‘Pink Tulip’ (1925)

People love, or love to hate, Georgia O’Keeffe. Either they fall under the spell of her ecstatic palette, or they despise her garishness and avidity to please. Some start out in one camp and switch to the other, discarding their dorm-room posters of orgasmic flowers or wind-buffeted skulls in favour of more demanding or less decorative art. Others sustain an enduring love for her pinks and petals, for the graphic immediacy and simplicity of her unfolding forms.

I’ve never quite managed to see the majesty in O’Keeffe but I’ve also been unwilling to dismiss her work as kitsch. In each new encounter, I try to strip away built-up layers of familiarity and judgment. Yet over and over again, I reach the same ambivalent conclusion: that O’Keeffe was talented and even captivating; that she could seize and paint rarefied states of rapture. But that, after a brief period of radical experimentation, her style hardened into a tedious succession of slick, eye-catching husks.

O’Keeffe confessed that she longed to be “magnificently vulgar”. If she could do that, she wrote, “I would be a great success to myself”. The survey on view at the Whitney Museum, one of the largest of her paintings to date, signals that she far exceeded that aspiration. The show confines itself to abstractions, thus excluding excesses such as “Horse’s Skull with White Rose”, which recalls the high camp of black-velvet painting. But we still get an assortment of the highs and lows that continue to make her so controversial.

The exhibition opens buoyantly, with the charcoal drawings and watercolours O’Keeffe made around 1916, as she was beginning to perceive shapes and colours as more accurate analogues of her feelings than language could ever be. Art, she wrote to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, is “usually just another way of saying what I said – or it is sometimes saying something that I probably would have said if I could have – and painted because I can paint things I feel and do not understand when I cant [sic] formulate them into words.” O’Keeffe’s convoluted syntax proves her right: she was far more eloquent with a paintbrush than with a pen.

Georgia O’Keeffe (1918) by Alfred Stieglitz

From the beginning, she concentrated on a small repertoire of gestures, alternating between cucumber-like protrusions and shrimp-like forms that curled in on themselves. If the elongated, tumescent or wilting fruit stood for masculine aspects of herself and others, the spiral evoked a wider range of associations: a violin scroll, a coiled foetus, the vortex of a tornado, the bend of a cat’s playful paw. That same motif appears over and over again throughout her long career. There it is in “Blue II” of 1916, one of the earliest watercolours, and again, reduced to a couple of calligraphic strokes, in “Untitled (Abstraction Pink Curve and Circles)” from the 1970s, by which time she could barely see.

In 1918, O’Keeffe fell in love with her own body. She was having an affair with Stieglitz, who was three decades older and married, and who started taking fervid photographs of his young protégée. The nudes were as revelatory to her as they remain to us. These fierce close-ups of hands, breasts and buttocks are the exhibition’s pinnacle: not the world seen through her eyes, but her flesh as seen through her lover’s lens. Stieglitz distilled her limbs into potently erotic abstractions that became a narcissistic intoxicant. O’Keeffe was inspired by herself.

‘Series 1 No 8’ (1919)

That bolt of sensuality yielded “Blue Line”, from 1919, in which the canvas is divided into two succulent, curvaceous halves by a suggestive fissure. Some paintings seem to answer specific Stieglitz photographs. In “Torso”, from 1918, he showed her from thigh to clavicle, backlit and twisting – an ebony statue against a marmoreal background. A bit later she painted “Abstraction” (1921) and mimed the same gyrating curve, the same contrast between black and white. Despite the title, you can make out a naked, undulating spine plunging into a gauzy veil. The coy misdirection is typical: the twinned, ripe “Alligator Pears” from 1923 bear a family resemblance to a Stieglitz titled simply “Georgia O’Keeffe – Breasts”.

When these ostensibly abstract paintings first went on display at the Anderson Gallery in New York in 1923, critics tended to see them as disquisitions on female sexuality – those who followed contemporary art had already familiarised themselves with O’Keeffe’s anatomy two years earlier when Stieglitz had shown his nudes, and the connection was hard to miss. Nevertheless, O’Keeffe was miffed to be seen as a painter of dirty pictures, or as an imitator.

‘Spring’ (1922)

Her reaction was disingenuous. Stieglitz shaped the way she saw and portrayed herself, and also pushed her to take command of her persona for the rest of her lengthy existence. Many people who have only a vague idea of the throbbing landscapes and melodramatic skulls she produced in later life know what she looked like. We remember her older incarnation: a weathered westerner, drying in New Mexico’s desert sun. She learned early how to turn herself into an icon, and she was canny enough to keep updating the brand.

In a display of ostentatious self-effacement, O’Keeffe refused to sign her pictures, preferring to stamp them with her mannerisms instead. The triangular opening in a tent that she painted as a young woman reappears in the form of floral clefts and rough peaks all through her career. To see all those decades telescoped into the Whitney’s galleries is to realise that even when she turned her gaze to a treeless mountain, she was always looking at herself.

‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction’ continues until January 17