Georgia O’Keeffe is celebrated for her ethereal depictions of flowers, sunlight, landscapes and animal bones, their gracefully swooping forms dripping with organic curves and seemingly on the verge of melting before our eyes. Such an approach would seem to be quite at odds with the firm, straight lines of farmhouses and barns, to say nothing of the electrified skyscrapers of New York City – and yet that is exactly what is centered in the Detroit Institute of Arts’s new show Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture. It’s a charmingly tranquil side view of the titular construct, dominated by bright green, rich burgundy and subtly textured eggshell white, made by O’Keeffe during one of her many travels through the rurals of upstate New York and far-out parts of eastern Quebec.
The artist regularly adventured through these rough and remote lands before deciding to leave New York City and live full-time in New Mexico in 1949. Coleman explained that Stables gave him the inspiration to look at O’Keeffe’s work with fresh eyes and seek out other ways of exploring her subtle textures and studies in pure color. With his eyes attuned to the geometries of Stables, Coleman began to seek out more and more of O’Keeffe’s architectural works.
Among other things, this search let him put fresh eyes onto the artist’s New York City pieces, many of which she made from the vantage of her apartment window; she and her husband Alfred Steiglitz started on the 11th floor of the Shelton Hotel in 1926, then moved up to the 28th, and finally the 30th floor out of 31. This high vantage let O’Keeffe create unprecedented cityscapes, among them a series of works depicting the gritty urban industrial life surrounding the East River. With smokestacks billowing out pollution and endless rows of nondescript urban buildings, it’s quite far from the works O’Keeffe is famous for, but according to Coleman, in these pieces she’s honing her ability to represent the feeling of a place by the buildings that fill it, a talent that she would famously apply to New Mexico’s adobes in subsequent years.
The piece is dominated by a flattened view of the bridge’s famous arches, bringing to mind the shapes of stained glass windows, framing gracefully swooping renditions of the bridge’s suspending cables. It neatly defamiliarizes the bridge, toying with abstraction while offering much to anchor the eye in reality. It places our point of view into a moment of departure, and there’s a beautiful, poetic quality to how she uses light and variations of color, almost like looking through a stained glass window.” Another noteworthy aspect of Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture is that it brings together multiple depictions of a humble patio door, a beloved part of the artist’s home in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
O’Keeffe bought the house in 1945, taking four whole years to restore it from the ruined state that she found it in. It became her permanent home in 1949, and she resided there until 1984, just two years before her death. The patio door paintings are a part of a suite of nearly abstract works centered around doors that O’Keeffe made during the 1940s and 50s, remarkable for the variety of colors that she brings to these simple, repeating forms.
She was inspired to paint it dozens of times, and it’s part of an extraordinary series of works, some of the most abstract in her career, but also so precisely anchored and placed.” Placing her alongside contemporaries such as Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko, these pieces are color studies formed out of minimistic geometries, generally showing rectangles of color with minimal, if any, perspective. After viewing one of the patio door paintings, Martin wrote to O’Keeffe: “It was a joyous experience and afterwards I knew more about the possibility of human response.” Immersive digital experiences offered at the exhibition let audiences actually feel what it’s like to be in some of the places that O’Keeffe inhabited while painting – the upper floors of the Shelton Hotel and her beloved patio in Abiquiu. They offer a chance to slow down and let one’s senses take charge, as museumgoers take their shot at attending to the subtle details of place that O’Keeffe drank in as she attempted to capture the pure essence of a location.
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