Georgia O'Keeffe's 1932 painting featuring a large red poppy is titled Red Poppy. The work belongs to her long-running group of paintings that magnify flowers until their petals fill much of the composition. By enlarging a familiar natural object, O'Keeffe encouraged viewers to study color, contour, and structure closely.
Flower paintings became among her most recognizable works, but they were not the whole of her practice. She also painted New York architecture, bones, shells, hills, doors, and abstract forms. Her flower images are sometimes reduced to symbolic or romantic interpretations, although O'Keeffe repeatedly emphasized looking carefully at the object itself.
Red Poppy can be confused with Red Canna, another flower painting by O'Keeffe, or with Oriental Poppies, a 1927 work made with Ida O'Keeffe. The titles refer to different paintings and should not be treated as interchangeable.