The former Shelton Hotel

Most of us are familiar with Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings from New Mexico, those abstract paintings of flowers, skeletons and soft curves sometimes appearing to overflow the canvas. Trained in art school to copy what she saw, she took to heart the suggestions of one art teacher who told her to develop her own style and not merely copy. At the urging of her gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who was to be her husband, she moved from Texas, giving up her teaching position, to live in New York.  There she lived and painted from 1918 until 1949 when she moved to New Mexico two years after her husband’s death.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, a power couple in the New York art scene, lived in the Shelton Hotel, the tallest and most luxurious residential building in the United States, where she was inspired by the city rising before her. Looking at the panorama of the city from high atop the Shelton, she writes: “I had never lived so high before and so excited that I began talking about trying to paint New York.” And paint New York skyscrapers she did with its sharp angles but softened by the inclusion of the natural environment;  painting not what she saw but what she felt as in The Shelton with Sunspots where the man-made is softened by the natural glow of the reflection of sunlight on the building.

As much as they loved living in New York City they loved the country and spent part of the year living in New York’s Lake George. In 1929 she added New Mexico to her itinerant lifestyle where she was inspired by the desert landscape.

Many of her paintings of skeletons in the desert settings were not painted in New Mexico. Georgia O’Keeffe shipped some skeletons she found to New York painting them here, such as this one titled Cows’s skull with Calico Roses. 

In this the most populous city in the country not a single person is included in Georgia O’Keeffe’s “My New Yorks” paintings. She sometimes hinted at life in the buildings by keeping some of the windows illuminated while others are dark as in New York Nights.

On this seven mile walk, Georgia O’Keeffe’s “My New Yorks,” many of the buildings and structures she painted in the early 20th century can still be identified and enjoyed today. Get to know this New York that Georgia O’Keeffe imagined.