A soon-to-open spotlight on celebrated 20th-century painter Georgia O’Keeffe at the Art Institute of Chicago offers a surprise within a surprise.
Many people who know the independent-minded proto-feminist’s iconic paintings of flowers and the American Southwest are likely to be surprised that from 1925-30, she primarily also created 25 or so scenes of Manhattan, where she was living at the time.
A fascinating new exhibition, titled “Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New Yorks’” — the subtitle borrowing a phrase the artist coined for these urban works — offers the first major look at this subset of her abundant output. It opens June 2 and runs through Sept. 22.
“This was not the largest part of her output,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, one of the show’s two curators, along with Annelise Madsen. “It’s definitely a concentrated period of time where she is working of them extensively and showing them every single year, but it is only a five-year period.”
The second surprise is that O’Keeffe painted and exhibited these city views right alongside rural scenes of Lake George, N.Y., and imagery of the Southwest, places where she was regularly traveling at the same time.
Not only was she able to jump from one subject to the next with extraordinary ease, she clearly saw these seemingly disparate depictions as not just interconnected but each building on and reinforcing the other.
“This is absolutely a message we really want to convey,” said Oehler, chair and curator of the Art Institute’s Arts of the Americas department. “It’s the O’Keeffe story. It’s a corrective to history and the way history has been told. It’s a way also of understanding O’Keeffe as this incredibly fertile and fluid painter.”
This under-recognized, simultaneous variety explains the startling presence of works like “Lake George Barns” (1926) or “White Flower” (1929), which at first blush seem out of place in a show that is centered on New York.
If there is a knock against “My New Yorks,” it’s how the exhibition is displayed. The museum has chosen to present the show in the venue’s main temporary exhibition space, Regenstein Hall, because O’Keeffe’s name recognition is likely to make it a big summer draw.
Though it’s always laudable to give artworks room to breathe, this show looks a little undersized for the vast gallery. Much like a student pads a term paper to get to the required length, it feels like the curators have plumped it up with surplus open space and an unduly large screening room in the center for a short video.
What does work well are vertical slits in the walls that allow visitors to peer into other galleries, providing the same kind of overlapping, fractured views that cities offer as one peers down alleys and streets and across rooftops.
A native of Sun Prairie, Wisc., O’Keeffe lived in Chicago twice and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before first going to New York in 1907 and finally settling there in 1918. Probably in part because of those connections, the Art Institute has had a long and distinguished history with O’Keeffe and her art.
The museum owns 20 of her paintings, including such immediately recognizable masterpieces as “Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses” (1931), and three drawings. It hosted her first large-scale retrospective in 1943 and two later, including the most recent in 1988.
Indeed, the near 40-year absence at the Art Institute of a solo show devoted to O’Keeffe was a key driving force for this exhibition. Its theme emerged from “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” (1926), a gift to the museum in 1985.
“It was [us] really starting to think about that gap of understanding, the lack of awareness that many of our visitors have about O’Keeffe’s very important early career in the 1920s, before she goes to the Southwest. So, it felt like an opportunity to get into this crucial moment and really get into these paintings,” Oehler said of the New York views.
That key oil on canvas depicts the 34-story Shelton Hotel (now a student dormitory), which was completed in 1923 and became the world’s tallest hotel at the time. It is a prime example of arguably the most striking subset of O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” — an upswept, semi-abstracted view of the skyscraper.
Illustrating O’Keeffe’s interest in both the natural and man-made, the towering building where she first lived in 1924 is partially shrouded by the glowing orb of the sun and series of sunspots that peer through seemingly curly wisps of mist floating in the background.
Hanging right next to it in the show is another view of the Shelton — a more austere, straightforward, yet equally commanding view — “Shelton Hotel, N.Y., No. 1” (1926). It is the first time since 1927 that these two works have been shown together.
Also in this section is one of the show’s highlights — a charcoal drawing, 24⅝ by 18⅞ inches, that offers a semi-abstracted view from the Shelton of the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the distance. Titled “Untitled (New York)” (1924–26), it is one of the most geometric compositions in the show, with subtle shadings and setbacks.
As unexpected as the variety of subject matter during this early period was O’Keeffe’s ability to move uninhibitedly from abstraction to representation with all kinds of gradations in between, blithely ignoring the modernist dictates of the time.
“I’m always swinging from one thing to the other. I have always been very free in my approach. I see no reason why abstract and realistic art can’t live side by side. The principles are the same,” O’Keeffe said in 1965 — a quotation that is posted in the exhibition.
Thus, in one of part of the show are four narrow, vertical paintings that come off as completely non-objective except for the title of one — “New York - Night (Madison Avenue)” (1926), which throws a different light on these oils on canvas and their inspiration.
At the opposite side of the stylistic spectrum is a group of works in another gallery that look down from O’Keeffe’s window and across the East River to the factories on the far side. Indeed, there is almost nothing immediately O’Keeffe-like in these very straightforward, representational paintings like “East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel” (1928).
What might have been beneficial to this show is the inclusion of works by other artists that took on New York in related ways, such as George Ault’s “New Moon, New York” (1945), which has decided echoes of O’Keeffe’s imagery. That said, the curators’ decision to keep the focus solely on her is understandable.
After closing in Chicago, “My New Yorks” will go on view Oct. 25-Feb. 16, 2025 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.
