ExhibitionsGeorgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks”
Current Exhibition

Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks”

October 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025

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“I had never lived up so high before and was so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York,” recalled Georgia O’Keeffe late in life. In 1924 the artist and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential skyscraper. The hotel’s stunning views inspired O’Keeffe to explore midtown Manhattan’s soaring geometries: she experimented across media and scale and with various subjects, forms, and perspectives during an energetic five-year period beginning in 1925. Through these works, which she called “my New Yorks,” she investigated the dynamic potential of the cityscape, often depicting it in dialogue with nature to represent her personal perceptions of the built environment.

This exhibition is the first to critically examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes while situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s. The exhibition establishes these works not as outliers or as anomalous to her practice but rather as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s—abstractions and still lifes made at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond and works made in the Southwest beginning in 1929. O’Keeffe’s “New Yorks” are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.

One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

—O’Keeffe, 1926

New York Street with Moon, 1925

O’Keeffe’s first cityscape, New York Street with Moon, depicts the streets around the Hotel Chatham, located two blocks west of her home in the Shelton Hotel. She painted the thirteen-story building at a steep upward angle, slimming down its blocky mass and rendering it as a single abstract form. Her framing of the hotel with geometric slivers of adjacent structures evokes the visual constraints pedestrians faced when surrounded by the towering buildings of Manhattan.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York Street with Moon, 1925, oil on canvas, mounted to Masonite, Colección Carmen Thyssen. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Georgia O'Keeffe, New York Street with Moon

The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926

This blazing canvas, which captures a fleeting juxtaposition of the natural and the human-built environments, was inspired by O’Keeffe’s perception of nature’s power even in an urban setting. She later recalled, “I went out one morning to look at [the Shelton Hotel] and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky.” The painting boldly exemplifies O’Keeffe’s response to the novel structure of the skyscraper, a subject almost exclusively represented by male artists.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Leigh B. Block, 1985.206. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926, oil on canvas

New York – Night (Madison Avenue), 1926

Across a field of white and gray, several intersecting diagonal lines divide the canvas into triangles and other two-dimensional shapes. Despite using a limited palette and a spare arrangement of forms, O’Keeffe summoned a vision of the underlying geometries of city streets.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York – Night (Madison Avenue), 1926, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida, gift of Charles C. & Margaret Stevenson Henderson in memory of Hunt Henderson (1971), 1971.31. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York – Night (Madison Avenue), 1926, oil on canvas

Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931

In 1931, O’Keeffe declared in the New York Herald Tribune, “Bones and flowers run together in my mind when I think of the desert.” Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses boldly demonstrates the new subjects that the artist encountered during her first summers in New Mexico, including dried animal bones and fabric flowers used to adorn gravesites. Yet it is also a New York picture. O’Keeffe shipped “barrels and boxes of bones” back east to refer to as she painted Southwestern compositions like this one in her Shelton Hotel apartment. She positioned the skull at the front of the picture plane to enhance its monumentality—an approach she used across her work, including her New Yorks, florals, still lifes, and early paintings of the Southwest.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1947.712. © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, 1931, oil on canvas

Manhattan, 1932

Manhattan is the largest of O’Keeffe’s New Yorks. She composed it as the central panel of a triptych for a 1932 exhibition on mural painting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Its scale demonstrates the artist’s ambitions to claim the city as a key subject even after she began spending time in New Mexico. The painting exemplifies this period of transition: the floating red, pink, and blue flowers connect the stair-stepping, overlapping skyscraper forms with her novel investigations of Southwestern motifs such as the handcrafted decorative flowers she discovered there. Within the space of a single composition, she created connections across subject matter, form, and location.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Manhattan, 1932, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1995.3.1. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, New York.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Manhattan, 1932, oil on canvas

Chrysler Building from the Window of the Waldorf Astoria, New York, ca. 1960

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Chrysler Building from the Window of the Waldorf Astoria, New York, ca. 1960, gelatin silver print, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2006.6.1370. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), Chrysler Building from the Window of the Waldorf Astoria, New York, ca. 1960, gelatin silver print

New York, Night, 1928–1929

From a north-facing, upper-story vantage point in the Shelton Hotel, O’Keeffe glimpsed the newly constructed Beverly Hotel and created this glowing composition. She later recalled how the illuminated cityscape transformed before her eyes: “Lexington Avenue looked, in the night, like a very tall thin bottle with colored things going up and down inside it.” The dance of lights across the evening skyline and along the streets below is distinct among O’Keeffe’s city pictures, offering a glimpse of a densely populated and animated urban space.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York, Night, 1928–1929, oil on canvas, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Art Association, Thomas C. Woods Memorial, N-107.1958. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Photo by Bill Ganzel.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), New York, Night, 1928–1929, oil on canvas

City Night, 1926

Using bold and spare geometric forms in City Night, O’Keeffe captures the sensation of walking the streets of New York and encountering the rising skyline. Save for the soft and low moon, the composition centers the upward angularity of the immense, abstracted buildings. O’Keeffe presented the work at her solo exhibition at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery in 1927, a turning point in her career.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), City Night, 1926, oil on canvas, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, gift of funds from the Regis Corporation, Mr. and Mrs. W. John Driscoll, the Beim Foundation, the Larsen Fund, and by public subscription, 80.28. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887–1986), City Night, 1926, oil on canvas

This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Premier Exhibition Series Sponsor 

Premier Exhibition Series Supporters

Mr. Joseph H. Boland, Jr.
The Fay S. and W. Barrett Howell Family Foundation

Benefactor Exhibition Series Supporters

Robin and Hilton Howell

Ambassador Exhibition Series Supporters

Loomis Charitable Foundation
Mrs. Harriet H. Warren

Contributing Exhibition Series Supporters 

Farideh and Al Azadi
Mary and Neil Johnson
Mr. and Mrs. Baxter Jones
Megan and Garrett Langley
Margot and Danny McCaul
Wade A. Rakes II and Nicholas Miller
Belinda Stanley-Majors and Dwayne Majors

Generous support is also provided by  

Alfred and Adele Davis Exhibition Endowment Fund, Anne Cox Chambers Exhibition Fund, Barbara Stewart Exhibition Fund, Dorothy Smith Hopkins Exhibition Endowment Fund, Eleanor McDonald Storza Exhibition Endowment Fund, The Fay and Barrett Howell Exhibition Fund, Forward Arts Foundation Exhibition Endowment Fund, Helen S. Lanier Endowment Fund, John H. and Wilhelmina D. Harland Exhibition Endowment Fund, Katherine Murphy Riley Special Exhibition Endowment Fund, Margaretta Taylor Exhibition Fund, RJR Nabisco Exhibition Endowment Fund, and USI Insurance Services.