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About This Artwork
Georgia O'Keeffe
American, 1887-1986The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.1926
Oil on canvas
© 2013 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
123.2 x 76.8 cm (48 1/2 x 30 1/4 in.)
Signed, titled, and dated on label on reverse
Gift of Leigh B. Block, 1985.206In 1925 Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, moved to the 30th floor of the Shelton Hotel in New York, then the tallest hotel in the world. Inspired by the view, O’Keeffe painted a series of cityscapes celebrating the skyscraper. In The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y., she depicted a scene she recalled as an “optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky.” She used dramatic lighting to enhance the building’s mystique, expressing the allure this modern architectural form held for early-20th-century Americans.
— Permanent collection label
Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories
Exhibition History
New York, The Intimate Gallery, 1927, as The Shelton, New York No. II.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Georgia O’Keeffe, October 8-November 29, 1970, no. 49, cat. by Lloyd Goodrich and Doris Bry; traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, January 1-February 7, 1971; San Francisco Museum of Art, March 15-April 30, 1971.
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Works by Living Artists From the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Leigh B. Block, February 11-April 9, 1978, no. 1.
The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., Two Lives: O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, December 12, 1992-April 4, 1993, traveled to IBM Gallery of Science and Arts, New York, April 27-June 26, 1993, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, July 17-September 12, 1993, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 2-December 5, 1993. (Washington D.C., New York, and Minneapolis only).
Nationalgalerie Berlin, George Grosz: Berlin-New York, December 21, 1994-April 17, 1995, no. 111.3; traveled to Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, May 6-July 30, 1995.
Santa Fe, Georgia O’Keefe Museum, Views of the City: 1910s-1940s, November 14, 2000-March 14, 2001.
Kunsthaus Zurich, Georgia O'Keeffe, October 23, 2003-February 1, 2004.
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, October 28, 2011-January 22, 2012; traveled to Dallas Museum of Art, February 24-May 27, 2012; Cleveland Museum of Art, July 1-September 16, 2012.Publication History
Georgia O’Keeffe (New York Press, A Studio Book, 1976), no. 18
Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “The Inland Steel Building and Its Art,” Art In America (Winter 1957-1958), p. 25.
Susan F. Cohn, “An Analysis of Selected Works by Georgia O’Keeffe and a Production of Drawings by the Researcher Relating to the Work of the Artists Studied,” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1974), pp. 93-95, 98- 105
Art Institute of Chicago Mosaic, September/October 1985, p. 8 ill.
Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keefe: Catalogue Raisonné Volume One (New Haven and London: Yale University Press/ National Gallery of Art/the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 1999), no. 527.
“A Vibrant New York as O’Keeffe Framework,” The Santa Fe New Mexican, Wednesday, November 22, 2000, ill.
“Exhibition Follows rise of American Artistic Vision,” The Sunday Journal, Albuquerque, November 26, 2000, p. F3, ill.
“Group Show Views Of The City: 1910s-1940s,” THE Magazine, December/January, 2000, p. 57 ill.
“A Stieglitz View of the City,” Venue North-Journal North, Friday, November 17, 2000, p. 6 ill.
Judith A. Barter, “Designing for Democracy: Modernism and Its Utopias,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 27, 2 (2001), pp. 6-17, fig. 4.
Judith A. Barter et al., "American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955," (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat.Ownership History
The Intimate Gallery, New York. Alma Moranthau Wertheim, New York, 1927; by descent to Anne Wertheim Werner, New York, by 1946. The Downtown Gallery, New York. Leigh B. Block, Chicago, Ill., by 1957; given to the Art Institute, 1957.
