Above It All

“I realize it’s unusual for an artist to want to work way up near the roof of a big hotel, in the heart of the roaring city, but I think that’s just what the artist of today needs for stimulus.” The words are those of Georgia O’Keeffe, stated in a 1928 interview, while the “big hotel” in the “roaring city” was the newly built Shelton, which straddled Lexington Avenue like a colossus on a tightrope. Modern skyscrapers—those that incorporated “wedding cake”–style setbacks to ensure that New York streets wouldn’t be starved of daylight—had only just begun to make their way uptown. The Empire State Building was still a couple years off, and you couldn’t live in it even after it opened. From her thirtieth-floor corner unit, O’Keeffe could look out onto the gridiron in three directions, though she seemed to have enjoyed the East River exposure the most.

The paintings that she produced in that high-rise short-term apartment—and in the others at the Shelton she and her husband, the photographer and curator Alfred Stieglitz, leased in the mid- to late 1920s—made up the bulk of Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks.” They capture the sweep-you-off-your-feet drama of living in the navel of modernity, though their quality is noticeably uneven. Constituting an underseen side of an overexposed oeuvre, the works were small in number, supplemented by a handful of Stieglitz pictures. Entire gallery walls contained only quips and quotes; some nothing at all.

At the entry, one was greeted by a giant portrait of O’Keeffe, the stolid doyenne in a floppy hat, taken by Stieglitz. Adult women wearing bows in their hair used it as a selfie backdrop. Despite the skyscraper imagery on the poster out front, the show, it quickly became clear, was not about architecture, New York, or modern life, but O’Keeffe herself. The initial gallery offered a smattering of her familiar botanicals—corn plants, leaves, and flowers known to me from childhood from prints hanging in my mother’s bathroom. Their inclusion didn’t so much play up the gendered discontinuity of the subject matter (“feminine” plant life versus the “masculine” world of architecture) as underline the presence of a Great Painter. The final rooms were organized according to the flimsy premise that O’Keeffe’s New York canvases “informed” the close-ups of orchids and wobbly adobe houses of her New Mexico period. Luckily, this detour was short.

The show’s professed themes—New York’s jazzy skyline and its impact on design, psychology, and other creative and intellectual spheres—were hardly developed at all. Wikipedia-quality insights added up to a familiar spiel: New York in the ’20s—when O’Keeffe and Stieglitz were alternating between swanky Midtown suites and summers in Lake George (whose natural setting she interpreted in dreamscapes of swirling blues and greens)—was the site of unprecedented feats of construction. People couldn’t believe their eyes as rundown row houses gave way, almost overnight, to tall stacks in the sky. Perceptions of the world, suddenly transposed thirty or forty floors up in the air, took on heroic and hopeful dimensions. Industrial modernity created a rapacious present and with it, new, severe forms, staggering scales, and technological innovation. The curators included a map pinpointing the seven brick-and-concrete block-fillers O’Keeffe either drew or painted, all within a few minutes’ walk of one another. The long-demolished Hotel Chatham, built in 1916 by Warren & Wetmore and glimpsed in twilight silhouette, exudes mystery, while the top mast of the Ritz Tower, built in 1926 by Emery Roth and Thomas Hastings, threatens to exceed O’Keeffe’s skinny frame. In one of the two photographs attributed to her, the Seagram Building looks like a menacing box grater. How did filigreed towers—many of them with neat, pointy hats—lead to Miesian minimalism? How did one vision of progress overtake another? “My New Yorks” didn’t bother to venture any answers.

When documenting architecture O’Keeffe eagerly played with its conventional modes of representation. Her and Stieglitz’s various accommodations in the Shelton Hotel afforded them a new perspective on both the city and their own artistic practice. Designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon, the Shelton was said to be the world’s tallest hotel at thirty-one stories. (That O’Keeffe was perhaps the first artist to ever live in such a skyscraper, as has been argued by the art historian Anna Chave, went unmentioned in the show.) O’Keeffe strips away Harmon’s gothic revival trimmings to produce a more immediate, streamlined form. In several early paintings, she tries to capture the scale of the building and the power it exerts over Lexington Avenue and, in particular, Forty-Eighth and Forth-Ninth Streets. Her first attempt, Shelton Hotel, NY, No 1 (1926) embraces a deadpan precisionism: a two-dimensional brown pile with rows and rows of little gray windows. It’s a painting in which the struggle to get something on canvas feels real. The Shelton with Sunspots, NY, which was finished the same year and focuses on a persistent O’Keeffe fascination, light—in this case, artificial light—is softer and more atmospheric. Steam rises from the ground as the building scatters the glare of the sun. There’s a reason Shelton with Sunspots was on the exhibition poster: It is the best example of O’Keeffe trying to reconcile a sensuousness she’ll later come to fully inhabit and the difficult, yet thrilling subject of architecture whose hardness resists it.

With works such as A Street and City Night (both 1926), O’Keeffe begins to omit the troublesome windows and cornices and focuses on the assurgent shards of the towers and the chasms between them. In Shell and Old Shingle VI (1926), neither the shell nor the old shingle is immediately apparent. Instead, O’Keeffe creates a form more akin to a calla lily or maybe a lighting sconce. One takeaway from the exhibition is that architecture, for O’Keeffe, approached something like geometric abstraction, something she never fully gave in to. Telling exceptions in this regard are the pair of 1930 studies, Black and White and Black and White and Blue, in which a white pyramidal wedge penetrates a smoky void and dark articulated curves, respectively. Formally derivative and texturally confused though they may be, their inclusion, unlike that of the cornstalks and cow skulls, was necessary: They show that her interest in buildings was part of a broader period of experimentation with form itself. That some of these études ultimately resulted in creative cul-de-sacs makes O’Keeffe more interesting, not less.

Also included were a series of woozy landscapes portraying the East River’s working waterfronts. Many are surprisingly gray and flat for a painter so well known for her use of color, and in this way bear a resemblance to the work of Charles Sheeler, whose dour precisionist pictures of the Ford Motor Company plant on the River Rouge are pointedly and famously emptied of workers. The dynamic lines and transparencies of Sheeler’s New York scenes cannot distract from their disinterest in the lives of everyday people. O’Keeffe seems to share his disinterest in labor or even heavy industry; unlike the visceral feeling brought to both subjects by the painters of the Ashcan School around the turn of the century, her chilly depictions of production and logistics revel in their mediated distance. Viewed from her sky-high hotel room, the East River is reduced to a pretext for her restrained urban pictorialism—billowing chimneys, flat rooflines, and, once again, the light on the water.

In Pink Dish and Green Leaves (1928–29), a delicately painted coupe glass rests on a windowsill with the East River, irradiated and muddled on the other side of the glass, providing a misty backdrop. Local industry appears as so many playing pieces in O’Keeffe’s formal games; here we feel most acutely the grasping ambition of the show’s namesake quote—“My New Yorks will turn the world over.” It’s like the city belongs to O’Keeffe and O’Keeffe alone. Stieglitz’s photographs are good counterparts here, as they evince the same qualities as her tableaux: mood, contrast, severity, shadows layered upon one another in elevated metropolitan vistas. But unlike Stieglitz, who takes equal interest in naked steel framing as he does gleaming façades, O’Keeffe seems to have quickly tired of smokestacks and cranes and returned once more to the challenge of painting individual buildings.

The works that stood out the most play up the luminosity of skyscrapers at night—light from distant cars (another novelty), noirish streaks of glare in the rain, individual windows painstakingly given their own specific hue of yellow or orange. My favorite of these is Radiator Building – Night, New York, painted in 1937. Its subject, built in 1924 by Raymond Hood and J. André Fouilhoux, is a quintessential art deco skyscraper. Clad in black and capped in glistening gold, it’s dramatic enough in the daytime. O’Keeffe situates it in velvety darkness: Windows twinkle; beams of blue light shoot into the sky as steam hisses from the chimney of a neighboring building. The architecture itself is triumphal, trophy-like, yet only as articulated as the artificial light allows. Most notable, however, is the red neon sign on the building to the left emblazoned “ALFRED STIEGLITZ.” The emotion of this painting is enthrallment, personal and artistic.

O’Keeffe’s New Yorks did not exist in an artistic vacuum; they live within an entire tradition of experimental art about modern architecture. Her softened lines and expressive skies look very different from the exacting, draftsman-like compositions of Sheeler, whose photographic practice she especially admired; her brooding portraits of buildings are empty, yet less lonely and alienated than those of Edward Hopper; meanwhile, their attentiveness to profile and silhouette recall the nocturnes of Hugh Ferriss. The verve of her most art deco work could be contrasted with the murals and graphic prints of the Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, who was living in both the same and a very different New York. Her Brooklyn Bridge (1949), less oneiric than Joseph Stella’s views of the same structure, share much in common with the photography of Margaret Bourke-White, who, taking after O’Keeffe, established a studio in one of the very few apartments in the Chrysler Building. In the accompanying catalogue, many of these comparisons—including a whole essay about Douglas—are made, perhaps to compensate for their omission in the show itself. Even just a handful of contemporaneous paintings or photographs would have greatly enriched the exhibition, a significant portion of which sadly was filler. The inclusion of pieces from the Lake George and New Mexico periods felt like an attempt to cram as many paintings by O’Keeffe in as possible to justify the price of admission. This is an unfortunate by-product of the museum industry—captive to the dull, roundly problematized but still bankable myth of the epochal, singular artist.

“My New Yorks” was best when it cautiously, perhaps inadvertently, subverted this presentation. One of the final paintings of the show, Manhattan (1932), finds O’Keeffe at a pivotal moment of her career. The study—one of the last times she would tarry with New York’s cityscape—was to be the centerpiece of a proposed triptych for Radio City Music Hall. The speculative mural led to a real commission to adorn a women’s powder room there, but after Stieglitz, who acted as O’Keeffe’s manager as much as her husband, disputed the fee, the job was canceled. Deprived of the opportunity to make work for the public, O’Keeffe retreated to the Southwest. What makes Manhattan so intriguing is how thrillingly unresolved it is: a jagged, almost constructivist take on a skyscraper motif punctuated by three of her signature flowers, crisply rendered. Again, there is the desire to reconcile the abstract with the concrete, the soft with the hard, the organic with the architectonic, the artist and the world in which she is living.