Art
Anna Gaca
Georgia O’Keeffe, East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
In the mid-1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio looked out 30 stories above midtown Manhattan from the Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue. She painted the scene again and again in pieces like East River from the Shelton, No. III (1926) and East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel (1928), mapping the topography of rooftops and the variegations of sun on water.
Though famous for striking paintings of flowers, animal skulls, and the New Mexico desert, O’Keeffe is less often associated with New York City, a subject she portrayed frequently in her early career. “Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks,’” at the Art Institute of Chicago, on view through September 22nd, spotlights a period in the artist’s career focused on urban scenery and a brand-new architectural phenomenon: skyscrapers. In New York, O’Keeffe’s formal exploration and commercial success established the rhythms of a long and celebrated career.
Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918. The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. © The Art Institute of Chicago.
Georgia O’Keeffe, The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
O’Keeffe in New York
O’Keeffe and the Art Institute of Chicago have shared history: She studied at the affiliated art school in 1905–06 and presented her first retrospective at the museum in 1943. Visitors who arrive at “My New Yorks” via the main entrance will pass beneath one of O’Keeffe’s largest and most iconic paintings, Sky above Clouds IV (1965), which is on permanent display.
“My New Yorks” was inspired by another O’Keeffe painting in the Art Institute’s collection, The Shelton with Sunspots (1926). “So many of our visitors have been astounded to realize this is a painting by O’Keeffe,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, who co-curated the exhibition with Annelise K. Madsen. The curators sought to “position [O’Keeffe] a little bit outside of the Southwest,” while recognizing the breadth and continuity of her modernist approach. “Rather than see these New York paintings as somehow separate from the flow of her other work, we wanted to reintegrate them into her career at this time,” said Oehler.
Georgia O’Keeffe. New York Street with Moon, 1925. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, East River from the Shelton (East River No. 1), 1927–28. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo by Peter S. Jacobs.
When she began painting New York City, O’Keeffe had lived there for seven years already. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, she eventually relocated to New York in 1918. Photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, an influential champion of O’Keeffe’s work, convinced her to make the move. In 1924, the two married and moved into an apartment at the Shelton, dividing time between the Manhattan hotel and the Stieglitz family summer home in Lake George, New York.
O’Keeffe often recalled that her first New York painting, 1925’s New York Street with Moon, was snubbed: Stieglitz initially declined to exhibit it. Nature and domestic scenes were considered more appropriate for women artists and O’Keeffe resented the doubt of male peers. “When I wanted to paint New York, the men thought I’d lost my mind. But I did it anyway,” she told ArtNews in 1977. When the painting was shown in 1926, it sold immediately. O’Keeffe regarded 1927 as the first year she earned a living from art, and the “New Yorks” were key to her early success.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Shelton Hotel, N.Y., No. I, 1926. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo by Nathaniel Willson.
Georgia O’Keeffe. City Night, 1926. © Georgia OKeeffe Museum.
Architecture and nature combine
“My New Yorks” emphasizes formal connections in O’Keeffe’s work and her practice of exhibiting various subject matter—landscapes, buildings, close-ups of plants—side by side. “She’s thinking about how to convey architecture in relation to the natural environment,” said Oehler. “You see her thinking about how to structure a composition around a monumental central element, and she really refines that with skyscrapers, which are so inherently monumental.” The Shelton, then the city’s tallest residential building, was a favorite. In Shelton Hotel, N.Y. No. I (1926) and The Shelton with Sunspots, O’Keeffe consolidates the view, omitting real-life architectural detail to reinforce the building’s solidity against the sky.
Her New York paintings convey awe and light as well as a sense of individual perspective. “There’s a nationalistic undertone to a lot of imagery of skyscrapers, but she brings her own take,” Oehler said. Where Stieglitz’s photographs of the city often seem to hover above the ground in a world of right angles, O’Keeffe’s paintings adopt a human vantage point, tilting to look up from the sidewalk or out through the windows of her apartment. The view can feel ambivalent or even ominous: City Night (1926) places the viewer at eye level beneath buildings that tower above, suggesting a feeling of anxiety or anonymity in a crowd. O’Keeffe’s skyscraper paintings simultaneously illustrate the power of human ingenuity and the totality of human insignificance.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Manhattan, 1932. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931 © The Art Institute of Chicago
Escape to New Mexico
O’Keeffe’s first extended trip to New Mexico, in 1929, marked a personal and professional turning point. Stieglitz was pursuing an affair in New York and the couple’s relationship, though loving, was under strain. Taking some distance, O’Keeffe fell in love with the Southwest, and its vibrant colors and landscapes would characterize much of her later work. On long walks in the desert, she collected bones and other natural materials to ship back to her studio at the Shelton.
A standout of the current exhibition, 1932’s Manhattan, painted after O’Keeffe began spending time in New Mexico, blends the style she had established with her skyscrapers with fresh ideas from the desert. Strong diagonals evoke architectural lines, or perhaps the street map implied by earlier abstract compositions like New York – Night (Madison Avenue) (1926). The tilted composition takes on a Cubist slant, and stylized window grids share the rhythmic energy of a Mondrian. But Manhattan’s most salient color—a warm blush pink—was an unexpected addition. O’Keeffe also scattered in three of the decorative artificial flowers she encountered in New Mexico and memorably featured in paintings like Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses(1931).
New York’s ongoing influence
In New York, O’Keeffe cultivated the idiosyncratic artistic eye she would bring to new landscapes throughout her life. The “sky shapes” she saw peeking out between tall buildings reassert themselves in The White Place in the Sun (1943; on view in an adjacent gallery of the Institute), part of a series focused on a monumental natural rock formation in New Mexico. Her views from the Shelton Hotel reflect her interest in an elevated “modern” vantage on everyday experience, an idea that recurs in the “Sky above Clouds” series, inspired by later trips on airplanes.
Though Abiquiú, New Mexico, became O’Keeffe’s home base, New York held a permanent place in her heart. She would not move away from the city for good until 1949, three years after Stieglitz’s death.
“My New Yorks” closes with O’Keeffe’s final skyscraper: a reprise of City Night, painted in the 1970s, that turns up the wattage on the streetlamp and adds a smattering of stars to the wedge of deep blue sky overhead. Approaching the end of her working life, O’Keeffe was still discovering the natural element within an urban landscape—with New York on her mind.
