With only a little over a week left to catch Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” at the High Museum, consider it a priority.
And, be certain not to overlook the “s” in the exhibition title. This is, after all, a collection of work encompassing New Yorks, plural.
As viewers might expect, certain New York pieces in the exhibition are both an expectation and a must – alongside “East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928,” I am thinking specifically paintings like “New York, Night, 1928-1929,” or “Ritz Tower, 1928,” both renderings of dark skyscrapers punctuated by multiple sources of light. In these and other examples, beams reach out from behind windows, in car headlights and streetlights, and, in the case of the former, an illuminated cupola that serves as a bit of a beacon to O’Keeffe’s later commentary on perspective via height.
Viewers also get the surprise of skyscrapers as geometric form in “City Night 1926,” plus the reprise of it almost forty years later, in even larger scale and with – tellingly – more stars in the sky. While these paintings are essential for their very literal and quintessential O’Keeffe-ian takes on skyscrapers, line, and cityscape, it is the context of paintings like this within the entire exhibition that pull viewers into the fullness of O’Keeffe’s vision.
As the exhibition title suggests, “My New Yorks” extends beyond the Big Apple, to Lake George in upstate New York, and also ties in New Mexico. Unexpected, vibrant, and defined by surprise turns, even pull quotes on the wall invite viewers to pause, reflect, and understand just how New York created throughlines for O’Keeffe, even down to her take on vantage points. When living in Midtown Manhattan’s Shelton Hotel highrise (a substantial touchpoint in the exhibition) she observed: “the snow and the rain go down and away from you instead of coming toward you from above.”
In addition to O’Keeffe’s paintings, we are also privy to her charcoal sketches of skylines – so abstract and definitive one cannot help but consider the lines of her adobe house in Abiquiu, or her paintings of churches and other structures specifically in New Mexico. Having made the pilgrimage to both of O’Keeffe’s homes out West (Ghost Ranch can only be seen at a distance by horseback, and the extended tour at Abiquiu fills months in advance but is one of the only ways to see the 90-degree window intersection in her bedroom, plus peeks into her spartan wardrobe), the interplay of pencil line and brushstroke is especially poignant in this exhibition.
While we do see a smattering of O’Keeffe’s husband Alfred Stieglitz – both his photos of the young O’Keeffe and his captures of New York – it is in viewing O’Keeffe’s own photographs of the city that add an entirely different understanding to how she saw perspective, shape, and form. Also expect a powerful interlude in a display case containing spreads of 1938 issues of Life Magazine, including a stop-you-in-your-tracks header. Without giving too much away, O’Keeffe, like Frida Kahlo – contemporaries who corresponded with one another, especially during Kahlo’s time in Detroit – was often only seen in the shadow of Stieglitz, just as Kahlo was to her husband, Diego Rivera.
While my first exposure to O’Keeffe’s work as a teenager was through the Toledo Museum of Art – “Brown Sail, Wing and Wing, Nassau,” now fortunately back on view – it was the exhibition “The Poetry of Things” with the Phillips Collection in D.C. that propelled my committed interest. A mélange of O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers and bones, it was the displays of correspondence, books from her studies, and views into O’Keeffe’s education – including the teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow – that offered a deeper understanding into her development as an artist. Dow’s persistent encouragement to find the art in the everyday, whether that was in writing letters or buying a pair of shoes – continues to resonate in “My New Yorks.”
As an ekphrastic poet, my fascination with O’Keeffe’s trajectory as an artist, and her dual love of New York and New Mexico, also led me to The Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe – the televised interview that plays as introduction is a must-watch for confirmation of O’Keeffe’s cheeky humor – and to The Brooklyn Museum in New York for “Living Modern,” where visitors were able not only able to indulge in portions of her hand-sewn wardrobe and Laura Gilpin’s photographs of O’Keeffe, but also view her paint tubes and paint brushes, complete with fingerprints.
The sheer range that “My New Yorks” offers is a testament to our enduring fascination and reverence for the ways O’Keeffe makes us see again what we think we thought we saw. As she puts it in another pull quote that highlights the exhibition (referring to her paintings of enlarged flowers): “I’ll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they’ll have to look at them– and they did.”
“My New Yorks” calls on many collections to offer a true range – art on display is from across the states and Canada, including The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection. But it also offers the rare treat: “Pink Dish and Green Leaves, 1928-1929” is from a private collection. To be able to witness it on view, in tandem with O’Keeffe’s witty and candid observation about it, makes it one of the jewels of the exhibition: “The pink dish with the city is frankly my foolishness – but I thought to myself – I am that way, so here it goes – if I am that way I might as well put it down.”
My “New Yorks” is on view through Feb. 16. Tickets can be purchased here.
