Georgia O’Keeffe. East River from the Shelton (East River No. 1), 1927-28. New Jersey State Museum Collection. Purchased by the Association for the Arts of the New Jersey State Museum with a gift from Mary Lea Johnson. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo by Peter S. Jacobs.
This exhibition—featuring approximately 100 works across a range of media, including paintings, drawings, pastels, and photographs—is the first to seriously examine O’Keeffe’s urban landscapes, while also situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Georgia O’Keeffe, East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928.
Famed for her images of flowers and Southwestern landscapes, O’Keeffe has received little attention for her inspiring urban landscapes created in New York early in her career. In 1924 the artist and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, moved to the Shelton Hotel in New York City. At the time, it was the tallest building of its kind in the world. Shortly thereafter, she began creating a powerful group of works that she called “my New Yorks,” which explored the dynamic potential of the New York skyline. O’Keeffe resisted the popular approaches of the time, which often viewed the city as a streamlined, impersonal series of geometric canyons. Instead she created dynamic compositions both looking down into the city as well as humbling views directed up at the new urban monoliths.
“O’Keeffe stated that ‘One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt,’ and these works represent her inventive approach to understanding Manhattan’s exciting new skyscrapers,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Arts of the Americas, and vice president, Curatorial Strategy. “Frequently juxtaposing natural effects with soaring towers, her ‘New Yorks’ beautifully demonstrate the artist’s powerful personal response to the city.”
These New York paintings are by no means outliers in O’Keeffe’s body of work. Instead, they are integral in understanding how she became the artist we know today. For this reason, the exhibition includes a significant portion of the artist’s New York paintings alongside select works that highlight her varied subject matter, from shells and flowers to abstractions and landscapes.
“O’Keeffe moved easily between representation and abstraction, exploring numerous subjects and aesthetic vocabularies concurrently. With tremendous curiosity and dexterity, she translated her lived experiences into bold compositions, ranging from towering skyscrapers and expansive city views, to enlarged flowers, bones, landscapes, and more.” said Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator, Arts of the Americas.
This integration of subject matter underscores how O’Keeffe centered these works in her innovative and experimental modernist investigation of form, line, and color—an approach she continued upon her arrival in the Southwest. Additionally, this unique show will also include contemporaneous photographs by Stieglitz from the Shelton and other Manhattan high-rises, and the productive artistic dialogue that developed as each was inspired by their powerfully new urban environment.
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” is curated by the Art Institute’s Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen.
Catalogue
The accompanying richly illustrated catalog will feature a series of essays that presents new scholarship and viewpoints on this formative group of works.
A revelatory study of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York paintings of the late 1920s and their deep significance within the artist’s development
In 1924 Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) first moved to the Shelton Hotel in New York with her husband, the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. The Shelton was Manhattan’s earliest residential skyscraper, and its dizzying heights inspired O’Keeffe to create a powerful series of approximately twenty-five paintings and numerous drawings over a span of about five years. She called these “my New Yorks,” and they overwhelmingly consist of two types of compositions: sprawling observations looking down onto the city and humbling views directed up at the newly built urban monoliths. Exploring the New York skyline, O’Keeffe resisted the approach of contemporaries such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand—who celebrated New York as a streamlined, impersonal series of geometric canyons—and instead portrayed it as an amalgamation of the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed. Only in this way could she express New York (in her words) “as it is felt.”
Reshaping our understanding of this pivotal yet underappreciated period in O’Keeffe’s storied career, this publication situates the New York paintings within the artist’s larger oeuvre and examines how these works reflect narratives of built environments, racialized space, and the politics of place.