Internationally recognized for her vibrant florals and striking New Mexico landscapes, Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most influential pioneers of American modernist art. Alongside her early abstractions and experimentation with natural forms in the 1920s, O’Keeffe embarked on a short run of barn paintings in response to her time spent in Lake George, New York. The ensuing images celebrate the serenity of the surrounding Adirondacks in tandem with these dynamic rustic structures.
“I wish you could see the place here—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”
Georgia O’Keeffe and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz married in 1924, splitting their time between Manhattan and his family’s home in Lake George. Annual exhibitions at The Anderson Galleries (1923-26) and The Intimate Gallery (1927-29) kept O’Keeffe increasingly occupied in the commercial art space in New York throughout the twenties, but frequent visits to Lake George provided the artist with respite from the clamor of city living. Spending each fall in the Adirondacks at the Stieglitz estate proved immensely productive for O’Keeffe, who converted one of the family’s barns into a studio space. Lake George Barn, dated 1929, captures the deep red, autumnal palette of the region and encapsulates O’Keeffe’s affinity for architectural subjects within her diverse 1920s oeuvre.
Raised on a farm near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe was long familiar with barn subjects by the time she arrived in Lake George. Her examination of the barn form in the twenties is primarily grounded in New York, but certain pictures from this period deliberately recall her childhood in the midwest. Of the nine barn oils O’Keeffe produced during the 1920s, two depict Wisconsin structures rather than Lake George ones. It is worth highlighting that six of the nine reside in institutional collections today, while the remaining three remain in private hands. Lake George Barn is unique in that it is the only major work from the group to remain in private hands, while the others belong to esteemed museums such as the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Phillips Collection, and Walker Art Center.
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Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Barn, Lake George, New York, 1921. Oil on canvas. 14 by 16 in. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Eva Underhill Holbrook Memorial Collection of American Art, Gift of Alfred H. Holbrook. © 2024 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Beyond the rarity of finding an O’Keeffe barn of this caliber in private hands, the 1929 execution of Lake George Barn is historically significant within the artist’s broader oeuvre. O’Keeffe visited Lake George in August of 1929, having just returned from an impactful four-month stay in Taos. From 1929 onwards, her body of work became increasingly reflective of the dueling geographic influences on his life—New York and New Mexico. From desert bones to sandy hills, the influence of the American southwest is deeply entrenched in the artist’s later pictures. Lake George Barn was therefore created during a pivotal moment in O’Keeffe’s career prior to her growing infatuation with the New Mexican terrain.
While O’Keeffe produced a handful of red barns, Lake George Barn is remarkable in its interplay between the natural and artificial worlds. The alternating shades of red applied to the barn’s facade are imitated in the burnt hues of the surrounding mountain formation. Simultaneously, the harsh horizontality of the grey roof mirrors the bands of smoky clouds that dominate the sky. Although the scope of O’Keeffe’s palette is limited, the synthesis between the manmade structure and the landscape ultimately yields a balanced composition.
The predominantly red palette of Lake George Barn is offset by the sharpness of her strong geometric planes and careful layering of converging forms. While much of O’Keeffe’s early work is characterized by the magnification of forms and fluid abstractions, paintings such as Lake George Barn celebrate her realist, Precisionist side. O’Keeffe’s contemporary and friend, Charles Sheeler, would later broach agrarian themes with a similar eye for Precisionist aesthetics (see fig. 2). Both O’Keeffe and Sheeler shared an appreciation for illustrating rural life, which beyond the canon of early American modernism went on to inspire American Regionalist painters in the 1930s. Through the lens of American twentieth century painting, it is clear to see the trajectory between a picture such as Lake George Barn and depictions of the rural midwest by Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood (see fig. 3). More contemporary painters such as Vermont-based artist Wolf Kahn continued to find commercial success with barn subjects well into the post-war period. Kahn’s The Red Barn, executed more than forty years after O’Keeffe’s Lake George Barn speaks to the timelessness of rustic, countryside subjects within the tradition of American art (see fig. 4).
Georgia O’Keeffe’s early Lake George pictures are vital in contextualizing her broader artistic career. From the alternation between fluid, natural forms in the clouds and mountains to the sharp, angular forms of the barn itself, Lake George Barn shows a mastery of finesse and technique by the artist. The bold application of red color also foreshadows a lifetime of vibrant color in O’Keeffe’s body of work. While her 1920s barns are less omnipresent than her more commercially known florals and southwestern landscapes, Lake George Barn stems from an extremely influential moment in the artist’s development in which she developed a grasp of how color and form would intersect in the remainder of her fruitful artistic career. Lake George Barn captures the artist’s identity in a myriad of ways. The barn harkens back to her birthplace of Wisconsin, the Lake George setting relates to her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz and her early growth in New York; all of these elements are crucial in understanding the complexity of her life and career. Lake George Barn achieved $2.9 million when it previously sold at auction in May 2014 at Sotheby’s.