All galleries claim that their exhibitions will change the way the public sees an artist’s work, but Tate Modern’s ambition for its Georgia O’Keeffe show is bolder than most.
Visitors to the summer blockbuster show, which will be the largest that the American artist has received in Britain, will be asked to forget the most popularly held belief about O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers and instead adopt the mindset of “no sex please, we’re British”.
The curator maintains that O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers, such as Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, do not resemble female anatomy and that people who think so may have an overactive imagination.
The idea that O’Keeffe was depicting flowers as vaginas, or the other way around, has been a popular assumption since the 1920s, when even her own husband declared that the paintings were sexually charged.
Tanya Barson, the Tate exhibition’s curator, believes that this is a myth and will attempt to quash the rumours in July. The show will include Jimson Weed , White Flower No 1 (1932), which is not especially suggestive but became the most expensive work by a female artist when it sold for $44 million (£28.4 million) in 2014.
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Ms Barson said that there would be notices on the walls and an essay in the catalogue that would try to overturn the interpretation first voiced by Alfred Stieglitz, who promoted her work at his gallery in New York and later became her husband.
“That interpretation originated with Stieglitz and was spread through his circle, and then it came back again in the 1970s with the feminist artists who read the work in a similar way,” she said. “It’s very important to deal with it but to say that O’Keeffe consistently denied that interpretation. What we hope to show in the exhibition is that there are more important motivations for her.”
Asked whether O’Keeffe was being disingenuous in her denials, Ms Barson replied: “I don’t think so. I think she was reaching outwards to create abstract images. The bodily association is not something she really spoke about other than to say, that’s not really what I was intending. I think it’s honest and true that she wasn’t thinking in that way about those images.”
Ms Barson said that the artist changed her style in the mid-1920s in an attempt to get away from Freudian interpretations of her work. “I think it’s time to rethink these ideas about her work,” she said. “Maybe they’re subconscious but she didn’t acknowledge this as a principal concern of hers.”
Achim Borchardt-Hume, director of exhibitions at Tate Modern, said that O’Keeffe had been unfairly “reduced to one particular body of work which is interpreted in a particular way”. He added: “Many of the white, male artists across the 20th century have the privilege of being interpreted at other levels. I think it’s high time to say these artists have multiple readings too.”
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O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed is the only work by a female artist in the top 100 most expensive artworks and just one of only six in the top 1,000, according to Skate’s, an art market research company.
Ms Barson said that the exhibition, from July 6 to October 30, would try to show how underrated O’Keeffe’s work is in the mind of collectors. “I think there’s something cultural about Europe that doesn’t value women’s work as much as men’s,” she said.