AFA 18th Anniversary

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 131 Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), Georgia O’Keeffe, 1920–22. Gelatin silver print. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, N.Mex.; Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (2003.1.6). Photo © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. O’Keeffe treated her head and body like a blank canvas—something to be covered in abstract shapes. Like other radical women in the 1920s, she also experimented with gender-bending clothing to challenge and confound society’s conventional sartorial codes for men and women. For this photo session, O’Keeffe wore a bowler- like black hat and wrapped herself in Stieglitz’s cape, hiding its prominent buttons and collar. Sensitive to her daring androgyny, Stieglitz photographed her from a low vantage point, highlighting her streamlined body and emphasizing the way her clothing crossed gender lines to be neither male nor female, or both. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), Manhattan, 1932. Oil on canvas, 84⅜ x 48¼ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation (1995.3.1). Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./ Art Resource, NY. In 1932, for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, some sixty contemporary artists were commissioned to create designs for a large public mural. Each was asked to submit a small mock-up of a mural and then scale up one part of the design. O’Keeffe’s mock-up was a triptych of modern New York cityscapes, claiming for herself a subject that had long been the province of male artists. This painting is her enlarged version of one piece of her overall design. It is a colorful composition of pink, mauve, red, black, and white skyscrapers, two wedges of blue sky, and, as her personal signature, three floating flowers.