Morning Glory with Black (1926): Art, History and Details

Morning Glory with Black (1926) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

O'Keeffe is best known for close-up flower subjects whose magnified forms fill the entire space of each canvas. Likely inspired by similar compositions in modern photography, these images are not only celebrations of nature, but also striking essays in abstract design. Although many critics interpreted O'Keeffe's flower paintings as reflections of femininity in general and female sexuality in particular, the artist strongly opposed such readings. Throughout most of her career, she frequently attempted to persuade others to discuss her work without referring to her gender, writing on one occasion, "I have always been very annoyed at being referred to as a 'woman artist' rather than an 'artist.'"

Object facts

• Title: Morning Glory with Black
• Date: 1926
• Creator attribution: Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887–1986)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 96.5 x 81.3 x 5.4 cm (38 x 32 x 2 1/8 in.); Unframed: 91 x 75.5 cm (35 13/16 x 29 3/4 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1958.42

A detail from the museum

The morning glory rests against a black petunia, seen partially at lower right.

Collection credit

Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.

Further reading listed by the museum

• Messinger, Lisa Mintz. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
• O'Keeffe, Georgia, Alfred Stieglitz, and Sarah Greenough. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2011.
• Cole, Mark, "Exhibition: Georgia O'Keeffe," Cleveland Art 58, no. 6 (November/December 2018).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.