In 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe flew to Hawaii to paint pictures … for a pineapple-juice ad. Then 51 and famed for her flower paintings, she was offered an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise by Dole, then known as the Hawaiian Pineapple Company.
All she needed to do was come up with two images.
After nine weeks of island life, she’d made nearly two dozen.
You’ll see 20 of them at the New York Botanical Garden, where “Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i” opens on Saturday. The paintings and sketches are on display in the garden’s library, while the big glass-enclosed conservatory has been filled with the flora and fruit that inspired her: fragrant frangipani; hibiscus, bird of paradise, ginger and yes, bananas and pineapples.
Nothing in O’Keeffe’s beloved New Mexico, says Honolulu-based art historian Theresa Papanikolas, who curated the show, prepared the artist for Hawaii’s smoking volcanos, lava bridges and heliconia flowers, with their cascading, claw-shaped buds.
“O’Keeffe loved this flower,” Papanikolas tells The Post. “Someone handed it to her when she was getting off a plane, and she wrote to her husband” — photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was romantically involved with another woman at the time — “that she couldn’t wait to paint it.”
Paint it she did, and after she came home, she sent her canvas to Dole, along with her painting of a papaya tree.
“The papaya tree was rejected,” Papanikolas says, “because it was a rival juice.” It wasn’t until Dole shipped O’Keeffe a pineapple that it got an image it could use in its ads.
Not since 1940 have O’Keeffe’s Hawaiian paintings — five of them on loan from the Honolulu Museum of Art, others from the Smithsonian and private collections — been shown in New York together. And so the botanical garden is going all out, supersizing its art and flowers with themed sculptures, films, talks, ecology displays and several music-filled “Aloha Nights” through the summer.
And yes, you can even buy poke, the Hawaiian delicacy that gave O’Keeffe — who died in 1986, at 98 — her first taste of raw fish.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawai’i” runs through Oct. 28 at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Blvd., The Bronx: NYBG.org
