© 2022 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Artist/Maker Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887 – 1986)

Study for “Brooklyn Bridge”

1949

Charcoal and black and white chalk on paper

Unframed: 39 7/8 × 29 1/2 in. (101.3 × 74.9 cm)
Framed: 47 1/8 × 36 3/4 × 2 1/4 in. (119.7 × 93.3 × 5.7 cm)

Promised gift of Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, Scenes of New York City

IL2021.51.49

Georgia O’Keeffe’s powerful is dynamic and emotional. It has an eminent provenance from its original owner Doris Bry—O’Keeffe’s agent, confidante, and the noted scholar of Alfred Stieglitz, the artist’s husband. Bry acquired the large sheet directly from the artist in 1978, underlining that O’Keeffe valued it, keeping it with her for nearly three decades. That same year, O’Keeffe sold Bry another smaller, descriptive graphite sketch of one of the bridge’s towers with only a few cables delineated, which was likely O’Keeffe’s initial study. In the large drawing the artist placed the viewer inside rather than outside the bridge’s dynamic heart, its arches seemingly illuminated in white chalk with the cables swinging freely. O’Keeffe repeated the other tower with its crenelations, as in her initial sketch, in a smaller scale—either in the perspectival distance or like a footnote in a transparent experience of the bridge with two views telescoped together. This juxtaposition creates a simultaneity that endows the sheet with a complex and mysterious power. The artist loved to draw in friable charcoal, as well as in graphite, admiring its softness, boldness, and its ability to create threedimensional forms by smudging. She drew a few other bridges—among them two graphite sketches of the Triborough Bridge in New York (1936), and an unidentified bridge (1901–02)—but none have the immersive power of the Hirschfeld Collection sheet. The longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1883, John A. Roebling’s engineering wonder captivated artists and writers alike. Although unique to her, O’Keeffe’s works on the Brooklyn Bridge theme contain a nod to the Italian-born American Futurist Joseph Stella, who depicted the span in numerous studies and in five oils. His fractured compositions of the fabled structure reflect his modernist approach while simultaneously recalling the stained-glass windows of Gothic architecture: a marriage of the old with the new. In O’Keeffe’s monumental drawing, her formal inventions rival those of Stella. Like O’Keeffe, Walker Evans in several of his photographic series of the bridge (1928–30) put the viewer within its cables. Pioneering abstractionist O’Keeffe executed her Brooklyn Bridge trio around the time she left New York—after settling Stieglitz’s museum-quality estate—to live in New Mexico. As a group, they may have been a salute to her success in the City, a monument to the ability of bridges to connect people and places, or a gateway to her new life. O’Keeffe was known to have driven down to Wall Street on Sundays and back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge. Unlike the arches in the painting, those of the drawing suggest the lobes of a heart, creating a valentine to New York, where she and Stieglitz had launched their careers COMMUNITY VOICE O’Keeffe was among my favorite artists, long before she came into our collection. The eroticism in her pictures, including in this one, is subtle and palpable at the same time. Sarah and I both loved the Brooklyn Bridge for many reasons. Now, inspired by the artist’s amazing vision, we see the Bridge in a new way as this piece emotes a uniquely different powerful feeling. Elie Hirschfeld New York City real estate developer

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