Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1927 painting of a red-and-yellow flower against a dark background is Oriental Poppies. The work enlarges the flower so dramatically that its petals occupy nearly the entire canvas.
O’Keeffe painted Oriental Poppies during the period when flowers became one of her most recognizable subjects. Rather than treating the flower as a small detail in a garden, she used close cropping and intense color to make the viewer examine its internal structure. The resulting image balances botanical recognition with abstraction.
Oriental Poppies is often confused with Red Canna, another O’Keeffe flower painting from the 1920s. Both use saturated red forms and magnification, but they depict different flowers. Oriental Poppies is held by the University of Minnesota, which received the work as part of the Gellman collection.