The occasion of visiting the Luther Burbank home and memorial park was inspired by Erin B. Coe's essay in the catalogue, "Georgia O'Keefe and Lake George, where Coe analogizes O'Keefe's floral studies to Burbank's own eugenics and adaptation of species, O'Keeffe having seen the photographs in Burbank's seed catalogues, in which he enlarged the flowers, and emphasized their colors.
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| Janet(L) and Susan Coolidge(R) in rose garden |
Luther Burbank's hybrid petunias, for example, inspired her own "petunia" series painted at Lake George. Because so much attention was focused on the last solo years of O'Keefe's life in the SW in New Mexico, this exhibition gives perspective to the many paintings which evolved during the period she spent with Stieglitz at the Stieglitz home on Lake George in the summers, in NYC . Onsite, we discovered the Frido Kahlo painting, which is in a museum in Mexico City. Luther Burbank's body was buried beneath the large tree on the property, but the tree is now removed and the grave, unmarked! Of his contributions, learning about his famous Shasta daisy, which is so prevalent in California, along with his improvement to the California poppy and the Russett potato, are among his many contributions. The working garden is located in Sebastopol.
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Frido Kahlo's portrait of Luther Burbank as a tree (she and Diego Rivera admired his plant reproduction studies). Frido Kahlo did meet and was friends with Georgia O'Keefe, and admired her paintings.
O'Keefe was friends with Donald and Elizabeth(Stieglitz's neice who majored in horticulture and obtained the position of care taker and head gardener for Donald Davidson, her husband, at the Stieglitz estate) In the summer of 1924 O'Keeffe began planting beds of purpose and blue petunias to study their radiant hues...providing the impetus for her flower painting Petunia No. 2. a prelude to her other "magnified " flower paintings. Randall Griffey, in his study of the Stieglitz circle, focused on Burbank as a mediating figure between horticulture and eugenics in the 1920's. Burbank drew parallels between plants and humans, as reflected by artists in the plant imagery oftentimes a surrogate for people or parts of human anatomy. Edward Weston would do likewise with vegetable parts and women's bodies, as an example. Specializing in botanical hybrids, he could make an "orange" poppy "red".a..emphasizing the parallels between horticulture, botany and art making describing his own skills as analogous to those of a painter "choosing colors for his palette".
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| Burbank's hybrid petunia studies |
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| O'Keefe's petunia painting |
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