{"id":884670,"date":"2026-09-08T17:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T17:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/884670\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T17:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T17:08:09","slug":"skyscrapers-and-smokestacks-the-grittier-side-of-georgia-okeeffe-georgia-okeeffe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/884670\/","title":{"rendered":"Skyscrapers and smokestacks: the grittier side of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe | Georgia O’Keeffe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe 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 \u2013 and yet that is exactly what is centered in Georgia O\u2019Keeffe: Architecture<\/a>, a new show at the Detroit Institute of Arts (Dia).<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to tell a new story about an artist who is so familiar,\u201d said curator Ben Colman, who oversaw this collection of close to 40 works from the famed artist. \u201cWe can take a fresh look at works that O\u2019Keeffe always considered essential and celebrate them in the way she wanted to.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea for the show emerged from O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s 1932 work Stables, which is the only piece on exhibition that is in the Dia\u2019s collection. It\u2019s a charmingly tranquil side view of the titular construct, dominated by bright green, rich burgundy and subtly textured eggshell white, made by O\u2019Keeffe 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.<\/p>\n

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Stables, 1932. Photograph: The Detroit Institute of Arts\/\u00a9 2026 The Georgia O\u2019Keeffe Foundation\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York<\/p>\n

Colman explained that Stables gave him the inspiration to look at O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s work with fresh eyes and seek out other ways of exploring her subtle textures and studies in pure color. \u201cStables is very precise in its use of geometry, and for many people who know O\u2019Keeffe also a bit unexpected,\u201d said Colman.<\/p>\n

With his eyes attuned to the geometries of Stables, Colman began to seek out more and more of O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s architectural works. Among other things, this search let him put fresh eyes on to the artist\u2019s New York City pieces, many of which she made from the vantage of her apartment window; she and her husband Alfred Stieglitz 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. \u201cIt was likely the tallest residential building in the world at the time,\u201d said Colman.<\/p>\n

This high vantage let O\u2019Keeffe 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\u2019s quite far from the works O\u2019Keeffe is famous for, but according to Colman, in these pieces she\u2019s 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\u2019s adobes in subsequent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe tried very hard to represent the spirit and character of these places,\u201d said Colman. \u201cSo in my mind it connects an adobe church in New Mexico with a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe: Architecture also offers viewers a most remarkable depiction of the Brooklyn Bridge; verging on religious in its adoration of a beloved icon, it was made by the artist in 1949 as a sort of swan song as she was on her way out of New York. The piece is dominated by a flattened view of the bridge\u2019s famous arches, bringing to mind the shapes of stained glass windows, framing gracefully swooping renditions of the bridge\u2019s suspending cables. It neatly defamiliarizes the bridge, toying with abstraction while offering much to anchor the eye in reality.<\/p>\n

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Brooklyn Bridge, 1949. Photograph: Brooklyn Museum\/\u00a9 2026 The Georgia O\u2019Keeffe Foundation\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a deeply personal painting,\u201d said Colman, \u201cdocumenting a moment of transition for O\u2019Keeffe. It places our point of view into a moment of departure, and there\u2019s a beautiful, poetic quality to how she uses light and variations of color, almost like looking through a stained glass window.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another noteworthy aspect of Georgia O\u2019Keeffe: Architecture is that it brings together multiple depictions of a humble patio door, a beloved part of the artist\u2019s home in Abiquiu, New Mexico. O\u2019Keeffe 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.<\/p>\n

The patio door paintings are a part of a suite of nearly abstract works centered around doors that O\u2019Keeffe made during the 1940s and 50s, remarkable for the variety of colors that she brings to these simple, repeating forms. \u201cOnce she saw this patio door,\u201d said Colman, \u201cO\u2019Keeffe decided that it was something that she needed to live with. She was inspired to paint it dozens of times, and it\u2019s part of an extraordinary series of works, some of the most abstract in her career, but also so precisely anchored and placed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Placing her alongside contemporaries such as Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko, these pieces are color studies formed out of minimalistic geometries, generally showing rectangles of color with minimal, if any, perspective. After viewing one of the patio door paintings, Martin wrote to O\u2019Keeffe: \u201cIt was a joyous experience and afterwards I knew more about the possibility of human response.\u201d<\/p>\n

Georgia O\u2019Keeffe, Black Door with Red, 1954. Photograph: Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk\/\u00a9 The Georgia O\u2019Keeffe Museum\/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York<\/p>\n

Immersive digital experiences offered at the exhibition let audiences actually feel what it\u2019s like to be in some of the places that O\u2019Keeffe inhabited while painting \u2013 the upper floors of the Shelton hotel and her beloved patio in Abiquiu. They offer a chance to slow down and let one\u2019s senses take charge, as museum-goers take their shot at attending to the subtle details of place that O\u2019Keeffe drank in as she attempted to capture the pure essence of a location.<\/p>\n

Colman is excited to be bringing O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s architectural works to light, a part of her career that is built on an entire social network of architects and designers that she had deep personal and creative relationships with. In his telling, it\u2019s a story that has long resided in the archives, and now is the time to give it greater prominence in a celebrated artist\u2019s career. \u201cIt\u2019s a really exciting story,\u201d he said, \u201cto see these rich connections that inspired her to engage with the built environment for many years. I think visitors will be surprised that these works exist at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Georgia O\u2019Keeffe is celebrated for her ethereal depictions of flowers, sunlight, landscapes and animal bones, their gracefully swooping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":884671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":["post-884670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/884671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}