Georgia O’Keeffe’s breathtaking New York City paintings are finally getting the attention they deserve

While Georgia O’Keeffe is best known for her intimate floral paintings and vibrant depictions of Southwestern landscapes, a new exhibition celebrates a lesser-known subject close to the artist’s heart: New York City.

Titled “My New Yorks”, the exhibition features approximately 100 items – including paintings, photographs, pastels, drawings and letters – and explores how the city shaped O’Keeffe’s artistic career. Currently on display at Art Institute of Chicagoit will move to Atlanta High Art Museum in October.

“This exhibition provides a wonderful opportunity to highlight this important but perhaps less recognized period of O’Keeffe’s artistic life and to demonstrate how her New Yorks illustrate her innovation as a modernist,” said Rand Suffolk, director of the Atlanta museum, in An statement.

In 1924, about six years after moving to New York, O’Keeffe moved to the Shelton Hotel with her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. At the time it was the tallest residential skyscraper in the world. The views inspired the artist and she painted many of her cityscapes from the hotel’s 30th floor.

Unlike many of O’Keeffe’s well-known paintings with bright tones, her depictions of New York are vaguer and moodier. She loved these works: “My New Yorks would change the world,” she said ever said– but she did not always receive support from her contemporaries in the art world.

“The men decided they didn’t want me to paint New York,” O’Keeffe said later in life Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “They told me to leave New York to the men.” I was furious!”

Stieglitz was one of the men who held this view, because he felt that urban landscapes were too masculine a subject for O’Keeffe.

“He was obviously instrumental in promoting her career, but he certainly had a specific view of what that career should be,” says Sarah Kelly Oehler, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hyperallergic‘Is Isabella Segalovich. “There was an expectation that she would bring a certain femininity to her paintings that seems to contradict urban paintings.”

When O’Keeffe later created her famous flower paintings, she was still thinking of the tall buildings of New York City. The urban expanse inspired her bold, brilliant depictions of flowers, often painted on large-scale canvases. “I will make them big, like the huge buildings that go up. People will be shocked; they’ll have to look at it,” O’Keeffe once said of her flowers Art newspaper‘S Ruth Lopez.

The exhibition shows visitors how O’Keeffe’s cityscapes fit into the context of her larger oeuvre. According to the Chicago Tribune‘s Lori Waxman, some gallery arrangements mimic the way O’Keeffe presented her works during her lifetime.

“Glowing skyscraper is hung next to winding dead tree, moody mesa, cow skull, sunset cross, desert abstraction, multi-story adobe houses. Nearby is the Brooklyn Bridge,” Waxman writes. “The surprise may be that O’Keeffe painted urban scenes at all, but the real revelation is how much meaning her subjects have together.”

She adds, “The show is wonderful, and anyone who cares at all about modern painting should see it.”

“My New Yorks” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through September 22, 2024. It will then move to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, where it will be on view from October 25, 2024 to February 16, 2025.