The Anthurium: Passion, Politics, and Paint
How a tropical flower became one of modernism's most provocative subjects
In a sun-drenched studio in Honolulu, February 1939, Georgia O'Keeffe confronted a flower that would challenge everything she thought she knew about painting. The anthurium—with its blood-red spathe gleaming like lacquered leather and its yellow spadix thrusting upward with almost aggressive vitality—was unlike anything that grew in her beloved New Mexico. "They are strange flowers," she wrote to a friend. "I never saw anything like them before."
Strange, indeed. But also irresistible.
The anthurium's journey from the rainforest floors of Colombia and Ecuador to the pristine galleries of the Museum of Modern Art is a story that intertwines botanical obsession, imperial ambition, artistic revolution, and the perpetual human desire to possess beauty—to pin it down, frame it, own it. It is a tale of how a single flower became a lightning rod for debates about abstraction and representation, about the male gaze and female agency, about what it means to look at nature and what it means for nature to look back.
An Exotic Arrival
The anthurium first entered European consciousness in 1876 when French botanist Édouard André encountered Anthurium andraeanum in the Colombian Andes. Unlike the demure roses and violets that populated Victorian conservatories, this tropical specimen seemed almost aggressively modern. Its spathe—the heart-shaped modified leaf that most mistake for a petal—possessed an unsettling, artificial sheen, as though nature had lacquered it for permanence. The spadix, studded with dozens of minute flowers, protruded with unabashed prominence.
Victorian botanical illustrators approached these new specimens with scientific rigor and barely concealed fascination. In the archives of Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum, we find exquisite watercolors rendering every vein and curve with precision. Yet even in these ostensibly objective documents, one detects a certain tension. The anthurium refused to behave like a proper botanical subject. Its surfaces reflected light in ways that challenged watercolor technique. Its forms suggested anatomy that polite society preferred not to name.
By the 1880s, anthuriums had become prized specimens in the hothouses of Europe's wealthy collectors. They represented colonial reach—the ability to extract beauty from distant lands and domesticate it under glass. Each bloom in a London conservatory was a small declaration of empire.
The Modernist Eye
When modernist painters began dismantling representational conventions in the early twentieth century, they found in flowers—and particularly exotic flowers—perfect subjects for their experiments. Flowers occupied an interestingly liminal space: recognizable enough to anchor a composition, abstract enough to permit formal play, and sufficiently "feminine" to avoid accusations of depicting anything too politically charged.
Or so they thought.
Georgia O'Keeffe's engagement with anthuriums began during her nine-week stay in Hawaii in 1939, commissioned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company to create paintings for their advertising campaign. The corporate assignment might have produced mere decoration. Instead, O'Keeffe created some of her most formally audacious work.
In Anthurium (1939, Honolulu Museum of Art), the flower fills the canvas with such intensity that it becomes almost confrontational. O'Keeffe has compressed space, eliminated context, and magnified the bloom until its forms border on abstraction. The red spathe curves and folds, creating pockets of shadow that could be petals or could be something else entirely. The spadix rises through the composition's center with undeniable presence.
Contemporary critics, uncomfortable with the painting's evident sensuality, immediately sexualized it—and O'Keeffe. "Can it be simply a flower?" asked one reviewer, with what we might now recognize as willful obtuseness. O'Keeffe's response was characteristically sharp: "Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower—and I don't."
The distinction matters. O'Keeffe insisted on the primacy of looking—of sustained, disciplined attention to form, color, light, and spatial relationship. If viewers saw sex in her flowers, she suggested, perhaps they should examine their own preconceptions rather than her paintings.
Yet the anthurium's anatomy makes O'Keeffe's position more complicated than her statements suggest. Flowers are, after all, reproductive organs. The anthurium's spathe functions to attract pollinators to the spadix, where fertilization occurs. To paint an anthurium accurately is necessarily to paint sexuality—not human sexuality projected onto nature, but nature's own erotic strategies. O'Keeffe's genius lay in her willingness to look at this directly, without embarrassment or euphemism, and to translate what she saw into paint.
Latin American Reclamation
While North American and European modernists were abstracting the anthurium, Latin American artists were reclaiming it as cultural patrimony. For painters like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the flower represented something more than formal possibility—it was an assertion of indigenous identity against colonial aesthetics.
In Rivera's 1943 painting The Flower Carrier, anthuriums appear among the massive burden of blooms that weighs down the painting's central figure. Here, the flower functions simultaneously as beauty and as labor, as natural abundance and as economic exploitation. Rivera's anthuriums refuse the rarefied atmosphere of O'Keeffe's close-ups; they exist in social and political space, implicated in questions of work, class, and the commodification of nature.
Frida Kahlo incorporated anthuriums into her elaborate still lifes, where they appeared alongside indigenous Mexican plants, fruits, and symbols. In Still Life with Parrot and Flag (1951), anthuriums mingle with watermelons and bananas under the gaze of a parrot, creating a defiant catalogue of Mexican flora. Painted shortly after Kahlo's leg amputation, the work's vitality feels almost aggressive—an insistence on life and growth in the face of bodily decay.
For these artists, the anthurium was never simply a flower. It was a political statement, a connection to pre-Columbian traditions, a rejection of European aesthetic hierarchies that had long dismissed tropical exuberance as vulgar or primitive.
The Hawaiian Context
O'Keeffe's Hawaiian anthuriums cannot be separated from the islands' complex colonial history. By 1939, Hawaii had been a U.S. territory for forty years, its indigenous governance overthrown, its economy dominated by American plantation interests. The Hawaiian Pineapple Company's commission to O'Keeffe was part of a broader campaign to sell Hawaii to mainland Americans as an exotic paradise—conveniently omitting the political and cultural violence that had made such marketing possible.
The anthurium, introduced to Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, had become by O'Keeffe's visit a symbol of Hawaiian identity, despite being no more native than the plantation owners themselves. This botanical colonialism—the displacement of indigenous plants by showy imports—mirrored the broader colonial project. When O'Keeffe painted Hawaiian anthuriums, she was painting a constructed landscape, one shaped by imperial appetites and marketing imperatives.
Yet Hawaiian artists themselves embraced the anthurium, transforming it into something genuinely local. Mid-century painters like Madge Tennent and Jean Charlot incorporated anthuriums into their depictions of Hawaiian life, situating the flower within domestic spaces, markets, and ceremonies. In their work, the anthurium sheds its exoticism and becomes simply part of the everyday visual fabric of island existence.
The Anthurium Industry, which emerged in Hawaii in the 1940s and 1950s, further complicated the flower's identity. Hawaiian-grown anthuriums became valuable exports, shipped to mainland florists in refrigerated containers. The same flower that O'Keeffe had painted as an object of aesthetic contemplation became an agricultural commodity, its beauty monetized, its meanings multiplied.
Formal Seductions
What is it about the anthurium's form that has proved so durable as an artistic subject? Partially, it's the flower's inherent geometry. The spathe's heart shape provides a clear, recognizable outline that translates well across media—from O'Keeffe's oils to Art Deco textile patterns to contemporary digital illustrations. This formal clarity allows the anthurium to oscillate between representation and abstraction without ever becoming unrecognizable.
But geometry alone cannot explain the flower's artistic persistence. The anthurium possesses a quality that might be called "surface strangeness." Its spathe has a waxy, almost plastic appearance that challenges traditional techniques of floral painting. Watercolorists struggle to capture its reflective quality; oil painters must resist the temptation to make it look more natural, more petal-like. The anthurium demands to be painted as it is: strange, glossy, artificial-seeming even in nature.
This surface quality attracted mid-century photographers like Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, who found in anthuriums ideal subjects for exploring form, light, and texture. Weston's close-up studies emphasize the flower's sculptural qualities, using dramatic lighting to transform botanical specimens into abstract compositions of curve and shadow.
Robert Mapplethorpe's anthurium photographs from the 1980s push this formal exploration to its logical extreme. Shot in stark black and white against neutral backgrounds, Mapplethorpe's anthuriums become studies in contrast and composition. The flowers' erotic suggestiveness—impossible to ignore in these images—serves Mapplethorpe's broader project of challenging boundaries between high art and pornography, between aesthetic beauty and sexual desire. His anthuriums are unapologetically sensual, yet their formal perfection places them firmly within the tradition of modernist still life.
Contemporary Resonances
Today's artists continue to find new meanings in the anthurium. Contemporary painter Kehinde Wiley incorporates anthuriums into his ornate backgrounds, where they function as part of his complex visual vocabulary mixing Old Master techniques with hip-hop aesthetics and postcolonial critique. In Wiley's portraits, anthuriums appear alongside other tropical flowers in densely patterned backgrounds that reference both European decorative traditions and African textile designs.
British artist Marc Quinn has created massive sculptures of anthuriums in bronze and steel, enlarging the flowers to architectural scale. These monumental blooms, installed in public spaces, make strange what familiarity has made ordinary. Standing beneath a twelve-foot bronze anthurium, viewers confront the flower's forms as landscape, as architecture, as something alien and compelling.
Digital artists have embraced the anthurium's clear forms and bold colors, which translate remarkably well to screen-based media. On Instagram, #anthurium yields millions of images—photographs, illustrations, GIFs, and videos that continue the flower's artistic life in new registers. The anthurium's durability as a cut flower (blooms can last six weeks or more) has made it a favorite subject for time-lapse photography, where its subtle movements and changes become visible, reminding us that these seemingly static forms are living, breathing, growing things.
Looking Forward, Looking Back
What does the anthurium's artistic history reveal about our relationship with nature, with beauty, with the exotic and the familiar? Perhaps it demonstrates that the most powerful artistic subjects are those that resist easy categorization—flowers that don't quite look like flowers, forms that hover between representation and abstraction, surfaces that seem simultaneously natural and manufactured.
The anthurium reminds us that beauty is never neutral. Every act of aesthetic appreciation carries within it histories of power, possession, and perspective. When O'Keeffe painted her Hawaiian anthuriums, she was painting flowers that had themselves been transplanted, cultivated, and commodified. When Rivera included anthuriums in his murals, he was reclaiming symbols that colonialism had extracted and attempting to restore them to indigenous contexts. When Mapplethorpe photographed anthuriums in his studio, he was engaging with centuries of floral still life tradition while simultaneously queering it, making visible the eroticism that had always been present but politely ignored.
The anthurium persists in contemporary art because it refuses simplification. It is both flower and not-quite-flower, both natural and uncannily artificial, both beautiful and strange. It invites us to look closely, to attend to form and color and light, while simultaneously reminding us that looking is never innocent—that every act of aesthetic attention is shaped by culture, history, and power.
In this, the anthurium is the perfect modernist flower: difficult, uncompromising, irreducible to any single meaning. Like all great subjects, it gives back more than we bring to it. We think we are looking at a flower, and then we realize the flower is looking back.
Georgia O'Keeffe's Anthurium (1939) is in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. Robert Mapplethorpe's flower photographs can be viewed at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Major museum collections hold extensive botanical illustrations including anthurium specimens, many available for research by appointment.
