In a Revelatory Georgia O’Keeffe Exhibition, Paintings of New York Unlock an Entire Oeuvre’s Mysteries

If things had gone differently, Georgia O’Keeffe would be famous for her paintings of skyscrapers, not her pictures of flowers. Starting in 1925, she began painting tall, monolith-like structures in cities devoid of people and cars.

These strange, entrancing pictures capture a New York remade by modernity—and act as some of the most crucial documents of that transformation. What a shame it is that these canvases do not act as her calling card.

For that, we have O’Keeffe’s husband, the artist Alfred Stieglitz, to thank. O’Keeffe wanted to hang her paintings of skyscrapers—“my New Yorks,” she called them—in a 1925 group show at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery.

He shot that idea down, and instead pushed her to present her landscapes, which contain few of the sharp, hard forms seen in the New York paintings. But O’Keeffe knew she was onto something, and she was vindicated the next year, when she succeeded in exhibiting one of her New Yorks. It sold for $6,000, hardly anything to sneeze at during her day