Although the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe are primarily abstract, comprising basic geometrical shapes and lines, they never fail to evoke the places where they were made. A look at her mountain and lakeside landscapes takes one to the shores of Lake George, a small community in the New York Adirondacks; her still lifes of animal bones and southwestern scenery seem to contain within them the arid countryside and clear blue skies of her homes in New Mexico. However, years before setting off on the transcontinental adventures that would result in her best-known canvases, O’Keeffe lived in the Midwest. From 1905 to 1906 she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied under Dutch-American artist John Vanderpoel. She maintained an affection for her alma mater throughout her career, in 1947 donating part of the art and photography collection of her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, to the Art Institute, which in 1943 had held her first retrospective and would exhibit her singular brand of modernism many more times in the subsequent decades.
In a new show opening on June 2, the Art Institute continues to highlight O’Keeffe’s work, but by focusing on another major city the artist once called home: New York. Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” displays examples from O’Keeffe’s cityscape paintings and drawings made from 1924 to 1929, during her stay at the Shelton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. At that time she was just beginning her celebrated large-scale flower paintings and was newly married to Stieglitz, the well-heeled owner of 291, the city’s trailblazing photography gallery. It was not an easy time. O’Keeffe’s union with Stieglitz was precipitated by a difficult bout with the Spanish Flu, and marked by serial infidelity and jealousy. O’Keeffe was also a woman artist finding success, making her an easy target for criticism. When the newlyweds took up residence in the Shelton in 1924, it became her refuge. It was one of Manhattan’s first residential buildings, and it offered first-class amenities, such as a cafeteria where O’Keeffe ate two meals a day and a heated pool where she swam for exercise. The amazing views from the thirtieth floor provided an inspirational space where she could create her versions of the city.
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt,” O’Keeffe once explained. Through experimentation with materials, perspective, and scale, she captured the industrial atmosphere and grand scale of the skyscrapers while simultaneously reflecting the human experience in the city. In The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., the viewer looks up into the daytime sky, the hotel towering in the frame and glaring sunspots reflecting from the windows. “I went out one morning to look at it [the Shelton Hotel],” O’Keeffe recalled in her 1976 book Georgia O’Keeffe, “and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky.” The dusky scene in New York, Night shifts the perspective to line up with the crenelated roof of the Hotel Beverly (now the Royal Sonesta Benjamin), as seen from O’Keeffe’s apartment. The skyscraper stands like a column of darkness that lightens as it nears the busy street, outlined by glittering Lexington Avenue trailing away to the north. O’Keeffe remarked about the scene, “Lexington Avenue looked, in the night, like a very tall thin bottle with colored things going up and down inside it.”
In the exhibition will be over ninety paintings, pastels, drawings, photographs, and ephemera from the 1920s and 1930s, drawn from the Art Institute’s collection and loaned from other institutions, such as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art. The range of items on view encompasses not only O’Keeffe’s urban subject matter but New Mexico–inspired canvases such as Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, making the exhibition the first to emphasize the artist’s total output from the period. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays from the show’s curators, Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen.
“My New Yorks would turn the world over,” O’Keeffe once mused. The Art Institute of Chicago is making this a reality.
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” • Art Institute of Chicago • June 2 to September 22 • artic.edu
