The O'Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector

The O’Keeffe Circle: Artist as Gallerist and Collector

The experimental paintings and drawings of Georgia O’Keeffe found their greatest early advocate in Alfred Stieglitz, the gallerist and photographer whom she married in 1924. Through Stieglitz, O’Keeffe was introduced to critics, collectors, and a collegial community of avant garde painters with whom she showed her newest works. In time, several artists came to trust her to hang their shows at the galleries with the same careful, unerring eye that she brought to her own annual installation. In effect, O’Keeffe functioned as co-curator with the oracular Stieglitz, often moderating his enthusiasms with a dispassionate exactness. This online gallery explores O’Keeffe as a gallerist in New York and as collector in her New York apartments and residences in New Mexico. She was highly judicious in selecting the art that shared her home, claiming that “My home is simple, but I aim to make it simpler!”

The recent promised gift, O’Keeffe’s Cedar Tree with Lavender Hills, 1937, is joined by works by Alexander Calder, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Arthur Dove.