Some think that painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was a sleepy Southwesterner who primarily depicted labial flora. But the Art Institute’s exhibit chronicles a more complete origin story with the energetic exhibit My New Yorks, a title she gave to her architectural depictions of the city she lived in during the 1920s and beyond.
O’Keeffe also had a strong Chicago connection. She attended the School of the Art Institute from 1905-6 (she received an honorary degree in 1967) and worked as a commercial illustrator here from 1908-10. The museum hosted her first major retrospective in 1943 and has several of her familiar pieces on permanent display like “Sky above Clouds IV.”
In 1924, newlywed O’Keeffe and her photographer husband Alfred Stieglitz moved into NYC’s Shelton Hotel, the tallest residential skyscraper in the world at the time. “I had never lived up so high before and was so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York,” she said, as recorded in the exhibit’s expansive signage. She also asserted that her paintings were “not transcriptions but translations.”
“I realize it’s unusual for an artist to want to work way up near the roof of a big hotel in the heart of the roaring city but I think that’s just what the artist of today needs for stimulus,” said O’Keeffe. “He has to have a place where he can behold the city as a unit before his eyes but at the same time have enough space left to work.”
She used the dynamic skyline to explore geometry and scale with human-generated structures and organic “sky shapes” like clouds and polygons, foreshadowing her close studies of future flowers, a dynamic between “tall buildings and tiny shells,” as one placard says. Her canvases frequently match the shape of the subject matter, such as slim rectangular forms and frames for representations of corn, eggplant and a dark iris. “These paintings … keep on producing new shoots and efflorescences, now through the medium of apples, pears, eggplants, now through leaves and stalks, now in high buildings and sky-scapes, all intensified by abstraction into symbols of quite different significance,” she said. Some of her graphite sketches are featured here as well.
The couple alternated between living in the city and spending time at Lake George in upstate New York. O’Keeffe used that bucolic setting to generate lush natural meditations using earthy palettes to portray water, storms and other weather that are also featured in this exhibition. They moved to upper floors of the Shelton with each passing year, each facing east with north and south views, changing their metaphorical and literal perspectives and influencing their output. “New York’s most beautiful hotel, no longer for bachelors only, is an ideal place for artists and artistic people to live, for a day or a year,” proclaims one of the marketing brochures featured in the show.
When comparing skyscraper photos with O’Keeffe interpretations, one sees that the painter has edited or truncated architectural elements (like the number of floors or doors) to fit her ethos, sometimes layering natural occurrences like sunspots over geometric forms. “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt,” she said.
O’Keeffe’s play with color (from almost white to almost black canvases), stroke thickness (heavy for snowy rooftops above the East River and thin for smoke), and form (from rigid angles to curvilinear sensuality) solidifies her range, moving “fluidly between abstraction and representation, never limiting her approach to one kind of aesthetic exploration,” a sign notes.
“I see no reason why abstract and realistic art can’t live side by side. The principles are the same,” O’Keeffe said.
O’Keeffe not only lived and worked in the shadow of some of the Big Apple’s most remarkable architecture, but she also lived somewhat in the shadow of her famous photographer husband. Sometimes he chose to not include her work in his gallery shows and might have been threatened by her notoriety. Her 1927 work “Radiator Building—Night, New York” features the edifice at night swathed in steam, with a red neon “Alfred Stieglitz” sign dominating the left side of the canvas, perhaps a commentary on the patriarchy dictating O’Keeffe’s visibility.
As far as her famous flower paintings, which became part of her portfolio after spending summer 1929 in Taos, New Mexico, she’s quoted as saying “I’ll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled: they’ll have to look at them—and they did.” O’Keeffe shipped “barrels and boxes of bones,” shells and other inspirations from the Southwest to paint in her New York studio where she would turn “dead bones into live art.” Her paintings of trees and other vertical forms echo the towering buildings in the concrete jungle.
In 1949, O’Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico, but continued to visit New York regularly. Her art was sold in galleries there and, alongside painting, she took photos too, some of which are featured here as small prints. The juxtaposition of size and content in O’Keeffe’s work is substantial, and it’s a pleasure to see her non-flower work assembled and her motivations considered.
“When you live up high, the snow and rain go down and away from you instead of coming toward you from above,” she said. “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.”
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks runs at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., until September 22. Several lectures and related events are offered in conjunction with this exhibit.
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