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 is celebrating a lesser-known subject close to the artist’s heart: New York City.

Titled “My New Yorks,” the show features roughly 100 items—including paintings, photographs, pastels, drawings and letters—and examines how the city shaped O’Keeffe’s artistic career. Currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, it will move to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in October.

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

In 1924, about six years after relocating to New York, O’Keeffe moved into 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 featuring bright hues, her depictions of New York are dimmer and moodier. She was fond of these works—“My New Yorks would turn the world over,” she once said—but she didn’t 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, per the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. “They told me to ‘leave New York to the men.’ I was furious!”

Stieglitz was among the men who held this opinion, believing the urban landscapes to be too masculine of a subject for O’Keeffe.

“He was obviously instrumental in promoting her career, but he certainly had a particular view of what that career should be,” Sarah Kelly Oehler, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, tells Hyperallergic’s Isabella Segalovich. “There was this expectation that she would bring a certain femininity to her painting that the urban paintings seem to contradict.”

Later, when O’Keeffe created her famous floral paintings, she was still thinking about the tall buildings of New York City. The urban expanses inspired her bold, brilliant depictions of flowers, often painted on large-scale canvases. “I’ll make them big, like the huge buildings going up. People will be startled; they will have to look at them,” O’Keeffe once said of her florals, per the Art Newspaper’s Ruth Lopez.

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

“Glowing skyscraper is hung adjacent to twisty dead tree, moody mesa, cow skull, sunset cross, desert abstraction, multistory adobe houses. Nearby is the Brooklyn Bridge,” writes Waxman. “The surprise may be that O’Keeffe painted urban scenes at all, but the true revelation is how much sense her subjects make together.”

She adds: “The show is tremendous, and anyone who cares anything about Modern painting will need to see it.”

“My New Yorks” is on display 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.

Julia Binswanger | READ MORE

Julia Binswanger is a freelance arts and culture reporter based in Chicago. Her work has been featured in WBEZ, Chicago magazine, Rebellious magazine and PC magazine.