Georgia O’Keeffe’s New York

It’s not always easy to unearth a new angle on a well-known artist, least of all one as well-known as Georgia O’Keeffe. Last year’s exhibition of O’Keeffe’s work at the Museum of Modern Art ^[1] explored her creative process with the inclusion of less often reproduced drawings and watercolors. The current entry,

Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” will soon be closing at the Art Institute of Chicago, after which it moves to its only other venue in Atlanta. O’Keeffe’s New York paintings aren’t obscure, yet in the century since she moved into the Shelton Hotel on the East Side and began producing cityscapes, there’s never been a show devoted to this aspect of her career until now. Given the quality and significance of the city paintings, the fact that no New York gallery or museum (read: Whitney) got the jump on this is puzzling. That “My New Yorks” won’t be seen here is a disappointment. 

O’Keeffe’s recollection, “I was told that it was an impossible idea—even the men hadn’t done too well with it,” may have been self-serving—she was well aware of the Ashcan School and George Bellows, and Edward Hopper was her contemporary. Still, she had every right to pride of accomplishment when she wrote “My New Yorks would turn the world over.” At the very least, they outstrip the urban Precisionism of Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth. Radiator Building—Night, New York and The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. are sleek crystallizations of the 1920s skyscraper ethos, a modern vision of Manhattan. 

O’Keeffe’s art is so firmly identified with the Southwest that her New York City tenure may mistakenly be reduced to a single period of her youth, when she actually lived in the city intermittently over a span of more than forty years. Originally from Wisconsin, she first arrived in New York to study at the League from 1907 to 1908. Family and finances intervened, and after teaching stints in Virginia and Texas, O’Keeffe returned to enroll in classes at Teachers College of Columbia University in 1914; after taking another teaching job in the south, she was again a student at Columbia in 1916. She briefly chaired an art department in Texas before returning to New York in 1918. For a while, it seemed that fellow student Eugene Speicher’s prediction that O’Keeffe would never be more than an instructor in a women’s college was prescient. 

In 1924, O’Keeffe moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the tallest residential building in the world. Initially, she and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, shared an apartment on the eleventh floor before moving to the twenty-eighth floor and, finally, the thirtieth floor in 1927. The Shelton, located on Lexington Avenue and 49th Street, had opened in 1923 as a hotel for men but began admitting female tenants the following year. The building’s dramatic use of setbacks on ascending floors was an Art Deco solution to recent zoning regulations and a dry run for the design of the Empire State Building and other subsequent skyscrapers. The building underwent a series of transformations through the twentieth century—when my parents stayed there while visiting me in the late 1980s, it was the Halloran House. It was a Marriot hotel when the pandemic forced its closure in 2020. The building has since reopened as student housing. 

The move to the Shelton coincided with O’Keeffe’s discovery of what would become a signature motif, the large-scale flower canvases. One subject gloried in organic forms, the other, architectural, but both shared a monumental conception. Much has been made of the anatomical symbolism of O’Keeffe’s flowers and much to O’Keeffe’s annoyance. The decision to simultaneously embark on paintings of monolithic structures would bring joy to a Freudian’s heart. 

O’Keeffe explained the attraction of a midtown residence:

When I came to live at the Shelton about three years ago … I couldn’t afford it. But I can now, so of course I’m going to stay. Yes 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. 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. 

The hotel itself, memorialized in Shelton Hotel, N.Y., No. I, and The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., became O’Keeffe’s subject. In both paintings, the building’s massive terracotta-colored frame looms over the viewer at the center of the canvas, flanked by the imposing diagonals of adjacent buildings. The perspective is convoluted, the effect dizzying and elating. In The Shelton with Sunspots, the sun’s glare takes a chunk out of the hotel’s upper floors and leaves an array of optical bubbles in its wake. I don’t imagine O’Keeffe painted these on-site, though she probably would have made drawings at street level and completed the canvases in her apartment. O’Keeffe adopted the same viewpoint for the more abstracted cityscapes New York Street with Moon, City Night, and Manhattan, the latter reminiscent of Sheeler’s cacophonous overlapping architecture, except for the flowers O’Keeffe added in the sky. Radiator Building—Night, New York, is a glamorized view of the city after dark, dominated by another recently erected skyscraper. O’Keeffe claimed her interest was prompted when she “walked across 42d Street many times at night when the black Radiator Building was new—so that had to be painted, too.” The painting is perhaps O’Keeffe’s most recognizable paean to modern Manhattan, but it has invited scrutiny as a possible jab at Stieglitz at a time when their marriage was strained. 

The elevated vantage point of the Shelton apartment provided an unobstructed view of the city skyline, resulting in compositions of breadth and atmosphere. Looking west, O’Keeffe drew the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the mid-1920s—five years later, her view would have been blocked by the rise of the Waldorf-Astoria. More often, she turned her attention toward the East River, producing oils and pastels that depict the view in sun and haze. A series of beautiful and nearly monochromatic views show the river as a serene, shimmering plane. The Manhattan and Queens shorelines are comprised of a grid of rooftops, snow-covered or enveloped in darkness, punctuated by industrial smokestacks like so many irregularly spaced notes on a page of sheet music. One in particular is essential. Near the center of each composition, a smokestack rises from the Manhattan waterfront. If it doesn’t quite reach the piers on the far shore, a trail of smoke is added to bridge the gap and break the horizontal expanse of water. These tone poems culminate in East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, an elegant panorama of the scene under muted sunlight, the river humming with barges and tugboats.

The river activity is not that of the Ashcan School or the jazz-infused abstraction of John Marin. O’Keeffe saw the city from a distance, coolly. Eventually she didn’t require its stimulus, finding the space of New Mexico inspiration enough. She hit her stride in Manhattan in the 1920s, when the city was enjoying its headiest days, just before the crash and the Great Depression. “My New Yorks” covers this territory and adds O’Keefe’s contemporaneous, unrelated work for context. Missing are the works she produced at Lake George, where she and Stieglitz summered, and which would have provided a fuller understanding of her art in that period and the yin/yang of city and landscape. All the same, it’s a significant block of New York modernism, a sleek and lyrical ode to the city. The biggest knock on “My New Yorks” is that it won’t be coming to New York. 

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Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” is at the Art Institute of Chicago until September 22, then at the High Museum of Art[1] in Atlanta from October 25, 2024 to February 16, 2025.