art’ onto the painting.
Despite being notorious for the vulvic imagery in Black Iris III (1926) and other works, Georgia O’Keeffe did not indend for her paintings to be viewed this way. She opposed the description of this painting by Linda Nochlin. O’Keeffe intended simply to portray what she sees in a flower on a bigger scale. Because flowers are so small people don’t tend to look closely at them, her enlarged paintings of flowers in a sense force people to look at it carefully. She says, “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 flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower – and I don’t.”[3] Georgia seems to be bothered by the interpretations of her work by other artists. She said throughout her career that she did not intend for her art to be sexual. She may have been more sensitive about it because of her husband, Stieglitz, and his projected ideas of her art. He “equated the creative process with sexual energies, and from the beginning he defined O’Keeffe’s work primarily in terms of gender, declaring her imagery the visual manifestation of a sexually liberated woman.”[4] While this interpretation is not entirely bad or wrong, Georgia rejected it from the start while Stieglitz steamrolled her opinion in favor of his own. Because he was so adamant about putting this perspective and label onto her art, O’Keeffe likely became defensive and more strongly opposed to this view. Often when someone is pushed into a label they don’t want or aren’t ready for, they begin to resent it and oppose it stronger than if they had been given the opportunity to come to terms with the label on their own. This happens with gay people often, where they will be called gay by peers before they have accepted it about themselves. Because everyone seems to be telling them they are and assuming they are when they don’t think or know they are, it causes them to try their hardest not to be gay and oppose the accusations strongly. This is because they are forced to address it before they were ready and therefore are forced to defend themselves when they shouldn’t have to. (I am speaking from personal experience with myself and others from my life). This same experience may have applied to Georgia O’Keeffe when her husband and the world was trying to tell her that her art was sexual.
With a Freudian perspective, we can further understand O’Keeffe’s rejection of the sexualized interpretations of her imagery. According to the essay prompt from Professor Denise Johnson, “Freudian theory argues that human behavior, our urges, and feelings that inform the choices we make derive from struggles on an unconscious level that we do not perceive. The id, based in biological drives or ‘urges’ is often in conflict with the ego, our conscience and moral regulator.” This implies, in Georgia’s case, that her subconscious was propelling her to depict vulvic and sexual images in her paintings even if she does not realize it or perceive it that way consciously. A Freudian analysis of this work concludes that the true intention of Black Iris III (1926) was to depict female genitalia, her id propelling this decision without her conscious knowledge. Her rejections to this claim thus were a reflection of her ego conflicting with her id, saying that she simply intended to show what a flower looks like up close.
[1] Barbara Buhler Lynes, “Georgia O’Keeffe: American Painter,” Brittanica, Encyclopedia Brittanica, 11/11/2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georgia-OKeeffe
[2]Margaux Stockwell, “Black Iris III and the Flower as Symbol in O’Keeffe’s Painting,” Art History: Artworks Under the Lens, Singulart, 9/24/2019, https://blog.singulart.com/en/2019/09/24/black-iris-iii-and-the-flower-as-symbol-in-okeeffes-painting/
[3] Margaux Stockwell, “Black Iris III and the Flower as Symbol in O’Keeffe’s Painting,” Art History: Artworks Under the Lens, Singulart, 9/24/2019, https://blog.singulart.com/en/2019/09/24/black-iris-iii-and-the-flower-as-symbol-in-okeeffes-painting/
[4]Barbara Buhler Lynes, “Georgia O’Keeffe: American Painter,” Brittanica, Encyclopedia Brittanica, 11/11/2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georgia-OKeeffe
