Georgia O’Keeffe’s £28m masterpiece to be star of Tate Modern show

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/ White Flower No. 1 will be the centrepiece of an exhibition celebrating the American painter’s work
Full of character: Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait; Alfred Stieglitz
J. Paul Getty Trust
Robert Dex @RobDexES1 March 2016

One of the world’s richest women has loaned the most expensive painting by a female artist to Tate Modern for a major show.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/ White Flower No. 1 will be the centrepiece of an exhibition celebrating the American painter’s work.

Two years ago, Walmart heiress Alice Walton paid £28 million for the painting at a Sotheby’s auction in New York for her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. Ms Walton, 66, is worth an estimated £23 billion.

Tanya Barson, the exhibition’s curator, said the 1932 painting — of a flower widely found in New Mexico, where O’Keeffe lived for years — had “all of the expected characteristics” of her work.

Record-breaker: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 painting fetched £28m at a Sotheby’s auction in 2014 Edward C. Robison III
Edward C. Robison III

She said: “If you were to ask 100 people in the street if they could describe an O’Keeffe, they would describe a painting like Jimson Weed/ White Flower No.1. I’m very keen to include the works people know and love, but the one thing I would love people to take away from the show is that they’ve discovered a much more varied, multi-faceted artist.

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“I think there will be rooms which people will find equally beautiful to the flower paintings but which will come as a major surprise to them.

“We’ve got absolutely extraordinary paintings and I hope they will blow people away because she is a stunningly good painter.” O’Keeffe, who died aged 98 in 1986, left a will that ensured her works went to many major institutions in the United States and many have loaned them to the Tate for its show.

Georgia O’Keeffe is at Tate Modern from July 6 to October 30.

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