Unpacking the lesser-known urban landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe, this exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta reveals a multifaceted artist who defied conventions and pushed boundaries.
Incompleteness and the City: Unpacking Georgia O’Keeffe’s Urban Landscapes
The widespread understanding of Georgia O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is incomplete. The great modernist abstractionist is, rightfully so, galvanized as a painter of abstract floral compositions. Closely cropped compositions of flora, rendered in hard-edged oil paint or watercolor, are the titular artworks associated with the artist’s name. They are remarkable, but much like the compositions themselves, they do not show the artist in her entirety.
Beyond the Florals: O’Keeffe’s Urban Landscapes
Beyond her flora paintings, O’Keeffe has a prolific and prodigious career in landscape and cityscape painting—the subject of “Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks” now on at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. This exhibition functions as a kind of retrospective, which is to say, the artworks proceed chronologically through a five-year span of O’Keeffe’s life and career.
Abstraction and Discernability
Despite O’Keeffe’s frequent use of the still-life, abstraction is the core of her practice. This phenomenon is an approach that should be applied to O’Keeffe herself, as exemplified by the first artwork encountered in this exhibition: New York Street with Moon (1925). One of many cityscapes in the High’s show, it debuted in a group exhibition organized by Alfred Stieglitz and his cohort. While O’Keeffe was to be included, Stieglitz was outspoken that she present one of her floral paintings, believing that she should “leave paintings of the city to the men.” In an admirable moment of defiance, O’Keeffe refused to submit to Stieglitz’s opinions and chose to exhibit New York Street with Moon.
The Futility of Definition
Scrutiny leads not to greater definition and understanding but a collapse of them. Abstraction is not an intentional step into undefinition but an eventuality of close examination. O’Keeffe’s defiance of Stieglitz and the High Museum’s exhibition unravel the widespread (mis)understanding of the artist’s oeuvre, proving the futility of attempting to rigidly define any one subject.
A New Perspective
Focusing on a seemingly erroneous chapter in O’Keeffe’s life, this exhibition presents masterful artworks that are interrelated but markedly separate from her more popular artworks. As this exhibition shows, it is within these deviations and miscellanea that often the most fruitful work can be found, if only preconceived notions can be dispelled.
“Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks” is on view at the High Museum of Art through February 16, 2025.
