Georgia O’Keeffe New York painting comes to Iowa from Madrid
An acclaimed early painting by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) is now on view at the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa in Iowa City through late January 2026. A loan from the Colección Carmen Thyssen, courtesy of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, New York Street with Moon (1925) embodies O’Keeffe’s attempts to capture a lived urban experience. As she expressed it, “one can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
New York Street with Moon, O’Keeffe’s first cityscape, is on display through late January 2026 as part of a reciprocal loan arrangement with the Spanish museum. Two years ago, the Thyssen-Bornemisza asked to borrow Jackson Pollock’s Portrait of H.M. (1945) for their current exhibition “Warhol, Pollock and Other American Spaces” (through January 26, 2026). In exchange, Diana Tuite, visiting senior curator of modern and contemporary art, requested the O’Keeffe painting.
“Georgia O’Keeffe’s voice is notably absent from the Stanley Museum of Art collection,” Tuite noted. “With this remarkable loan, we can show how invested she was in representing modernity and urbanity—bound up as these topics are with national identity—and how the city, in turn, sharpened the vision she applied to the rural landscapes for which she is best known.”
In the galleries at the Stanley, New York Street with Moon is installed alongside Roger Brown’s View From Halfway Up (In Fish-Eye Photorealism) (1978), courtesy of Christine and William John Robb III, which offers a fantastic take on a twentieth-century city from approximately fifty years later. Brown, an artist closely associated with Chicago, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, just as O’Keeffe had.
Seen together, these two paintings raise questions about the ways that images of the built environment can underwrite and critique ideologies of American progress.
About the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art
The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art is a leading university art museum that serves as a focal point for members of the public as well as a multidisciplinary tool and creative hub for students across campus. Striving to provide relevant, thought-provoking experiences, the museum cultivates experimentation as an innovative teaching and learning resource.
For more information, visit www.stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu.
