Georgina Klitgaard (1893 – 1976)

Johnny Walker’s Place, by 1929, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 34 x 42 inches, exhibited 1) 28th International Exhibition of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, October 17 – December 8, 1929, no. 47; and 2) 126th Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, January 25 – March 15, 1931, no. 137 

$18,000

During the 1920s and 30s, Georgina Klitgaard, a native New Yorker, became one of the most accomplished female artists working in the United States. Her unique form of American Scene painting combined Regionalism with a naïve version of modernism. Klitgaard studied at Barnard College, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. She had an early show in 1927 at the Whitney Club. By 1929, she was represented by New York’s important Rehn Galleries, which represented the artist into the 1960s. Klitgaard was a frequent exhibitor at the nation’s most significant museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), the Corcoran Gallery, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. She exhibited Johnny Walker’s Place at PAFA and the Carnegie in 1929 and 1931, respectively. She was also a frequent prize winner, taking home honors from PAFA, the Carnegie, and the San Francisco Art Association, among others. In 1933, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Later during the Great Depression, she was commissioned by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Arts to complete a mural for the post office in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the Woodstock Art Association, and many other public and private collections. She is listed in Who was Who in American Art and other standard references.