Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1939 painting Oriental Poppies depicts poppies.
Oriental Poppies is a large-scale flower painting from O’Keeffe’s mature career. Its enlarged red and orange blossoms fill the composition, turning a botanical subject into an immersive study of color, shape, and repetition. The painting is associated with the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
O’Keeffe frequently magnified flowers so that viewers had to confront their structures at an unfamiliar scale. She rejected the idea that such works should automatically be read as coded images of sexuality, emphasizing instead the visual possibilities of natural forms and the way enlargement made people really look at flowers.
Oriental Poppies is different from O’Keeffe’s paintings of jimson weed, irises, calla lilies, and cannas. Those flowers recur elsewhere in her work, but the title itself identifies poppies as this painting’s subject.