Art & Creativity Quote by Georgia O'Keeffe

New York, in O'Keeffe's hands, isn’t a skyline to be inventoried; it’s a stimulus to be metabolized. The line rejects the macho modernist brag that the city can be captured through sheer exactness - the crisp draftsmanship of towers, the documentary eye, the hard-edged “real.” She’s arguing that the truer portrait is subjective, even bodily: the city as pressure in the chest, as vertigo, as glare and speed. That’s not a retreat from reality. It’s a claim that the lived reality of modernity is sensation before it is structure.

The intent is partly defensive and partly insurgent. O'Keeffe arrived in New York through Alfred Stieglitz’s orbit, a scene that sold the city as the future and the artist as its witness. But she refuses to be a stenographer for industry. Her skyscraper paintings don’t read like architectural renderings; they loom, crop, and simplify, turning steel into feeling. “As it is felt” gives her license to distort scale, drain detail, and heighten mood without apologizing for “inaccuracy.” The subtext: objectivity is its own pose, and often a male-coded one.

Context matters: the 1920s city was a machine of ambition, noise, and acceleration, newly vertical and aggressively mythologized. O'Keeffe’s sentence converts that spectacle into interior experience. It’s also a quiet manifesto for modern art itself: representation isn’t copying; it’s translation. New York becomes less a place than a state of mind - and that’s why her version still reads as New York.