Georgia O'Keeffe’s 1936 painting of a large red poppy is titled Red Poppy.
O'Keeffe became famous for enlarging flowers so that petals and centers filled the picture surface. This approach encouraged viewers to look closely at ordinary natural forms and helped make her flower paintings among the most recognizable images in American modernism.
Red Poppy belongs to the later part of her long engagement with floral subjects. Its intense red color and close cropping emphasize the flower’s shape rather than presenting it as a small botanical specimen in a larger setting.
The title is easy to confuse with several other flower paintings by O'Keeffe. Oriental Poppies dates from 1928 and is a different work, while Red Canna belongs to her series of canna paintings. O'Keeffe’s flower pictures were sometimes interpreted as sexual symbols, but she rejected the idea that viewers should reduce them to that explanation.