Luther Burbank house museum, Santa Rosa
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. 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...