Forget The Flowers

"Georgia O'Keeffe: Architecture"
Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit
Opening Sept. 11

Forget the flowers — Georgia O’Keeffe sure liked her patio door, as is evident in the latest exhibit opening today at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The exhibit “Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture” showcases the painter’s works depicting the built environment that influenced her life between the 1920s and 1960s. The nearly 40 paintings are primarily divided into the rural structures of Upstate New York, the burgeoning skyscrapers of New York City and the adobe architecture of New Mexico.

The styles of the paintings are bold, geometric and almost cartoonish in their simplicity, with lines and shapes taking precedence over details. Many of the subjects are ordinary barns, homes and buildings. Her depictions convey a fondness for them, finding something special in the mundane – especially that patio door.

Georgia O'Keeffe with the beloved patio door

The doors are not my favorite paintings in the exhibit. They are the most abstract of the collection — literally a series of black rectangles amid solid colors and stripes. Some of these look like windows, based on their location within the lines.

Abstract paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe's beloved patio door; photo courtesy of the DIA

While the door doesn’t fascinate me, O’Keeffe’s fascination with the door does. She loved this door so much, she bought the house it was attached to and then painted it repeatedly. It's an opportunity to understand the world through the eyes of a great artist - eyes that sought to capture something below the surface by examining her subjects from different angles and in different lights, which was clear in all the works in the exhibit.

My favorites in the collection were depictions of the skyscrapers of New York City in the 1920s. That part of the collection reminded me of a smaller exhibit I saw at the Detroit Institute of Arts years ago showing work that captured the public’s awe, fear and fascination with the skyscrapers as they were being introduced throughout the country. I found this compelling, since skyscrapers are something we take for granted in modern-day cities; it’s remarkable to think what it would have been like for people seeing those giants popping up around them for the first time.

O’Keeffe’s work captures skyscrapers from all different perspectives: in daylight, in moonlight, from the ground up and from her high-rise apartment looking below at her view of the East River. One that stood out was “New York, Night,” which draws attention to the artificial light from within the buildings and the streets themselves, capturing an entirely different aspect of how these massive structures reshaped their surrounding landscapes.

The exhibit also includes two immersive video projections to help visitors experience O’Keeffe’s vision. The first is a projection of the modern-day view from O’Keeffe’s former high-rise perspective over the East River; the second is a 360-degree video projection of the open patio of her New Mexico home where she liked to paint. Both show how the artist’s vision of the same subject varied throughout the day, depending on the light, and the one of New York City offers insight into how much the city has developed over the past 100 years.