Views of the City: 1910s – 1940s

November 14, 2000 - March 14, 2001

During the first half of the 20th century, America became the most powerful nation in the world, and the visual manifestation of this power was its cities—most specifically, the dramatically changing skyline of New York. This urban landscape of bridges, factories, piers, and skyscrapers became a symbol of America's technological ingenuity and prowess, and thus the metropolis—especially its relentless growth skyward—became a favorite subject for many artists.

Georgia O'Keeffe lived in New York on and off from 1907 until 1949, and she was keenly aware of the possibilities the city offered as subject matter. This exhibition, organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, presents eight of the artist's New York works, along with more than 60 additional interpretations of the city and its environs by 28 of her contemporaries.

One of O'Keeffe's first direct responses to the city was the highly abstract Blue Lines, 1916, whose forms are a distillation of the vertical and diagonal lines of buildings as she saw them from her room. This watercolor was first shown in 1917 by modern art champion Alfred Stieglitz at his lower Fifth Avenue gallery, 291. It was the culmination of a series of studies that includes Black Lines, 1916, exhibited in Views of the City. But although O'Keeffe officially took up residence in New York in 1918, it was not until the mid-1920s that the subject matter of the city again became an important component of her imagery.

As O'Keeffe explained in an interview with Katharine Kuh, published in 1960 in The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists: "In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes seemed to be going up overnight in New York. . . . I saw a sky shape near the Chatham Hotel. . . . It was the building that made this fine shape, so I . . . painted it." The result was New York Street with Moon, 1925 [upper right], the first of approximately 40 sketches, drawings, and paintings of New York that she completed between 1925 and 1949.

It's important to this aspect of O'Keeffe's work that she and Stieglitz (by then her husband) began living in 1925 in the recently completed Shelton Hotel on Lexington Avenue at 49th Street (now the New York Marriott East Side), and the building and the views from its upper floors often inspired their work. Among the Shelton-related O'Keeffes in the exhibition are The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., 1926; and East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel, 1928. Another New York painting included here, A Street, 1926, depicts an unidentifiable but typical New York "cavern." With New York–Night, 1926, O'Keeffe again responds to the city through abstraction.

After 1918, O'Keeffe lived in New York at least part of each year until 1949, three years after Stieglitz's death, when she made New Mexico her permanent home. Also included in the exhibition are her two last city pictures, a charcoal drawing and an oil painting both titled Brooklyn Bridge, 1949, which many have interpreted as farewells to the city and to Stieglitz. Although O'Keeffe always claimed to prefer the vast skies, vistas, and solitude of the American Southwest to the confining, towering buildings and frenetic pace of New York, her studies of the city are among the most important of her works and, in fact, of any works of their period using New York as subject matter.

More broadly, Views of the City provided a means of assessing how a number of other artists responded to the dramatic changes that transformed New York in the first half of the century. Loaned from 35 public and private collections, the works document responses to the city by well-known figures (like Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Joseph Stella, and Max Weber), and by artists important to the period but now less celebrated (like Berenice Abbott, Howard Cook, Elsie Driggs, Paul Grotz, Samuel Halpert, Jan Matulka, and Niles Spencer). Each artist responded in a very personal way to the dynamics of the city's ever-changing character, and so the exhibition as a whole demonstrates both a range of interpretations of the city and the range of styles that were prevalent in America in the first half of the 20th century.

Many of these paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs (and a single three-dimensional work) were inspired by architectural structures?many of them identifiable, such as the New Yorker, Murray Hill, and Shelton hotels, the Chrysler Building, the Flatiron Building, and the Manhattan, George Washington, and Queensborough bridges. Of interest to many artists, including O'Keeffe, was the Brooklyn Bridge. At its completion in 1883, it was the largest suspension bridge in the world, and linked the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan by spanning the East River with thin roadways supported only by steel cables slung from massive stone towers. The bridge symbolized the beginning of the new technological era that this exhibition documents. Among the 15 studies of the Brooklyn Bridge included are: Alvin Langdon Coburn'sBrooklyn Bridge, 1912; Karl Struss's Vanishing Point II: Brooklyn Bridge from the New York Side, 1912; John Marin's Lower Manhattan, 1920; Joseph Stella's American Landscape, 1929; and Max Weber's Brooklyn Bridge, 1911.

The Museum is grateful to the many individuals and institutions who have generously loaned works from their collections. The exhibition was made possible by The Burnett Foundation. It was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Office of Cultural Affairs; and by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers' Tax.