Painting Big—O'Keeffe's Manhattan

Abstract

In 1995 the directors of the Georgia O’Keeff e Foundation gave the Smithsonian American Art Museum a striking painting entitled Manhattan. Created by O’Keeff e in 1932, it is loud, large, and the only canvas of New York skyscrapers that she or any other modernist seems to have painted with blossoms fl oating on its surface. Most scholars knew the work only as a black-and-white reproduction and believed Manhattan to be lost or destroyed. But all along it had remained in O’Keeff e’s personal collection and only came to light when her estate was available to study.1 Th e Museum of Modern Art in New York had commissioned the painting for a 1932 exhibition, Murals by American Painters and Photographers. In an eff ort to help modern artists obtain mural commissions, the museum asked sixty-fi ve painters and photographers to work up designs for wall-sized decorations. Th e painters were each asked to create a twenty-by-forty-eight-inch mockup of a hypothetical mural. Th ey were then invited to develop one piece of the overall design into a painting seven feet high by four feet wide. Th e installation featured the large panel by each artist hanging above the much smaller design of the whole mural. Artists had but six weeks to prepare their submissions. Like most of the painters, O’Keeff e came up with a triptych, a trio of equally sized panels. Each featured a diff erent New York cityscape. She enlarged the middle panel into the more fi nished painting, and that is the work now at SAAM.2 Th e painting documents Georgia O’Keeff e’s unfulfi lled desire in the late 1920s and 1930s to secure a mural commission. During a period when murals were routinely being commissioned for public buildings—especially by the government—she wanted to participate. “I have such a desire to paint something for a particular place—and paint it big,” she wrote to a friend in 1929.3 On the heels of the Museum of Modern Art’s mural exhibition (and perhaps because of it), O’Keeff e did receive a commission to paint a mural in the Ladies’ Powder Room at Rockefeller Center, but the design was to be of fl owers rather than skyscrapers. Th e story is well known: after a host of problems, many of them between O’Keeff e and Stieglitz, she withdrew, and the commission ultimately went to Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Th en in 1936, when she let it be known that she would like to paint a mural for the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts, the director there rejected the idea. O’Keeff e’s only “big” painting in the 1930s other than Manhattan was commissioned by Elizabeth Arden. Th at six-by-seven-foot canvas of jimsonweed fl owers decorated the Elizabeth Arden Gymnasium Moderne on Fifth Avenue and is today in the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.4 Much later, in the 1950s, when the New York School painters were working on a large scale, O’Keeff e began to increase the size of many of her paintings, working often with four-by-sevenfoot canvases. In 1965, when she was seventy-eight years old, she made her decadeslong dream come true. Taking matters into her own hands, she created her biggest painting ever, Sky above Clouds IV, an eight-by-twenty-four-foot portrait of clouds that now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. In composing Manhattan, O’Keeff e pushed her own stylistic envelope. Not only is the canvas twice as large as any of her other cityscapes, she also used an unconventional palette.5 Pitting pink against red, mauve against blue, black against white, the painting off ers up a jazz-age brashness and surface tempo we seldom see in her work. O’Keeff e also infused the piece with cubist and futurist rhetoric, two vocabularies she rarely engaged as methodically as she does here. She formulated the central skyscrapers