In 1925, Georgia O’Keeffe, the grande dame of American Modernism, moved into the soaring 31-storey residential Shelton Hotel—at that time, one of the tallest hotels in the world—with her photographer and gallerist husband Alfred Stieglitz. They wintered there and spent summers at Lake George in the Adirondack mountain region, around 200 miles north of the city, until O’Keeffe visited New Mexico a few years later and began incorporating the state into her yearly migrations.
O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was inspired by the expansive views of the growing metropolis from her studio and produced a series of cityscapes. That perspective from on high also informed the presentation of another ongoing body of work. “I’ll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they will have to look at them,” O’Keeffe said of her more widely exhibited (at least posthumously) flower paintings. The works were interpreted as sexual, helped in part by Stieglitz’s hanging nude photographs he had taken of O’Keeffe alongside the first exhibition of that body of work. For Stieglitz, the feminine ideal was O’Keeffe’s brand—something she spent the rest of her life opposing.
O’Keeffe’s output while based at the midtown Manhattan skyscraper is explored in My New Yorks at the Art Institute of Chicago, which features 45 oil paintings along with dozens of drawings, pastels, photographs and letters.
Stieglitz
It is not possible to create a meaningful show of O’Keeffe’s work during this period in particular without talking about Stieglitz. The pair first met in 1916: he was 52 and established and she was an art teacher half his age living in Texas. They remained married for 22 years until his death in 1946. The curators have deftly included enough about Stieglitz and his work for context, while maintaining the focus on O’Keeffe. Perhaps Stieglitz’s 1918 portraits of O’Keeffe did not need to be included here, yet they exist in the museum’s collection, so why not?
While Stieglitz promoted O’Keeffe’s art in many exhibitions at his noted New York gallery, An American Place, he was not interested in showing her urban compositions. O’Keeffe considered New York Street with Moon (1925) as her first major cityscape. The painting depicts a dusk view of the corner of a building with a streetlamp’s aura in dynamic relationship with the moon and the red glow of a stop light. When the painting was finally exhibited, it sold immediately. “No one ever objected to my painting New York after that,” O’Keeffe said in a 1976 interview.
She considered The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1936) one of her best. It hangs on its own wall in the first gallery (and graces the catalogue cover). The painting depicts the massive hotel at an angle, framed in an urban canyon as the sun appears to eat into the building’s edge, casting a large white aura while sprinkling smaller orange and yellow sunspots. The backdrop appears to be a mix of belching smoke, striated clouds and fog.
New Mexico painted in New York: the artist’s Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1931)
© The Art Institute of Chicago
My New Yorks reveals how the many seeming tangents of the artist’s life and work are connected. Many of O’Keeffe’s paintings of New Mexico were created at her studio on the 30th floor of the Shelton. For instance, in Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (1931)—a semi-abstract landscape of a sun-bleached cow skull—the backdrop is informed by the terrain of New Mexico with its organic adobe structures. Wherever she was, O’Keeffe explored on foot, picking flowers, rocks and shells. In New Mexico, she collected animal bones on long walks in the high desert and shipped them back to her studio in New York.
In photographs taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1936, O’Keeffe stands on the terrace of a Manhattan penthouse she lived in after leaving the Shelton. A cow skull hangs on a brick wall, and in one shot, the artist poses next to it with her face in profile, her hand lovingly cupping its skeletal chin.
Chicago
O’Keeffe’s connection to Chicago began in 1905, when she attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She studied there for only a year but returned to it in 1908 to work as an illustrator for a little over a year. In 1943, the Art Institute of Chicago organised her first museum retrospective. Later, as executor of her late husband’s estate, O’Keeffe expanded the museum’s photography department by gifting hundreds of photographs from Stieglitz’s collection as well as her own work. O’Keeffe moved to northern New Mexico full-time in 1949. She continued to make significant additions to the museum bequest until her death.
In addition to seeing O’Keeffe’s work and rare materials in the vitrines, it is a pleasure to stroll through the galleries. The architecture of the city, O’Keeffe’s vision and perhaps the Shelton seem to have informed the exhibition design in a spectacularly positive way. Walls break from the grid, some at angles with windows at corners giving visitors a view of the space beyond.
In the reading room by the exit, large photo murals depict the installation of O’Keeffe’s Sky above Clouds IV (1965) in its permanent spot in the museum, adding a postscript to the unique story of the artist’s relationship with the Art Institute. It is a bonus. Completed when O’Keeffe was 77, the 24ft-long work would not fit inside the doors of the next venue during its retrospective exhibition tour in 1970, so it stayed in Chicago on extended loan. Eventually, it formally entered the collection. If you are not sated at the conclusion of your visit to My New Yorks, swing by Gallery 249 in the adjacent wing for dessert.
• Art Institute of Chicago (until 22 September), curators Sarah Kelly Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen, tickets $42 with general admission (concessions available)
The Art Newspaper's rating: the work ★★★★★; the show ★★★★
The show will travel to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (25 October-16 February 2025)
What the other critics said
The Wall Street Journal’s Lance Esplund calls the exhibition “an engaging time capsule” and “though uneven—abstractions such as New York—Night (Madison Avenue) (1926) and Black and White (1930) are too illustratively sleek and reductive—[it] is diverse and informative”.
Meanwhile, in the Chicago Tribune, Lori Waxman questions the setting of the show in a “cavernous” 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 […] Regardless, the show is tremendous”.