In Atlanta, Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Yorks

Far and away, Georgia O’Keeffe is probably best-known as a painter of flowers and of the Southwest, but as with anything else about O’Keeffe, that’s only a small bit of the story—a point that’s made clear in the exhibit Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks.

The exhibit, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, is currently at the High Museum in Atlanta, where it will run through February 16th. Its central focus is on works O’Keeffe created in the mid to late 1920s, while living in New York in an apartment in the high-rise Shelton Hotel with her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

The exhibition’s title comes from an O’Keeffe quote: “My New Yorks would turn the world over.” While that may be a bit of over-reach, they certainly did give the world a different look at the skyscraper city that many at the time looked to as the epitome of progress and change, and which was also the subject of photo essays by photographers such as Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

O’Keefe’s paintings of the city are largely from two points of view: looking out and up toward skyscrapers, expressed in very vertical pictures, and looking down from her own skyscraper windows on the city below, expressed in extremely horizontal pictures. The example above was the first of her cityscapes.

     
The Shelton with Sunspots, 1926, and Ritz Tower, 1928

O’Keeffe’s skyscrapers were an act of rebellion as well as an artistic project; years later she told an interviewer her male peers had discouraged her from painting New York subjects: “The men decided they didn’t want me to paint New York … They told me to ‘leave New York to the men.’ I was furious!” Not surprising, given O’Keeffe’s long rejection of the idea of being a ‘woman artist.’ In later years, she complained to an interviewer that “men put me down as the best woman painter… I think I’m one of the best painters.”

It’s always impossible to really describe O’Keeffe as either an abstractionist or a representational painter; her works fall on both sides of that line and straddle it. The three images above, all from 1926 and 1927, share significant similarities. Left is Line and Curve, right is Abstraction White, and in the middle is New York-Night (Madison Avenue)—recognizable after considerable staring as a “vision of the underlying geometries of city streets.”

Geometry, or form, shape so many of O’Keeffe’s paintings, whether with a limited or muted palate, or with the vivid colors that come out so strongly in many of her paintings from the Southwest, such as the two below, Dark Mesa with Pink Sky, 1930 and Desert Abstraction, 1931.

O’Keeffe’s shifting and evolving views can be seen across the skyscraper paintings, including the most representational one, New York, Night, 1928-1929, painted from a window at the Shelton, and her three-year later Manhattan, painted after her first Southwest trips, with a change of palate and the addition of decorative flowers. Manhattan was intended as the centerpiece of a tryptych.

The view from the Shelton tower offered O’Keeffe both new opportunities, and a continuing puzzle as she explained years later: When you live up high, the snow and rain go down and away from you instead of coming toward you from above. I was never able to do anything with that. There were many other things that I meant to paint. I still see them when I am in the Big City.” Despite that, the view produced some stunning images, such as these views across the East River.

Most of the East River views share a fairly muted palate, but a few show wider colors, including East River No. 1, 1927-28 below and the 1928 title image above.

Pink Dish and Green Leaves, from 1928, is the only known painting that shows both her domestic space and the cityscape. O’Keeffe explained to a friend “The pink dish with the city is frankly my foolishness—but I thought to myself—I am that way so here it goes—if I am that way I might as well put it down.”

Below, a charcoal sketch made in preparation for one of the East River paintings

Of course, O’Keeffe was not the only artist working at those windows in the Shelton. Stieglitz, who also made numbers of images from high-floor windows at his gallery, used the same viewpoint for a number of photographs.

For one of his images, Stieglitz rotated the camera counter-clockwise, and then rotated and mounted the image to restore the geometry of the buildings but not of the picture. The result seems to me to almost echo O’Keeffe’s deconstructed skyscrapers.

By the mid-1930s, O’Keeffe was spending most of her time and attention on her new home in the Southwest, although she returned to New York for three years starting in 1946 to deal with the estate of her husband, who died that year.

Her 1949 painting of the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the best-known from that era; the exhibit at the High has a charcoal sketch she made in preparation for it, although not the painting itself, which is in the Brooklyn Museum, where she had her first solo show in 1927.

In the 1970s, O’Keeffe returned once more to the skyscrapers that played such a prominent role in the beginning of her New York views reprising a painting done nearly 50 years before. It stands as her last New York.

   
City Night, 1926 at left and Untitled (City Night) 1970s at right