Before Georgia O’Keeffe painted her legendary Southwestern scenes, she spent years depicting a very different kind of landscape: the harsh and smoky urban canyons of NYC. After she married Stieglitz in 1924, they lived on the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel, what was then the tallest residential building in the world. The bird’s-eye view inspired a masterful series of experimentations with abstraction, perspective, and scale. But she was discouraged from exhibiting these angular, dark paintings, which the art world’s reigning men viewed as too masculine for a woman artist.
Now, a century later, these works are the focus of a dedicated exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) through Sept. 22, after which it will travel to the High Museum in Atlanta.
At hyperallergic.com
