Gallery • 2 Photos

City Night, 1926 Georgia O’Keeffe 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

After being dismissed as too masculine for a woman, American modernist and feminist breaks down gender barriers in her installation at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s art, which is included in her collection “My New York,” has reached the masses and paved the way for female artists today. 

“My New York” showed how the city influenced a less recognizable period of O’Keeffe’s life and career. The exhibit holds paintings, photographs, pastels, drawings, and letters of New York’s skyscrapers.

The online website, Hyperallergic, published “York Paintings Now on View in Chicago” by Isabella Segalovich, a Philadelphia-based artist, designer, writer, and TikToker. She wrote about how NY institutions and male artists overlooked O’Keeffe’s “My New Yorks,” which finally got an exhibition a century later.

“It is particularly surprising that it’s taken so many decades for these paintings to get a proper showing,” Segalovich said. “Given how popular they were in their own time.”

O’Keeffe was living in the Shelton Hotel, the tallest residence skyscraper in the world when it opened in 1924, on the thirtieth floor when inspiration struck. With the view of New York City, the artist was inspired to paint cityscapes.

Her paintings featured duskier and moodier, a change from her bright colors. Either way, she believed it would turn the world over. As an alternative, some of the other artists in the art world didn’t give their support.

“The men decided they didn’t want me to paint New York,” O’Keeffe said. “They told me to ‘leave New York to the men.’ I was furious.”

Alfred Stieglitz, her late husband and photographer, promoted her career, drawing attention to the femininity in her work, contrary to what she had been known for. 

“Blue and Green Music” is one artwork that O’Keeffe’s husband supported. The painting is a contrast of hard and soft edges to take the rhythm and movement of music; described as “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.”

Ruth Lopez, a writer for The Art Newspaper, published “The Big Review: Chicago exhibition captures Georgia O’Keeffe’s love of Cityscapes” of her “My New Yorks” upbringing how this didn’t stop O’Keeffe from displaying “New York Street with Moon”, her first major cityscape art.

“The painting depicts a dusk view of a corner of a building,” Lopez said, “with a streetlight’s aura in dynamic relationship with the moon and the red glow of a stop light.”

It sold immediately, prompting viewers to show support for her cityscape paintings. 

“I will show them big.” O’Keeffe said, “Like the buildings going up. People will be startled; they will have to look at them.”

This created her famous floral paintings. Thinking of the tall buildings inspired her for the boldness of flowers on large-scale canvases. The floral paintings showed how her cityscapes could fit.

Julia Binswanger, freelance arts and culture reporter, shared “Georgia O’Keeffe’s Breathtaking New York City Paintings Are Finally Getting the Attention They Deserve” of the artist’s cityscape and backlash of “My New Yorks” being too masculine, but her remarks only influenced O’Keeffe’s floral art, her iconic style on Smithsonian Magazine.

“The exhibition (Art Institute of Chicago) helps visitors see how O’Keeffe’s cityscapes fit into the context of her large oeuvre,” Binswanger said. “According to the Chicago Tribune’s Lori Waxman, some of the gallery arrangements mimic the way O’Keeffe presented her works during her lifetime.”