Georgia O’Keeffe - The New York Years: 1918-1949 - Art History Program with Robert Kelleman

Georgia O’Keeffe - The New York Years: 1918-1949 - Art History Program with Robert Kelleman.
Learn about iconic American artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life in New York City and see the incredible paintings she created there.
Our art history program complements the art exhibit “Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks”, at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 2 - September 22, 2024.
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“My New Yorks would turn the world over.”
Georgia O’Keeffe
Famed for her images of flowers and Southwestern landscapes, Georgia O’Keeffe spent several years exploring the built environment of New York City with brush in hand. The artist first moved to the city’s newly built Shelton Hotel in 1924, then the tallest residential skyscraper in the world, and its soaring heights inspired a five-year period of energetic experimentation, across media and at a variety of scales, with subject matter, form, and perspective.
She created street-level compositions capturing the city’s monumental skyscrapers from below and suspended views looking down from her 30th-floor apartment. O’Keeffe called these works “my New Yorks” and through them investigated the dynamic potential of New York’s cityscape-the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed. As she put it, “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
This exhibition is the first to seriously examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes, while also situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s.
The presentation establishes these works not as outliers or anomalous to her practice, but rather as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s-from her abstractions and still lifes at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond to her works upon arriving in the Southwest in 1929. O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.
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Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 - March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been called the "Mother of American modernism".
In 1905, O'Keeffe began art training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then the Art Students League of New York. Between 1912 and 1914 she was introduced to the principles and philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow, who created works of art based upon personal style, design, and interpretation of subjects, rather than trying to copy or represent them. This caused a major change in the way she felt about and approached art. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1917.
She moved to New York in 1918 at Stieglitz's request and began working seriously as an artist. They developed a professional and personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924. O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers.
O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls. After Stieglitz's death, she lived in New Mexico at Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú until the last years of her life, when she lived in Santa Fe. In 2014, O'Keeffe's 1932 painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for any female artist. After her death, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe.
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Your host for this program is Robert Kelleman, the founder/director of the non-profit community organization Washington, DC History & Culture.
Washington, DC History & Culture
A non-profit community organization.
Experience the history and culture of Washington, DC - and the world!
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Thanks!
Robert Kelleman
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