Georgia O’Keefe’s husband, photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stiglitz, called her the first woman of American modernism and said that O’Keefe’s images of flowers, animal bones and desert landscapes were an integral part of the mythology and iconography of American art culture. Throughout her creative career, Georgia O’Keefe remained true to these three subjects and a single style that combined the traditions of European abstract painting and the aesthetics of pictorial photographers, one of whom was Alfred Stiglitz.
Despite the neutral content of the work, some critics saw hidden sexual connotations in O’Keefe’s works – in some paintings, the fragments of flowers depicted in close-up reminded them of something more than pistils and petals. O’Keefe, however, has always denied this interpretation of her works.