O'KEEFFE
/
BEL BAHAR

2026-03-12

Lina Devaud

(1) Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Iris, 1924
(2) Women-Petals, ceramic, 1985

(1) Georgia O’Keeffe, Music – Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918
(2) Souhila Bel Bahar, Florilège, gouache on paper, 1977

O'KEEFFE
/
BEL BAHAR

2026-03-12

Lina Devaud

The representation of flowers in art is more than a decorative motif: it constitutes a fertile ground for experimentation with form, perception, and femininity. From Georgia O’Keeffe (1887, Sun Prairie – 1986, Santa Fe) to Souhila Bel Bahar (1934, Blida – 2023, Algiers), from New York to Algiers, two painters separated by half a century and radically different cultural contexts transformed the floral motif into a site of artistic invention and identity formation.

(1) Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Iris, 1924
(2) Women-Petals, ceramic, 1985

Between 1920 and 1950, Georgia O’Keeffe painted more than two hundred flowers. Through close cropping and dramatic enlargement—often in vertical formats—she brought them into intimate proximity with the viewer, transforming them into self-contained microcosms in which every petal and pistil is magnified. Influenced by photography and by the phenomenology of the modern city, O’Keeffe rendered flowers with remarkable precision, treating them as monumental natural architectures.

Yet for decades, her flowers were interpreted by male American critics as erotic symbols, despite the artist’s repeated objections. Open forms became sexual metaphors in the critical imagination. Lewis Mumford, for instance, famously described her work as “a long and flagrant stream of sex: sex in adolescence, sex in maturity, sex in full bloom.” Within this critical framework, the flower was recast as the emblem of an allegedly instinctive and corporeal femininity.

Although O’Keeffe initially acknowledged that her work might express certain specifically feminine experiences, she quickly rejected the obsessive erotic readings projected onto her paintings. For her, these works were not about sexuality but about vision itself. The flower was not inherently sexual; it became so in the eye of the beholder. The canvas functioned as a projection surface onto which a predominantly male critical establishment deposited its own fantasies and expectations. What critics saw in the paintings often revealed less about the artist than about the gaze directed toward her work. As O’Keeffe famously remarked: “When you took the time to really notice my flower, and when you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, you wrote about my flower as if I thought and saw what you thought and saw—and I don’t.”

Convinced that this interpretive filter was fundamentally gendered, O’Keeffe went so far as to ask the writer and patron Mabel Dodge Luhan to write about her work, believing that a woman’s experience of the world might generate a different response. As she suggested, “a woman for whom line and color are an expression of life may be able to say what a man cannot.” What criticism transformed into a sexual symbol was, for O’Keeffe, an attempt to slow perception itself—to enlarge a fragment of the world until its latent force became visible once again.

O'KEEFFE/ BEL BAHAR

Although O’Keeffe initially acknowledged that her work might express certain specifically feminine experiences, she quickly rejected the obsessive erotic readings projected onto her paintings. For her, these works were not about sexuality but about vision itself. The flower was not inherently sexual; it became so in the eye of the beholder. The canvas functioned as a projection surface onto which a predominantly male critical establishment deposited its own fantasies and expectations. What critics saw in the paintings often revealed less about the artist than about the gaze directed toward her work. As O’Keeffe famously remarked: “When you took the time to really notice my flower, and when you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, you wrote about my flower as if I thought and saw what you thought and saw—and I don’t.”

Convinced that this interpretive filter was fundamentally gendered, O’Keeffe went so far as to ask the writer and patron Mabel Dodge Luhan to write about her work, believing that a woman’s experience of the world might generate a different response. As she suggested, “a woman for whom line and color are an expression of life may be able to say what a man cannot.” What criticism transformed into a sexual symbol was, for O’Keeffe, an attempt to slow perception itself—to enlarge a fragment of the world until its latent force became visible once again.

Although O’Keeffe initially acknowledged that her work might express certain specifically feminine experiences, she quickly rejected the obsessive erotic readings projected onto her paintings. For her, these works were not about sexuality but about vision itself. The flower was not inherently sexual; it became so in the eye of the beholder. The canvas functioned as a projection surface onto which a predominantly male critical establishment deposited its own fantasies and expectations. What critics saw in the paintings often revealed less about the artist than about the gaze directed toward her work. As O’Keeffe famously remarked: “When you took the time to really notice my flower, and when you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower, you wrote about my flower as if I thought and saw what you thought and saw—and I don’t.”

Convinced that this interpretive filter was fundamentally gendered, O’Keeffe went so far as to ask the writer and patron Mabel Dodge Luhan to write about her work, believing that a woman’s experience of the world might generate a different response. As she suggested, “a woman for whom line and color are an expression of life may be able to say what a man cannot.” What criticism transformed into a sexual symbol was, for O’Keeffe, an attempt to slow perception itself—to enlarge a fragment of the world until its latent force became visible once again.

(1) Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Iris, 1924
(2) Women-Petals, ceramic, 1985

Questions of autonomy and masculine projection find a particular resonance in the work of Algerian artist Souhila Bel Bahar. Where O’Keeffe was subjected to erotic interpretation, Bel Bahar consciously embraced the floral motif as a space of creation and freedom.

The female body occupies a recurring place within her practice. Raised in a traditional Muslim family in post-independence Algeria, Bel Bahar sought through painting to articulate her perception of women’s central role within both social and domestic life. As she explained: “My painting privileges women. Perhaps because I grew up in a traditional environment where women occupied the very heart of the family unit, expressing, in some way, an experience that is my own.”

Bel Bahar developed her celebrated women-petals motif, a visual language in which body and nature become inseparable. These elongated, dreamlike figures emerged from spontaneous sketches and observations drawn from everyday life. Every line was reworked, every face suggested through a handful of minimalist marks, generating a visual poetry in which femininity unfolds freely, oscillating between simplicity and refinement. For Bel Bahar, the flower was never the projection of an external desire; it was a fertile ground for experimentation and emancipation.

In 1987, during a major cultural event organised in Algeria to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the nation’s independence, a group of artists was invited to pay tribute to Pablo Picasso through original works. Bel Bahar chose to reinterpret Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, transforming Picasso’s Cubist figures into the voluptuous silhouettes of her women-petals. The resulting works functioned simultaneously as homage and reinvention, embodying her distinctive approach to femininity, in which vegetal iconography became a vehicle for asserting her own artistic vision. Yet despite the inclusion of two of these paintings in the exhibition catalogue, the works were swiftly removed from view. Bel Bahar never understood the indecency that some perceived in images that, for her, were above all formal and aesthetic investigations.

(1) Georgia O’Keeffe, Music – Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918
(2) Souhila Bel Bahar, Florilège, gouache on paper, 1977

Bel Bahar’s frustration recalls that experienced by Georgia O’Keeffe when confronted with a critical discourse obsessed with the sexual interpretation of her flowers. In both cases, the flower—or the female figure—resists imposed readings that seek either to eroticise it or to frame it as indecent. Instead, it emerges as a space of emancipation, poetic invention, and artistic agency.

Despite her frustration with the persistent eroticisation of her floral imagery, O’Keeffe continued to pursue this body of work into the 1950s before turning her attention more fully to the landscapes of New Mexico—subjects that fascinated her just as deeply while provoking fewer interpretive controversies.

Bel Bahar, for her part, resisted calls to destroy her series inspired by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. She kept the works hidden from public view until the early 2000s, after the end of Algeria’s Black Decade, when she was finally able to exhibit them and continue developing the series

Sources :

It Rains Jasmine over Algiers, excerpts from Souhila Bel Bahar’s personal journals (1983–85), Algerian Ministry of Culture, 2016.

Didier Ottinger, Georgia O’Keeffe, Centre Pompidou Editions, 2021.

Paul Rosenfeld, “American Painting. Women, One!”, The Dial, December 1921, pp. 666–67.

Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Mitchell Kennerley, New York, Autumn 1922.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, New York: Viking Press, 1976.

Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, New York, 1925.

References :

Georgia O’Keeffe, Music – Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Iris, 1924.

Souhila Bel Bahar, Florilège, gouache on paper, 1977.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon after Picasso, gouache and watercolor, 103.5 × 72 cm, 1987 (version I), revisited in 1996 and 2012.

Bel Bahar’s frustration recalls that experienced by Georgia O’Keeffe when confronted with a critical discourse obsessed with the sexual interpretation of her flowers. In both cases, the flower—or the female figure—resists imposed readings that seek either to eroticise it or to frame it as indecent. Instead, it emerges as a space of emancipation, poetic invention, and artistic agency.

Despite her frustration with the persistent eroticisation of her floral imagery, O’Keeffe continued to pursue this body of work into the 1950s before turning her attention more fully to the landscapes of New Mexico—subjects that fascinated her just as deeply while provoking fewer interpretive controversies.

Bel Bahar, for her part, resisted calls to destroy her series inspired by Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. She kept the works hidden from public view until the early 2000s, after the end of Algeria’s Black Decade, when she was finally able to exhibit them and continue developing the series

Sources :

It Rains Jasmine over Algiers, excerpts from Souhila Bel Bahar’s personal journals (1983–85), Algerian Ministry of Culture, 2016.

Didier Ottinger, Georgia O’Keeffe, Centre Pompidou Editions, 2021.

Paul Rosenfeld, “American Painting. Women, One!”, The Dial, December 1921, pp. 666–67.

Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Mitchell Kennerley, New York, Autumn 1922.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, New York: Viking Press, 1976.

Georgia O’Keeffe, letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, New York, 1925.

References :

Georgia O’Keeffe, Music – Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Light Iris, 1924.

Souhila Bel Bahar, Florilège, gouache on paper, 1977.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon after Picasso, gouache and watercolor, 103.5 × 72 cm, 1987 (version I), revisited in 1996 and 2012.