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In a short and stimulating essay devoted to the “flower paintings” of the American painter, the art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual gives power back to flowers, thus continuing her research inviting us to see the living differently.
These are flowers that are not considered as such. One of the most emblematic parts of the work of an immense 20th century artist that many nevertheless insist on seeing differently. Because there would be there, in the folding of their petals, nothing else to observe than the extension of the painter’s anatomy. As for the erect spadixes, no need to think regarding it for long. Throughout her life, however, Georgia O’Keeffe vigorously denied critics’ obsessively erotic interpretation of her flowers. And if his position was recalled in the beautiful retrospective – the first in France – which was dedicated to him at the Pompidou Center last year, this did not prevent a number of commentators from describing these canvases as “sulphurous” or “suggestive”.
Are we therefore incapable of giving an interest to flowers for what they are? It is this question that Estelle Zhong Mengual explores in a short but fascinating essay entitled Hand-to-hand painting. Flowers and Georgia O’Keeffe. The art historian, who signed last year the very stimulating learn to see, this time makes the interpretation of O’Keeffe’s flowers a symptom of the “crisis of sensitivity to the living” (a phenomenon formulated by the philosopher Baptiste Morizot). This was already the starting point of his previous work: «Pe
