GEORGINA KLITGAARD
America Through Her Eyes
Cover illustration:
Georgina Klitgaard
Spring Ploughing
Oil on canvas
34 x 42 inches
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Catalog design by Clanci Jo Conover
October 10–November 23, 2024 17 East 67th Street, Suite 1A
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Foreword
Building on the successes of our NAWA (National Association of Women Artists) exhibition this past March-May, we are thrilled to once again turn our focus to a historically underrepresented female artist. We are pleased to present our inaugural exhibition of Georgina Klitgaard’s paintings and watercolors from the early and mid-20th century at our Upper East Side gallery. Although Klitgaard’s work was shown regularly from the 1920s through the 1940s at the most prestigious institutions, her work has rarely been shown together in the last 50 years. Her portrayals of the local Hudson Valley landscape, and also those of the United States during her travels, continue to exemplify American Scene Painting and Regionalism.
102 years ago, Klitgaard and her husband Kaj chose Woodstock, New York as their home partially because of the beautiful vistas that surrounded them, but also due to the lively artist community that flourished after the Art Students League established a summer school for landscape painting in 1907. This upcoming winter, in collaboration with Graham Shay 1857, we will host a group exhibition highlighting the work of historical instructors of the Art Students League, in celebration of the organization’s 150th anniversary.
We are grateful to the descendants of Georgina Klitgaard and especially Rachel Lennox for making this exhibition a reality. We sensed Tom Wolf was the perfect scholar for the following essay, and not only did he agree to writing, but he involved Janis Staggs, and so we were fortunate to have a 2-for-1 with leading art historians on the Woodstock Art Colony authoring our exhibition catalogue.
We hope this exhibition reveals the simple beauties of nearly every corner of the United States from New Mexico, to Georgia, to Massachusetts, and New York. We look forward to welcoming you to both of our galleries this season.
GEORGINA KLITGAARD: THROUGH THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
Tom Wolf and Janis Staggs
Georgina Klitgaard (1893-1977) was a nationally recognized American artist in the 1930s and 1940s whose work has been rarely seen in recent years. The paintings and watercolors selected for this exhibition highlight her mastery of the landscape, depicting the varied terrain of the United States through her vivid brushwork and simplification of shapes. She successfully merged her modernist tendencies with a choice of subject matter and style akin to those created by contemporary regionalist or American scene painters. Klitgaard’s oeuvre is in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters, but replaces their romantic drama, exacting detail, and spiritual reverence with a more modernist and generalized realism. Writing for The New York Times in 1929, the influential curator, Lloyd Goodrich insightfully described her art as “fresh, direct, clear-cut.”1
Georgina Berrian Klitgaard was born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York, and graduated from Barnard College in 1912 before enrolling at the National Academy of Design. It was probably around this time that she had a studio at 659 Fifth Avenue, near Rockefeller Center. She frequented the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at a party thrown by a friend who worked there, she met the Danish-American artist, mariner, and writer Kaj Klitgaard (18881953). The couple married in 1919 and moved to the hamlet of Bearsville outside of Woodstock, New York, where they built a home that they called “The Ledge.” It was a rustic stone structure with a sizable chimney to help keep the house warm during the cold winters in the Catskill Mountains. Situated atop a hillside on the edge of Mount Tobias, The Ledge offered a dramatic view down onto the valley below, overlooking Bearsville and the artists’ colony of Woodstock. A photograph by Peter Juley and Son from about 1922 shows Georgina posing on the stone wall along the perimeter of the porch of The Ledge, with farms dotting the rolling hills below and the village of Woodstock visible in the distance [Fig.1]
Warmly,
Doug Gold & Eli Sterngass
The three-room house where the couple raised their two sons became the subject of one of Georgina Klitgaard’s most significant paintings, The Ledge2 [Fig.2]. The idyllic scene shows Kaj relaxing in the yard, barefoot, with a pipe in his mouth, surrounded by burgeoning foliage in their private Eden. A book lies next to him on a rustic stone table, and behind him Mount Guardian and Overlook Mountain are clearly visible; these distinctive peaks frequently appear in Georgina Klitgaard’s paintings.
The Klitgaards’ two sons, Peter (1921-1976) and Wallace (1937-2006), were born sixteen years apart, so Georgina devoted years of her life to motherhood. She frequently
raised the children as a single parent while Kaj embarked on sailing expeditions around the globe, both earning a living and gathering material for his novels. Although she lived in their rural home, distant from the closest neighbors, she actively participated in the lively artistic scene that flourished around the Woodstock Artists Association (established in 1919), which at Fig. 2: Georgina Klitgaard, The Ledge, 1936-37 the time included both realist and modernist artists like Eugene Speicher and Andrew Dasburg. The Woodstock Artists’ Colony had begun in 1902 with the Byrdcliffe colony, founded by Ralph Whitehead, a wealthy British disciple of the Arts and Crafts philosopher, John Ruskin. Three years later the poet Hervey White founded the Maverick colony across town, a more bohemian alternative to Byrdcliffe, and after the Art Students League established a summer school for landscape painting in 1907, Woodstock became a haven for artists who wanted to escape the tensions of Manhattan while still being in reach of its dynamic art scene, and art market. Georgina was fortunate to spend her life in pursuit of her artistic aspirations in the Woodstock region, one of the country’s most bucolic settings, and she would be acknowledged as one of the area’s most significant artists.
Despite her isolated living situation, Klitgaard exhibited regularly at highly-regarded venues, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, and the Whitney Museum. She also had five solo shows at the Frank Rehn Gallery in Manhattan which represented some of the most prominent artists of the time—as seen in a photograph from 1945 of the dealer surrounded by 14 of his artists (all men) including Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, and Bradley Walker Tomlin [Fig.3].
Caption for Fig. 3:
Klitgaard tended to prefer pastoral landscapes, but her painting, Central Park South, reflects her ties to New York City and represents a departure from her more frequent representations of a cultivated countryside. In this picture, a swirling flock of white birds directs the gaze toward blocks of towering high-rise buildings that loom over the park below. [Fig.4] More typical is Spring Plowing with a farmer working the land behind a pair of horses [Fig.5] The characteristically firm composition develops through parallel layers that move back into space from left to right, backed by the distant mountain; the overlapping planes are echoed in the clouds above. She articulated her belief in the importance of abstract structure in 1951, stating that the painter “confronted with a ‘view’… must organize the multitude of small forms of the panorama towards the largeness, weight, and sense of deep space which the landscape primarily evoked…To accomplish this within the limits of my frame, I have come to build upon a nonobjective design, using geometrical forms, which are not arbitrary, but which are an interpretation of Nature’s unity and emphases.”3
While this statement is especially relevant to her work
from the late 1940s, when she sometimes experimented with an almost cubist approach, her concern with structure can be seen in Truck Garden, another scene of a peaceful farm. In this canvas, a house positioned to the left of center and set on a diagonal anchor the space [Fig.6]. Two shirtless men working the land in rhythmic poses at the right are juxtaposed with the tractor in the middle ground, and the scene culminates with a train emitting smoke against the horizon, as industrialization enters the rural scene.4
Nature and technology are again juxtaposed in an unusual painting, Radiant Moon,
Group of artists at the Rehn Gallery, 1945. Top: H.V. Poor, John Clancy, Edward Hopper, Henry Mattson, George Picken, Reginald Marsh. Middle: Eugene Speicher, Franklin Watkins, Rehn, Charles Burchfield, Bradley Walker Tomlin, John Carroll, Morris Kantor. Floor: Alexander Brook, Peppino Mangravite. Photograph by Peter A. Juley & Son. Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries records, 1858-1969. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Fig. 3: Group of artists at the Rehn Gallery, 1945.Top: H.V. Poor, John Clancy, Edward Hopper, Henry Mattson, George Picken, Reginald Marsh. Middle: Eugene Speicher, Franklin Watkins, Rehn, Charles Burchfield, Bradley Walker Tomlin, John Carroll, Morris Kantor. Floor: Alexander Brook, Peppino Mangravite. Photograph by Peter A. Juley & Son. Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries records, 1858-1969. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
which is atypical in Klitgaard’s oeuvre due to its almost abstract simplicity [Fig.7]. It features a full moon illuminating the sky over a verdant landscape, with an electric pole tethered to the ground on the left. The composition evokes the mysterious nighttime paintings of fellow Woodstock artist, George Ault. Ault’s journalist wife, Louise Jonas, noted that the light from the Klitgaards’ Bearsville home “was a
symbol of courage to the folk residing in the valley below. They looked up and saw the light and knew that a brave and indomitable woman was there.”5
In 1933, thanks to being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, Georgina embarked on a study trip to visit Europe’s great museums with Kaj and Peter. During the Depression, the government hired artists to produce works for public spaces, and Klitgaard received three commissions from the Treasury Department in the late 1930s to create post office murals. She chose very different subjects for each project, and they were devised to appeal to local audiences. In Goshen, New York, she painted a mural in 1937 depicting The Running of the Hambletonian Stake, illustrating a nationally famous horserace on the town’s track. Initially, government officials objected to the portrayal of a subject they deemed inappropriate, but the race was a point of pride for the city’s residents and the mural remains in place to this day.6 In 1940, she and Woodstock painter Charles Rosen were tasked with depicting the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, in two scenes. One shows the city as it appeared a century earlier while the other offers a contemporary view. Klitgaard completed the historic version, benefitting from suggestions proffered by President Franklin Roosevelt, who had grown up in nearby Hyde Park. A year later, in Pelham, Georgia, she completed a serene view of a glistening pond framed by trees. Her painting, Georgia Swamp, with a white bird flying gracefully across an arabesque of trees before a watery landscape, could be a study for this mural [Fig.8]
Although she traveled fairly extensively, most of Klitgaard’s landscapes were set close to her home in Bearsville. However, in 1940, the Klitgaard couple opened a short-lived art school in Durham, North Carolina, and they often spent winters in Florida. She featured both of the latter geographies in her work, usually as richly painted vistas of peaceful spaces.
Kaj Klitgaard’s 1941 book, Through the American Landscape, recounts his tour through 23 states and Washington, D.C. to consider the work of the regionalist painters.7
Funded by a Guggenheim Foundation grant, 16-year-old Peter joined Kaj on the trip, while Georgina remained in Bearsville to take care of baby Wallace. The book reproduced works by 40
contemporary artists, including renowned figures such as Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, John Marin, and Reginald Marsh. Georgina was among six women whose art was featured. Her spacious Landscape with Blooming Tree8 graced the cover, and a black and white reproduction of one of her Florida watercolor scenes appeared on the interior. In the watercolor, a bamboo bridge floats over a pond surrounded by lush foliage rendered with her distinctive palette of silvery colors [Fig.9]. The reflections of the bridge on the placid water dominate the foreground of this magical slice of the Florida landscape, a watery vision in harmony with the fluidity of the materials with which it was made.
Watercolor was a medium in which the artist excelled.
In his 1929 review of a Klitgaard exhibition at the Rehn Gallery, Lloyd Goodrich enthused, “the watercolors are remarkable for their wit, delicacy, and grace.”9 Camellias is one of numerous floral still-lifes she produced in watercolor. Here, a vase is overshadowed by a bunch of luminous white flowers radiating across the page [Fig.10]
In a more densely worked still-life watercolor, an autumnal bouquet comprised of evergreen branches and dried stalks, enlivened by a cluster of vivid red flowers, complements a vase with its own floral ornament, while balanced atop a brown cloth patterned with further plant imagery—a modest subject infused with decorative energy. [Fig.11]
Georgina typically did not date her paintings so it is sometimes difficult to develop a chronology of her work or understand her evolution as an artist. For example, she painted several landscapes of New Mexico scenery—these may date from a 1954 trip to the western United States, or a residence at the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico in 1967, 1968, and 1969, The western United States gave her an opportunity to experiment with landscapes completely different from her beloved upstate New York. In New Mexico Landscape with Grazing Horses, a frothy white tree in the foreground echoes the snow on the distant mountains, which provide a dramatic background to the box-like pueblo houses and five peacefully grazing horses [Fig.12] Although various accidents and ailments in the late 1960s and early 1970s took a toll on her health, nonetheless
Klitgaard continued to paint almost until her death in 1977 at age 84. By then, she seemed out of fashion, detached from almost all postwar art trends. However, she remains one of the most prominent American female painters of the 1930s and 1940s and a distinguished representative of American scene painting. In 1961, Lloyd Goodrich placed Georgina Klitgaard among other Woodstock artists that he viewed as part of a “new landscape school,” whose proponents were “concerned with nature’s permanent realities, with her enduring forms, and their translation into pictorial design.”10 In 1974, Kingston’s Daily Freeman dubbed Georgina Klitgaard the “Grand Dame” of the Woodstock art colony.11 That same year, a retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Capricorn Galleries in Bethesda, Maryland. She died at her home in Bearsville on January 12, 1977.
Georgina Klitgaard was one of the most prominent American women painters of the 1930s and 40s and a distinguished representative of American regionalism. In a 1951 statement, she explained her obsession with her subject matter. “The landscape,” she wrote, “is forever demanding that some broad synthesis be reached, comparable, perhaps, to coming to terms with life itself.”12 She was fortunate to spend her life in pursuit of her artistic aspirations in the Woodstock valley, one of the country’s most bucolic settings, and was acknowledged as one of the area’s most significant artists. When describing her approach to her work, Georgina Klitgaard noted, with the directness and lack of pretense that also characterizes her art: “I paint year in and year out, and regardless of personal shortcomings and the changing political climate, hope for the best.”13 Her paintings remain exemplary examples of conservative American modernism.
Lloyd Goodrich, “Varied Work by Artists of Diverse Talents Shown,” The New York Times, October 20, 1929.
The Ledge was exhibited in 1931 at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Forty-Fourth Annual Painting and Sculpture show.
Georgina Klitgaard, “Landscape Painting,” in Arthur Zaidenberg, The Art of the Artist (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951), 148-9.
The stretcher has the title Truck Garden noted, but a different painting with this title was awarded Honorable Mention at the Carnegie International Exhibition in 1928, so it is unclear if this is a second painting with the same name or if she merely reused the stretcher.
Louise Jonas, “Her Light Became a Symbol of Courage, Thus Georgina Klitgaard, Creator of Post Office Mural, Became Legend in Catskill Mountains,” Poughkeepsie Sunday New Yorker, Sunday, November 21, 1943, Two-A.
Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 55-6.
Twenty-six of the forty works illustrated in Through the American landscape, including Landscape with Blooming Tree, were included in a travelling exhibition which toured seven states from March 1942 to June 1943, with the Howard University Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. as the final venue.
Landscape with Blooming Tree was exhibited in 1937 at the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition of Paintings, and in the 1939 Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Sixteenth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Painting.
Lloyd Goodrich “Varied Work by Artists of Diverse Talents Shown,” The New York Times, October 20, 1929.
Lloyd Goodrich and John I. H. Baur, American Art of Our Century (New York: Frederick A. Praeger for the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1961), 81. Goodrich, who was director of the Whitney Museum of American Art at the time, authored part one of the book, which covered the years 1900-1939.
The Kingston Daily Freeman, "At Grand Reopening of WAA," March 10, 1974, 65.
Georgina Klitgaard, “Landscape Painting,” The Art of the Artist: Theories and Techniques of Art by the Artists Themselves, compiled by Arthur Zaidenberg (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951), 148.
Ibid., 149.
Authors: Tom Wolf, Professor Emeritus of Art History and Visual Culture, Bard College, and Janis Staggs, Director of Curatorial and Manager of Publications, Neue Galerie New York
18
Signed lower right
30 x 52 inches
Signed lower right
Bearsville, New York
Oil on artist's board
26 1/4 x 32 inches
Signed lower right
Oil on canvas
34 x 42 inches
Signed lower right
26 x 36 inches
Signed lower right
28 x 42 inches
Signed lower right
Pueblo Indians, Taos, New Mexico
Oil on canvas
18 x 24 inches
Signed lower right
Central Park South
Oil on canvas
40 1/2 x 28 inches
Signed lower right
24 x 17 3/4 inches
Signed lower right
25 1/2 x 31 inches
Oil on canvas
34 x 42 inches
Signed lower right
Oil on canvas
24 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches
Signed lower right
24 x 30 inches
Signed lower right
18 x 22 inches
Signed lower right
Apples and Pears Still Life
Oil on artist's board
12 x 16 inches
Signed lower right
Oil on canvas
8 x 10 inches
Signed lower right
Watercolor on paper
13 1/2 x 19 inches
Signed lower right
Watercolor on paper
13 x 19 1/2 inches
Signed lower right
Dade City, Florida, c. 1940
Watercolor on paper
19 x 13 inches
Signed lower right
Watercolor on paper
29 x 23 inches
Signed lower right
Still Life
Watercolor on paper
22 x 15 inches
Signed lower right List of Works
Buttermlik Bay, Cape Cod, 1932
Oil on canvas
18 x 30 inches
The Ledge, 1936-1937
Oil on canvas
30 x 52 inches
Bearsville, New York
Oil on artist's board
26 1/4 x 32 inches
Spring Ploughing Oil on canvas
34 x 42 inches
Truck Gardens
Oil on canvas
26 x 36 inches
Arroyo Seco, New Mexico
Oil on canvas
28 x 42 inches
Pueblo Indians, Taos, New Mexico Oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches
Central Park South Oil on canvas
40 1/2 x 28 inches
Radiant Moon Oil on artist's board
24 x 17 3/4 inches
Washington Square Park, New York
Oil on canvas
25 1/2 x 31 inches
$8,500 $24,000
$8,500
$16,000
$14,000
$8,000
$6,000
$14,000
$4,000
$10,000
Johnny Walker's Place, c. 1929
Oil on canvas
34 x 42 inches
Newton's Farm
Oil on canvas
24 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches
Catskill Mountains
Oil on canvas
24 x 30 inches
Fodder Stacks, Bearsville
Oil on canvas
18 x 22 inches
Spanish Moss, Georgia
Oil on artist's board
12 x 16 inches
Apples and Pears Still Life
Oil on canvas
8 x 10 inches
Chapel Hill Farm, North Carolina, c. 1940
Watercolor on paper
13 1/2 x 19 inches
North Carolina, c. 1940
Watercolor on paper
13 x 19 1/2 inches
Dade City, Florida, c. 1940
Watercolor on paper
19 x 13 inches
Camellias
Watercolor on paper
29 x 23 inches
Still Life
Watercolor on paper
22 x 15 inches
$24,000
$14,000
$8,000
$8,000
$4,000
$2,500
$2,000
$2,000
$2,000
$2,000
$2,000
New Deal Murals
1937 Goshen Post Office, New York
1940 Poughkeepsie Post Office, New York
1941 Pelham Post Office, Georgia
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1926 New York, Whitney Studio Club
1929 New York, Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries
1932 New York, Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries
1934 Rochester, New York, Memorial Art Gallery
1939 New York, Milch Gallery
1940 New York, Milch Gallery
1941 New York, Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art
1942 New York, Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries
1948 Ossining, New York, Saint-Gaudens Memorial
1959 New York, Frank K.M. Rehn Galleries
1974 Bethesda, Maryland, Capricorn Galleries
2009 Woodstock, New York, Fletcher Gallery
Selected Public Collections
Dayton Art Institute, Ohio
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut
Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Wichita State University, Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center - Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
Art Museum at University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford, Connecticut
Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, New York