O’Keeffe works fetch over $23M at N.Y. auctions
Proceeds from the three sales will be invested through the museum’s acquisitions fund and will be used solely to acquire other works by O’Keeffe, Hartley said, adding that the fund currently is “north of $50 million.”
The auction house’s percentage of this week’s sales is confidential, he said, but he felt Sotheby’s was “extremely generous” in working with the museum.
The sales come four years after the museum sold several pieces in its collection to raise money for new acquisitions. Among the pieces it sold earlier was the iconic Jimson Weed/ White Flower No. 1 (1936), which smashed prior records for sales of works by female artists when it sold for $44.4 million.
Two years later, the museum used some of the funds from those sales to buy a rarely seen painting by O’Keeffe of rustic barns overlooking the shores of Lake George, N.Y., where she and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, had a rural retreat. The purchase of the 1926 painting titled The Barns, Lake George, for more than $3.3 million, was part of the museum’s effort to fill gaps in its collection and tell a more complete story of the artist’s life and development, museum officials said at the time.
“We are committed to representing the full breadth of Georgia O’Keeffe’s career and life,” Hartley said Friday. “To do that, we are seeking to build a collection that represents all aspects of her work with the strongest examples possible.”
While the museum is focused on O’Keeffe’s life and works, it does own pieces by other artists, including photos by Stieglitz.
But, Hartley said that the museum for now “will only acquire works by Georgia O’Keeffe using the acquisitions fund.”
The museum has a strategy “to acquire a number of works through purchases and gifts,” he said, but is keeping quiet about those plans. Much of the strategy “depends on when things become available on the market,” he said.
O’Keeffe, closely associated with the red rocks and flattopped mesas of the Abiquiú area where she lived for decades, beginning in 1949, died in Santa Fe in 1986 at age 98.
She is mostly known for her Southwestern works and her depictions of flowers, such as Calla Lilies on Red, a gift by philanthropist Anne Windfohr Marion — a Forth Worth, Texas, rancher and oil company executive who founded the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The painting was acquired in 1996.
The other two paintings that sold this week were gifts from Marion’s Burnett Foundation and were acquired in 1997.
A Street, a rare O’Keeffe work, is from a group of cityscapes the artist painted from 1925-29 while living in New York City with Stieglitz.
The painting depicts a narrow chasm between two rows of towering Manhattan skyscrapers.
Cottonwood Tree in Spring is an example of O’Keeffe’s work that gravitated between abstraction and representationalism.
“The bulk of the collection really came from two sources: the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation that no longer exists and the Burnett Foundation, who had gifted a number of works to us over the years,” said museum Director Robert Kret.
Donors of the artworks were kept informed of all decisions regarding the sale, he said.
“They made it clear,” Kret said, “that we needed to be selfsufficient and stand on our own two feet and be able to find ways to build the collection without them.”