You think you know an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe, the mother of American modernism, painted skulls and flowers, often in disarmingly sensuous close-up, as well as the monumental desert landscape surrounding her home and studio in rural New Mexico.
While that’s true, it’s only part of the story. A fuller account of O’Keeffe’s tale is told in “Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks,’” the Art Institute of Chicago’s summer blockbuster, curated by Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen. The exhibition, which includes photographs, sketches, pastels, a trove of archival advertisements and magazines, as well as 50-plus paintings, reveals the great modernist to have been a Manhattanite of many decades, resident of skyscrapers and painter of them, too.
Born in 1887 in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keefe lived in New York for a number of years before putting a brush to its canvas. She arrived for the first time in the fall of 1907 to attend the Art Students League, then spent the following decade working as a commercial artist, teaching art, and furthering her artistic studies in Chicago, Charlottesville, Amarillo and back in Manhattan, where she permanently settled in 1918 at the invitation of her future husband, the preeminent photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. But it wasn’t until 1925, when she and Stieglitz moved into a high-rise apartment, that the booming architecture of the metropolis began to appear in her artwork.
O’Keeffe was already well-known by then, praised by critics for her magnified pictures of flowers, a theme deemed appropriately feminine. Stieglitz’s photographic portraits of her, many nude, contributed to the sexualized interpretation her work often received. How better to combat that bias than by taking on the most masculine subject of all: the high-rises and canyons of Manhattan?
On view at the AIC is her first attempt, the effervescent “New York Street with Moon” of 1925. In this sharply vertical cityscape, O’Keeffe carefully observes the urban sky from the point of view of a pedestrian gazing up. The heavens appear graphically reshaped by the tops of tall buildings monolithically silhouetted in the twilight. The moon glows behind wavy clouds and the artificial streetlights shine brighter still. This isn’t about the facts of architecture but how the city makes a person feel.
To O’Keeffe’s disappointment, Stieglitz refused to include that painting in “Seven Americans,” a group exhibition at his gallery that year. He instead chose 30 other exemplars of her recent work, including a cloudscape, flower and vegetable still-lifes, lake abstractions, and a terrifically strange image of the shed he used as a darkroom at his summer home in Lake George. The curators have reassembled a representative selection, hanging them alongside “New York Street with Moon.” The gesture, a first, succeeds as a feminist corrective, but so too did the fact that the painting sold the following year, on the very first day it was finally displayed, in O’Keeffe’s annual solo show.
O’Keeffe continued taking inspiration from her frequent walks around midtown Manhattan and the extraordinary buildings going up all around her. The most significant of these was the Shelton Hotel, a behemoth that filled the entirety of Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets, the tallest residential tower in the world when it opened in 1923. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz lived there on and off for a decade, and it is the subject of her finest New York painting, “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.,” as well as one of her dullest, “Shelton Hotel, N.Y., No. 1,” both painted in 1926. “No. 1” is brown and boring, where “Sunspots” dazzles with streaming smoke and clouds, glittering dots of light, and a brilliant glare of sun that eats into the side of the towering structure. Neither canvas feels any more or less true of the city than the other.
O’Keeffe and Stieglitz kept moving upward in the building, eventually preferring an apartment on the 30th floor with commanding views in multiple directions. The exhibition includes a his and hers gallery of the results, with her relatively detailed paintings of the industrial East River on one side and his not entirely dissimilar photographic prints on the other. It’s unclear what is to be gained from presenting Stieglitz’s urban compositions here, in a show whose purpose is to validate O’Keeffe’s, given the decades of sexist art history that only ever saw his influence on her.
Harder to fathom is the show’s location in cavernous Regenstein Hall. O’Keeffe may be as big an artist as they get, but her work is mostly small or mid-size, and it suffers from being spread out, bulked up, and divided between unfillable dead space. The exhibition is overfull, yet it feels empty. The AIC has made this mistake before.
Regardless, the show is tremendous, and anyone who cares anything about modern painting will need to see it. Some groupings of artwork are thematic — window views here, geometric abstractions there — but the most illuminating are those that mix it all up. These echo gallery arrangements O’Keeffe presented during the era, including in “Seven Americans” and a 1930 display of paintings made in New Mexico, New York and Lake George, after her life-changing first summer in Taos. Glowing skyscraper is hung adjacent to twisty dead tree, moody mesa, cow skull, sunset cross, desert abstraction, multistory adobe houses. Nearby is the Brooklyn Bridge. The surprise may be that O’Keeffe painted urban scenes at all, but the true revelation is how much sense her subjects make together.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic
“Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” runs through Sept.22 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave. , 312-443-3600, artic.edu
