Before the Desert, a Greener Side
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Lake George Paintings at Hyde Collection
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Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Lake George (formerly Reflection Seascape)” (1922). More Photos »
By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: August 8, 2013
GLENS FALLS, N.Y. — If you are a casual fan of Georgia O’Keeffe, you probably think of New Mexico when you think of her. After all, she lived there for decades and avidly explored the landscape in her work and her life, collecting stones and bones and accolades as one of America’s most celebrated painters.
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“Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George” (1918), by Alfred Stieglitz. More Photos »
But long before O’Keeffe embedded in the desert, her life included a period in the considerably lusher climes of upstate New York, on Lake George, the glacial Adirondack lake near here where she spent a series of summers — creating scores of paintings — while staying with Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, art promoter and her eventual husband, whose family kept a small estate there.
Now, for the first time, some five-dozen of those creations have been brought together in an exhibition — “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George” — at the Hyde Collection, a tiny museum in this modest, well-kept city of about 15,000, an hour north of Albany.
And in an impressive display of upstate pride, the Hyde exhibition, which opened here in June, has already set attendance records, drawing thousands of visitors to see some of O’Keeffe’s vivid musings on a lesser-known chapter of her life. That includes a rediscovered painting — “Lake George, Autumn 1922” — which was found by a grandniece of Stieglitz and has not been seen in public since the Roaring Twenties, according to the exhibition’s organizers.
It’s an exhibition — drawn from more than three-dozen collections — that its organizers hope will undeniably establish a connection between O’Keeffe and the lake, still a popular summertime tourist draw whose current attractions include low-budget motels, mini-golf and more upscale hotels and homes.
“O’Keeffe always developed a strong attachment to place, and Lake George is a place she had a deep connection to,” said Erin Coe, the Hyde Collection’s chief curator. “And it’s one of the first and the longest lasting.”
And while Ms. Coe noted that O’Keeffe was peripatetic — with stays in New York City and even Hawaii — “it’s really New Mexico and Lake George where she has the longest residency,” she said.
Ms. Coe spent five years assembling the show, overcoming a number of obstacles, not the least of which was that the Hyde — which was founded by a local paper mill heiress, and which now has a wide-ranging 3,000-piece collection — did not own a single Georgia O’Keeffe painting. So instead, Ms. Coe traveled to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe to examine its authoritative collection and consult with Barbara Buhler Lynes, an O’Keeffe specialist.
Using Ms. Buhler Lynes’s catalog, Ms. Coe created a database that identified — to her surprise — about 200 works related to Lake George, or about a quarter of O’Keeffe’s paintings. “That was one of the first triggers to propel me forward,” Ms. Coe said. “Because I was able to make the argument to other museums, to my colleagues and even to the staff here at the Hyde, to get everyone on board. Because it’s a very expensive proposition.”
At a cost of some $750,000, “Modern Nature” is the most expensive exhibition ever for the Hyde, said Charles A. Guerin, the museum’s director, who took over earlier this year. Mr. Guerin knew a thing or two about Western artists — he’d previously worked as executive director of the University of Arizona Museum of Art — and was impressed by O’Keeffe’s prodigious Lake George output.
“The repetition of the same things over and over again really gave her time to really strengthen that analytical sense between abstraction and realism,” Mr. Guerin said. “And that sense of how to abstract what is real becomes stronger and stronger and stronger and more and more powerful and more representative of her mature self.”
And in many ways, the Hyde was a perfect choice for the exhibition. Glens Falls sits less than 10 miles from Lake George’s southern shore, where Stieglitz’s family once had some 40 acres of property, complete with gardens, pastures and a studio for O’Keeffe. She began visiting the lake in 1918, and continued going there until 1934, when her attentions began to turn to the West.
But her visits weren’t brief, Ms. Coe said; she usually came in April and would stay sometimes as late as November or the first snow (though, as Adirondack types can tell you, the first snow can sometimes come a lot earlier than November). While staying with the Stieglitz family — a large and sometimes boisterous clan — O’Keeffe would hike, row, garden and generally take it all in. “I wish you could see the place here,” she wrote in 1923 to the novelist Sherwood Anderson. “There is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees. Sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces — it seems so perfect — but it is really lovely.”
Many of those images worked their way into her paintings, including those at the Hyde.
They include “Starlight Night, Lake George,” from 1922, a dark blue landscape dotted with globes of dock lights and stars; “Storm Cloud, Lake George,” from a year later, a darker canvas, the mountains in silhouette with a whipping flare of light above; and “The Old Maple,” from 1926, a tribute to a knotted climbing tree on the Stieglitz estate.
And then, of course, there are the flowers, those magnified and seemingly sensual flora that in many ways made O’Keeffe’s reputation as a sexual and artistic revolutionary. (Though that was an interpretation of her work she disdained.) The Hyde show has several striking examples: a fiery red canna from 1919; a delicate pink petunia from 1924; and a series of curving burgundy jack-in-the-pulpits, borrowed from the National Gallery and dating to 1930.
Lisa Messinger, a former associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who has studied O’Keeffe, said that many of her “really large, really magnified flowers, where you are really looking into the heart of the flower” were from the Lake George era.
“Before she came to New York, she was doing very abstract painting and charcoals, and the Lake George pictures are the flowers and the tree paintings, where they take on that human personality, almost,” she said.
Ms. Messinger added that she was shocked that no exhibition had ever exclusively focused on O’Keeffe’s Lake George period, though the artist may have been partly to blame. After resettling in New Mexico in 1949 — Stieglitz died three years before — O’Keeffe made a conscious effort to recreate herself as a different type of painter. “More and more after she moved to New Mexico, she presented herself as an artist of the desert,” said Cody Hartley, director of curatorial affairs for the O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe.
In short, a desert artist doesn’t play up her days as a guest at a lakeside estate. (The Hyde has assembled an accompanying exhibition of Stieglitz photographs of the compound and some of its residents and visitors.) But Mr. Hartley argued that the Lake George era was indeed worthy of examination, calling it “an incredibly important and formative period in her life.”
Like O’Keeffe herself, the Hyde exhibition will soon head west; after closing here in mid-September, “Modern Nature” will be seen at the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, followed by a stint at the de Young in San Francisco. And while both of those institutions are undeniably better known than the Hyde, Ms. Coe and Mr. Guerin seem pleased that they have cast some light on how O’Keeffe’s early days by the lake informed her undeniably more arid art.
“Lake George,” Ms. Coe said, “provided her with those tools.”
A version of this article appeared in print on August 11, 2013, on page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Before the Desert, a Greener Side.
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