Georgia O'Keeffe: White Flower, 1929 – Porcelain Art Mug

In the summer of 1929 Georgia O'Keeffe went to New Mexico for the first time, and the desert kept her for the rest of her life. This flower was painted that year and shown the following February in New York as White Flower, N.M. — number nine in an exhibition Alfred Stieglitz called simply 27 New Paintings.

She framed flowers the way a photographer would: close, magnified, the blossom running past the edges of the canvas so that there is no stem, no vase, no room, nothing to give the scale. What is left is the thing itself — white petals turning in and out of one another, a ring of orange stamens at the centre, a few blades of dark green pushing in from the corners.

Critics of the day insisted on reading her flowers as images of the female body. O'Keeffe rejected that reading for the rest of her life, and resisted just as firmly being called a woman artist rather than simply an artist.

The Cleveland Museum of Art bought the painting in 1930, within a year of its making, and has kept it ever since.

The mug carries the painting whole and uncropped, at the centre of the front — its white against the white of the porcelain.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Georgia O'Keeffe, White Flower, 1929; oil on canvas, 76.2 × 91.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection, 1930.2162. Open-access image released by the museum under CC0. A copyright notice printed in 1930 without a name is the reason this mug is sold here and not in Switzerland: read how we checked the rights on this image.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.