New York Street with Moon

A glowing orb of light hangs in the night sky above a narrow Manhattan canyon, a single ornate streetlamp burning between dark, looming buildings. Georgia O'Keeffe painted this, her first New York cityscape, against the doubts of her male colleagues that a woman could capture the modern metropolis. Now in the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, New York Street with Moon shows her precisionist modernism applied to the city - the towering architecture simplified into bold, clean forms, the glare of electric and lunar light turning the urban night into a stark, luminous abstraction.