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© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Cross by the Sea, Canada
1932oil on canvas
36 in. x 24 in. (91.44 cm x 60.96 cm)
Currier Funds, 1960.1
Georgia O'Keeffe
American
1887–1986
Over the course of her long career, Georgia O'Keeffe produced a varied body of work that includes not only her well-known flower paintings but images of skyscrapers, buffalo skulls, wooden crosses, and some of the earliest abstract compositions by an American artist. Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to the Art Students League of New York. After a year of courses under William Merritt Chase (q.v.) and others, O'Keeffe set out on her own, first as a commercial illustrator and then as an art instructor at schools in Texas, Virginia, and South Carolina.
Growing dissatisfied with the quality of her work, O'Keeffe in 1915 decided to make a new beginning, discarding her previous training to explore her own ideas. The result was a series of nonobjective charcoal drawings that O'Keeffe sent to a friend in New York City. These drawings soon reached Alfred Stieglitz (q.v.), who showed them at his modernist gallery "291." With Stieglitz as her mentor, O'Keeffe gave up teaching and became a full-time painter in New York. The two were married in 1924, and until Stieglitz's death in 1946 she exhibited regularly at his Intimate Gallery and its successor, An American Place. In 1949 O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico, where she had spent most of her summers since 1929. The artist traveled widely during the 1950s and 1960s, and inspired by views from airplane windows, she executed a number of cloud studies, including the major mural, Sky above Clouds IV (1965, The Art Institute of Chicago). O'Keeffe was the recipient of numerous retrospective exhibitions as well as many awards and honors. She died in New Mexico in 1986.
The cross appears in O'Keeffe's work beginning in 1929, when she first visited New Mexico. While on a walk with her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, she passed a morada, or Penitente church. Impressed by the stark simplicity of wooden crosses against the sunset, she made several paintings of the subject, including the well-known Black Cross, New Mexico (1929, The Art Institute of Chicago). Three years later, she encountered crosses again while on a visit to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. Among the resulting paintings is the Currier's Cross by the Sea, completed in 1932.
Cross by the Sea depicts a memorial to a young priest who was the victim of drowning. Positioned close to the picture plane and stretching almost to the edges of the canvas, a gray wooden cross rises against a backdrop of sea and sky. A small picket fence and a spot of greenery encircle its base, providing a sense of grounding. On the vertical shaft of the cross, a small placard reads: ICI S'EST NOYE LE 4 JUIN 1875/ LE REVD. E.V. COTE/ P[R]ETRE MISS. DU MONT LOUIS/ AGE D'ENVIRON 26 ANS/ PRIEZ POUR LUI (Here was drowned on the 4th of June, 1875, the Reverend E. V. Cote, Missionary Priest of Mount Louis, aged around 26 years. Pray for him).
Like her cross paintings of 1929, Cross by the Sea raises the frail wooden memorial to the level of the monumental and universal. Juxtaposed against a limitless expanse of blue, the cross literally demarcates the sky. At the same time, the firm lines of both the cross and the horizon suggest the harmony of natural and spiritual law. Although O'Keeffe was not a member of any church or faith group, she was attracted to the contemplative and mystic aspects of Roman Catholicism, seeing its eremitic shrines and votive monuments as metaphors for man's connectedness with the universe. It is for this reason, perhaps, that she was careful to include the inscription on the cross: on one hand, the young priest was simply the victim of a tragic accident; on the other, his death amid the waves can be read as a kind of poetic merging of man and the elements, and a freeing of the soul to attain a higher level of awareness.
Cross by the Sea was first exhibited in 1935 at Stieglitz's An American Place. After Stieglitz's death, this painting and others in O'Keeffe's inventory were handled by noted dealer Edith Gregor Halpert of the Downtown Gallery in New York. Cross by the Sea was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art through the Downtown Gallery in 1959.
VSD
REFERENCES
Lloyd Goodrich and Doris Bry. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970.
Barbara Buhler Lynes. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Roxana Robinson. Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Growing dissatisfied with the quality of her work, O'Keeffe in 1915 decided to make a new beginning, discarding her previous training to explore her own ideas. The result was a series of nonobjective charcoal drawings that O'Keeffe sent to a friend in New York City. These drawings soon reached Alfred Stieglitz (q.v.), who showed them at his modernist gallery "291." With Stieglitz as her mentor, O'Keeffe gave up teaching and became a full-time painter in New York. The two were married in 1924, and until Stieglitz's death in 1946 she exhibited regularly at his Intimate Gallery and its successor, An American Place. In 1949 O'Keeffe moved permanently to New Mexico, where she had spent most of her summers since 1929. The artist traveled widely during the 1950s and 1960s, and inspired by views from airplane windows, she executed a number of cloud studies, including the major mural, Sky above Clouds IV (1965, The Art Institute of Chicago). O'Keeffe was the recipient of numerous retrospective exhibitions as well as many awards and honors. She died in New Mexico in 1986.
The cross appears in O'Keeffe's work beginning in 1929, when she first visited New Mexico. While on a walk with her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, she passed a morada, or Penitente church. Impressed by the stark simplicity of wooden crosses against the sunset, she made several paintings of the subject, including the well-known Black Cross, New Mexico (1929, The Art Institute of Chicago). Three years later, she encountered crosses again while on a visit to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. Among the resulting paintings is the Currier's Cross by the Sea, completed in 1932.
Cross by the Sea depicts a memorial to a young priest who was the victim of drowning. Positioned close to the picture plane and stretching almost to the edges of the canvas, a gray wooden cross rises against a backdrop of sea and sky. A small picket fence and a spot of greenery encircle its base, providing a sense of grounding. On the vertical shaft of the cross, a small placard reads: ICI S'EST NOYE LE 4 JUIN 1875/ LE REVD. E.V. COTE/ P[R]ETRE MISS. DU MONT LOUIS/ AGE D'ENVIRON 26 ANS/ PRIEZ POUR LUI (Here was drowned on the 4th of June, 1875, the Reverend E. V. Cote, Missionary Priest of Mount Louis, aged around 26 years. Pray for him).
Like her cross paintings of 1929, Cross by the Sea raises the frail wooden memorial to the level of the monumental and universal. Juxtaposed against a limitless expanse of blue, the cross literally demarcates the sky. At the same time, the firm lines of both the cross and the horizon suggest the harmony of natural and spiritual law. Although O'Keeffe was not a member of any church or faith group, she was attracted to the contemplative and mystic aspects of Roman Catholicism, seeing its eremitic shrines and votive monuments as metaphors for man's connectedness with the universe. It is for this reason, perhaps, that she was careful to include the inscription on the cross: on one hand, the young priest was simply the victim of a tragic accident; on the other, his death amid the waves can be read as a kind of poetic merging of man and the elements, and a freeing of the soul to attain a higher level of awareness.
Cross by the Sea was first exhibited in 1935 at Stieglitz's An American Place. After Stieglitz's death, this painting and others in O'Keeffe's inventory were handled by noted dealer Edith Gregor Halpert of the Downtown Gallery in New York. Cross by the Sea was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art through the Downtown Gallery in 1959.
VSD
REFERENCES
Lloyd Goodrich and Doris Bry. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970.
Barbara Buhler Lynes. Georgia O'Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Roxana Robinson. Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Exhibition
1943 Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, "Georgia O'Keeffe." Jan. 21 - Feb. 22. 1957 Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinatti Art Museum, Cincinatti, OH, "An American Viewpoint." Sept. 1 - Nov. 20.
1957 Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH, Nov. - Dec.
1958 Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, "10th Anniversary Exhibition" June 1- July 20.
1959 Mumson Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, NY, March - April.
1962 Dwight Art Memorial, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, " Women Artists in America Today." April 10 - 30, cat. no. 39.
1966 "Georgia O'Keeffe." Traveled to: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX, March 17 - May 8; Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houton, TX, May 17 - June 19.
1970 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, "Georgia O'Keeffe Retrospective Exhibtion." Oct. 8 - Nov. 29.
1971 San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA, "Georgia O'Keeffe: Retrospective." March 19 - April 25.
1973 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Four MacDowell Medalists: Nevelson, Calder, Hopper, O'Keeffe." June 30 - July 29.
1974 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "American Art Since 1914." June 15 - Sept. 8.
1975 Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, TX, "Paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe." Oct. 24 - Nov. 12.
1975 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Salute to Women." Nov. 14 - 30.
1977-1978 Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, "Perceptions of the Spirit in Twentieth Century American Art." Sept. 20, 1977 - June 19, 1978.
1979 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, "Small Gallery on a Large Scale." June 16 - July 29.
1980 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "More Than Meets the Eye; Hidden Collections of the Currier Gallery of Art." Jan. 12 - March 2.
1980 "A Mirror of Creation." Organized by Friends of American Art in Religion, New York, NY. Traveled to: Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy, Sept. 24 - Nov. 23.
1984 "The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape in Northern Europe and North America, 1890 - 1940." Traveled to: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Jan. 14 - March 11; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, April 1 - May 15.
1984 Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, "Three American Artists in Quebec." Oct. 18 - Dec. 2.
1986 Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME, "Masterpieces from the Currier Gallery of Art." Sept. 11 - Nov. 2.
1987-1988 Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL, " The Expressionist Landscape 1920-1940." Oct. 1987 - Dec. 1988.
1999-2000 "Georgia O'Keeffe: the Poetry of Things." Organized by the Phillips Collection and the Dallas Museum of Art. Traveled to: Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, April 17 - July 18, 1999; The Georgia O'Keffee Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Aug. 7 - Oct. 17, 1999; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, Nov. 7, 1999 - Jan. 30, 2000; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Feb. 19 - May 14, 2000.
2001 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "From Wyeth to Welliver: American Realism of the 20th Century." June 30 - Sept. 3.
2006-2007 Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, "Masterpieces from the Currier Museum of Art." Sept. 2006 - Oct. 1, 2007.
2010-2011 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "The Secret Life of Art: Mysteries of the Museum Revealed." Oct. 2, 2010 – Jan. 9, 2011.
2012 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "A New Vision: Modernist Photography." Feb. 4 - May 13.
2024 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "Stories of the Sea." Feb. 1 - Nov 3, 2024.
Provenance
An American Place, New York, NY Downtown Gallery, New York, NY
Purchased by Currier Gallery of Art, 1960
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