Her landscapes seem like fragments of huge bodies: Georgia O’Keeffe is the world’s most expensive artist. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen focuses on these bright color fields.
The word most associated with Georgia O’Keeffe is “vagina,” critic Jessi Stevens recently wrote in the New Yorker, focusing on the lush, often extremely zoomed-in floral motifs that made the American painter famous. In the meantime, however, this word might also mean “cash”, Stevens added with a touch of sarcasm – in view of the record prices achieved by the paintings of the painter, who died in 1986 at the age of 98. In 2014, her 1932 painting “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” fetched $44.4 million at auction. Since then, O’Keeffe has been considered the most expensive artist in the world.
This painting is currently hanging in the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, where the wonderful retrospective of the exceptional artist opened on Sunday with 85 pictures from all phases of her work. Measured by the real size of the flowers of the datura – regarding two centimeters – falls …
