Studying “The Shelton with Sunspots”
Image by Thomas Cizauskas
The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. (1926)
oil on canvas
— Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986)
on loan from The Art Institute of Chicago.
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” exhibition at…
High Museum of Art
City of Atlanta (Midtown), Georgia, USA.
9 February 2025.
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▶ Rejection
On 3 June 2025, the administrator for the Flickr group "Three’s company / A trois, c’est mieux !" rejected this photo for NOT displaying "three people (human beings) together". Ridiculous.
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▶ About the painting
☞ “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
— Georgia O’Keeffe.
☞ “This blazing canvas, which captures a fleeting juxtaposition of the natural and the human-built environments, was inspired by O’Keeffe’s perception of nature’s power even in an urban setting. She later recalled, ‘I went out one morning to look at [the Shelton Hotel] and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky.’ The painting boldly exemplifies O’Keeffe’s response to the novel structure of the skyscraper, a subject almost exclusively represented by male artists.”
— museum plaque
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▶ About the exhibition:
(October 25, 2024 – February 16, 2025)
‘I had never lived up so high before and was so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York,’ recalled Georgia O’Keeffe late in life. In 1924 the artist and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, moved into the Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential skyscraper. The hotel’s stunning views inspired O’Keeffe to explore midtown Manhattan’s soaring geometries: she experimented across media and scale and with various subjects, forms, and perspectives during an energetic five-year period beginning in 1925. Through these works, which she called ‘my New Yorks,’ she investigated the dynamic potential of the cityscape, often depicting it in dialogue with nature to represent her personal perceptions of the built environment.
This exhibition is the first to critically examine O’Keeffe’s paintings, drawings, and pastels of urban landscapes while situating them in the diverse context of her other compositions of the 1920s and early 1930s. The exhibition establishes these works not as outliers or as anomalous to her practice but rather as entirely integral to her modernist investigation in the 1920s—abstractions and still lifes made at Lake George in upstate New York and beyond and works made in the Southwest beginning in 1929. O’Keeffe’s ‘New Yorks’ are essential to understanding how she became the artist we know today.”
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▶ Photo —and Pic(k) of the Week— by: YFGF.
▶ For a larger image, type ‘L’ (without the quotation marks).
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▶ Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10 II.
— Lens: Lumix G 20/F1.7 II.
— Edit: Photoshop Elements 15, Nik Collection (2016).
▶ Commercial use requires explicit permission, as per Creative Commons.
