I spent a weekend in London recently. It’s something I always enjoy, but this time it was even better than usual – partly because of the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern. As it’s open for another two months, I thought I’d encourage you to go and see it, in case you happen to be in London or can travel there without much trouble.

Any decent O’Keeffe exhibition would be worth seeing, there is no doubt in my mind that she is one of the greatest modernist painters. Why I liked this show so much, however, was the way it was curated and framed. O’Keeffe is best known for her blown-up flower paintings and the sometimes flower-like abstracts. These works have been usually interpreted in the context of female sexuality, including by her husband and collaborator Alfred Stieglitz. It was an interpretation she herself vehemently disagreed with and tried to shake for much of her career. The exhibition never forgets that.

While the flowers are present at Tate, they have been (I believe) deliberately downplayed and put on equal footing with other streams of her work, of which there are many. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the flower paintings, but turns out I like many of her landscapes, still lives and studies of bones equally well. The audio guide does a stellar job of explaining her journey from a farm girl in Wisconsin to an obsessive artist in the desert of New Mexico. Obviously one does not need to know anything about the person to appreciate the art, but for example her sudden turn towards figurative painting makes much more sense to me now: it was a reaction to the erotic reading of her work. It is also an interesting exercise to look at her more famous pictures and try to unpick your own feelings about them: I do see the carnality there, but is it because this is what I’ve been told to see?

I have since then wondered how it’s possible to reduce a woman like O’Keeffe to a sensual being only. From what I’ve heard and seen, she seems extraordinarily sharp and intellectually formidable and her personality very far from what you’d call traditionally feminine. To be honest, she comes across as a very complicated, borderline unpleasant character. Even on the nude photos Stieglitz took of her (and that certainly contributed to the erotic myth), she looks like a creature of the mind to me. But I guess simply being a woman is enough to be defined like that.

Another thing I think about, though, is what if she hadn’t felt the need to abandon her original themes? What if she had not cared? Or if people would have allowed her flowers to be flowers, her abstracts abstract? Would we have seen something even more amazing – giant, dangerous almost-flowers, half-human half-plant? Things I have no capacity to even imagine? I cannot help but to feel sad that we’ll never know.