“Untitled” (America) | Art & Artists

The White Calico Flower is one of a series of flower paintings Georgia O’Keeffe produced between the 1920s and 1950s in which she used the technique of close cropping and sharp focus that she had learned from modernist photography. These magnified botanical images assume an unexpected monumentality and undermine habitual ways of looking. As O’Keeffe remarked, “In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York. . . . So I thought I'll make [flowers] big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled, they'll have to look at them—and they did.”