Poppies appear in Georgia O'Keeffe's 1927 painting Oriental Poppies.
Oriental Poppies is an oil painting showing two oversized red-and-orange poppy blossoms against a dark background. O'Keeffe enlarged flowers so dramatically that viewers could focus on their curves, folds, color, and internal structure rather than seeing them merely as small garden objects.
The work belongs to the period when O'Keeffe became famous for close-up flower paintings. She rejected the idea that these images should be treated only as botanical illustrations or as symbols with one fixed meaning. Instead, she emphasized looking closely at forms that people often passed without noticing.
Oriental Poppies is sometimes grouped with O'Keeffe's better-known Black Iris paintings, but the subjects are different. The red flowers in Oriental Poppies are poppies, while iris flowers appear in several other works. O'Keeffe painted many kinds of flowers, including calla lilies, petunias, roses, and jimson weeds. Her flower pictures became some of the most recognizable images in American modernism.