Georgina Klitgaard (1893 – 1976)

Georgina Klitgaard  (1893 – 1976) The Ledge, by 1931, oil on canvas, signed lower right, 32 1/8 x 50 1/8 inches, exhibited: 1) 44th Annual Exhibition of American Paintings & Sculpture, Art Institute of Chicago, October 29 – December 13, 1931, no. 102; and 2) Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Georgina Klitgaard, Capricorn Gallery, Bethesda, MD, June 22 – July 21, 1974; literature: Jonas, Louise, Her Light Became a Symbol of Courage, Poughkeepsie Sunday Reporter, November 21, 1943 (illustrated)

$20,000

The Ledge is an important and personal painting, depicting the artist’s husband, writer and sometimes artist, Kaj Klitgaard, sitting in front of their much beloved home in New York’s Catskill Mountains. In the early 1920s, the Klitgaards discovered a peaceful promontory on the sunny side of Mount Tobias above an expansive valley near the Woodstock artists colony. Without much consideration for the practicalities of living on an uninhabited hilltop, the Klitgaards built a shiplap shack with a fireplace. Soon after construction, Kaj went to sea to earn money, while Georgina stayed behind, alone in the small cottage without electricity or running water. Working alone, Georgina painted all day and into the night. When Kaj returned home the following year, Georgina recalled, “we seriously set about making a go of painting and writing.” As they pursued their respective crafts during the 1920s, the Klitgaards expanded the house and their family, as Georgina gave birth to the couple’s son, Peter. To the little cottage, the couple added more rooms and field stone cladding to the shiplap walls, resulting in the home featured in The Ledge. Eventually electricity and a pump to deliver running water up the hill were added so that by the end of the decade the home and studio became a cozy, if still isolated, refuge for the Klitgaards’ creativity. Georgina developed her innovative visual vocabulary from within the walls of the home that would become famous in the Woodstock area as “the Ledge.”

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, where she exhibited The Ledge in 1931. 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.