Georgina Klitgaard - Personal Background Information

The landscape is forever demanding that some broad synthesis be reached, comparable perhaps to coming to terms with life itself. The painter must escape from the cross section, and if he is confronted with a ‘view’ he must organize the multitude of small forms of the panorama towards the largeness, weight and the sense of deep space which the landscape primarily provoked.

Georgina Klitgaard, “Landscape Painting,” from The Art of The Artist,
              compiled by Arthur Zaidenberg, Crown, New York, 1951

Georgina Klitgaard;  American Regionalist

Successful during a prolific career as a painter, muralist and lithographer, Woodstock artist Georgina Klitgaard  (1893-1976)  was described by art critic Lloyd Goodrich as “one of America’s foremost woman landscape painters.” This warm, mysterious woman, who studied at the National Academy of Design, is superb without qualification.  The secluded (some say isolated) Bearsville residence she and her husband built in 1922 provided a panoramic view of the mountains and valleys of Woodstock, which she delighted in painting as the seasons changed.  The elegance of Klitgaard’s work is unsurpassed. Her skill and perfect pitch never failed her.

Long after her last exhibit in 1974, this fine painter is being reexamined in a comprehensive retrospective at the Fletcher Gallery in Woodstock, N.Y.  The show is a tribute in memory of her youngest son, Wallace Klitgaard, Ph.D., a biologist who died in 2006 leaving an invaluable store of art and the wish that his mother’s paintings be seen again.

Her first solo New York show at the Whitney Studio Club in 1927 was followed by exhibits and accolades from the Chicago and Carnegie Art Institutes, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, to name a few.  Her 1930s Works Progress Administration murals grace the post offices of Poughkeepsie and Goshen, N.Y. and Pelham, Georgia. The White House includes her work in its permanent collection.

Klitgaard won a Guggenheim in 1933 for creative work executed in Europe. Pennsylvania Academy’s Jennie Sesnan Gold Medal for the watercolor “Winter Wheat” came to her during the same period. “Girl and Child Under A Pine Tree,” a colorful portrait featuring a chubby, incandescent infant, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1939.

Because the artist’s perceptions were so clear and her tastes so subtle, she was able to blend a spectrum of styles seamlessly, gracefully straddling the contentious chasm between realism and expressionism. She influenced American Regionalism during the 1930s, while subtly infusing her oil paintings with modernist elements and personal symbolism. Fog rising on mountains with flowering trees yields comparisons to Chinese scroll painting; depictions of farm life have a primitive flavor and are full of humor.  Klitgaard can be compared to such diverse artists as Brueghel, Cezanne, John Carlson, Eugene Speicher, Arnold Wiltz and Doris Lee.

In watercolor, she moves closer to abstraction. Lush still lifes and tidewater scenes reflect bright sunlight from geometric forms.  Although shorelines may include industrial buildings in the precisionist mode, Klitgaard’s interpretations remained nuanced. Her work has been said to exude “a cool detached lyricism. Perhaps objectivity catalyzed the freedom her landscapes demanded. As old photographs of the work fade, modernistic underpinnings become more apparent, like viewing a stage set through a scrim.

“I have come to build upon a non-objective design, using geometrical forms which are an interpretation of nature’s unity and emphasis. These forms are universals and supply the basic structure which the cross section of nature lacks, but which nature possesses as a whole,” she stated in The Art of the Artist.

Personally, Georgina was known for her simple elegance, the ability to balance creativity with the needs of her family, and her sparkling, down-to-earth personality. Born Georgina Berrian in the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood of New York City in 1893, she graduated from Barnard College. Her mother was an artist. Georgina proved to be a feisty feminist when challenged by a traditionally-minded Barnard dean.

She married Danish-born mariner, artist and writer Kaj Klitgaard in 1919. The couple visited friends in Woodstock, bought land and commenced a country life. While the painter painted, Kaj wrote and illustrated books. They had two sons, Peter and Wallace. In 1940 the family traveled around the U.S. while Kaj, himself now the recipient of a Guggenheim, wrote Through the American Landscape. Later, while Kaj was steering Liberty ships through treacherous seas, Georgina was living with her sons on the mountain, which required her to walk to the Bearsville Store for supplies. The return trip was a steep uphill hike.

In 1939 she won a W.P.A. competition to depict the Hudson River waterfront at Poughkeepsie as it appeared in 1840, based on a Barber and Howe woodcut. Her entry was chosen over that of her friend, Charles Rosen, according to Rosen’s granddaughter, Woodstock resident Kit Worthington Taylor. Rosen was selected, however, to depict the same scene one hundred years later, in 1940. Both murals grace the Poughkeepsie post office. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who resided locally at Hyde Park, followed Klitgaard’s progress with great interest.

Among the second wave of artists to settle in Woodstock (along with Rosen, Speicher, Konrad Cramer and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and others) her work appeared regularly at Rehn Galleries in New York City. She categorized her work in four time periods, starting with her arrival in Woodstock and her emergence as an artist, encouraged by Speicher, Paul Rohland, George Biddle and Julian Bloch; the Depression era, when she created murals; rugged winters on the mountain during World War II; and the years following her husband’s death in 1954, when various foundation grants led to travel and write. During the late period she spent winters at a small residence on Bellows Lane in Woodstock village, but always returned to Bearsville in the spring.

Klitgaard chronicled the moods of nature when Woodstock was still mostly farmland, with plowed fields, horses and oxen, open meadows and orchards blooming on curvaceous hills. The subjects extend far beyond the local scenery, however, as does the painter’s reputation.
 
Olivia Twine

 

Sources:

Sam Klein Archives of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum
 Letters and photographs from the Estate of Wallace Klitgaard, courtesy of Heidi Lennox.
“Landscape Painting,” Art of the Artist, Theories and Techniques of Art by the Artists Themselves,
    Compiled by Arthur Zaidenberg, Crown Publishers, New York, 1951.
Artist in Woodstock,  Louise Ault, Dorrance, 1978.
Through the American Landscape, Kaj Klitgaard, U.N.C., 1941;
Unexpected Eloquence; The Art in American Folk Art, Howard Rose, publisher:  RaySaroff/Edith Blum Art Institute, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, 1990.
Interview with Jean Lasher Gaede.
Interview with Heidi Lennox.