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Book

Georgia O'Keeffe : "my New Yorks"

Call Number

  • 759.13 O413G (CEN)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New Haven, CT ; London [England] : distributed by Yale University Press

Physical Description

215 pages : illustrations (chiefly color), black and white portraits ; 32 x 24 cm

Summary

"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."--

"A revelatory study of Georgia O'Keeffe's New York paintings of the late 1920s and their deep significance within the artist's development. In 1924 Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) first moved to the Shelton Hotel in New York with her husband, the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. The Shelton was Manhattan's earliest residential skyscraper, and its dizzying heights inspired O'Keeffe to create a powerful series of approximately twenty-five paintings and numerous drawings over a span of about five years. She called these 'my New Yorks,' and they overwhelmingly consist of two types of compositions: sprawling observations looking down onto the city and humbling views directed up at the newly built urban monoliths. Exploring the New York skyline, O'Keeffe resisted the approach of contemporaries such as Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand--who celebrated New York as a streamlined, impersonal series of geometric canyons--and instead portrayed it as an amalgamation of the organic and the inorganic, the natural and the constructed. Only in this way could she express New York (in her words) 'as it is felt.' Reshaping our understanding of this pivotal yet underappreciated period in O'Keeffe's storied career, this publication situates the New York paintings within the artist's larger oeuvre and examines how these works reflect narratives of built environments, racialized space, and the politics of place."--

Notes

"Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by the Art Institute of Chicago [in Chicago, Illinois], on view from June 2 to September 22, 2024, and at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta [Georgia], October 25, 2024, to February 16, 2025"--Title page verso.

Contents

  • Foreword
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note to the Reader
  • Turning the World Over : Georgia O'Keeffe Paints Manhattan / Tall Buildings and Tiny Shells : Georgia O'Keeffe, New York, and the Scale of Things / O'Keeffe and the "City of Amnesia" : US Landscape Painting and Indigenous Erasure / Impossible Ideas : Seeing the City with Georgia O'Keeffe and Aaron Douglas / (Re)framing the View / Plates
  • List of Plates
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index.

Subjects