GEORGINA KLITGAARD (1893-1976)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Georgina Klitgaard (1893-1976)
Georgina Berrian was born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York in 1893. She was educated at Barnard College and studied at the National Academy of Design in New York. She married the Danish-born mariner, artist, and writer Kaj Klitgaard in 1919. After visiting friends in Woodstock, the couple became committed to the area and built a home in 1922 in Bearsville which provided a panoramic view of the mountains and valleys of Woodstock.
Georgina Klitgaard’s first exhibition in New York was held at the Whitney Studio Club from Dec. 20, 1927 to Jan. 7, 1928. She exhibited five oil paintings and two watercolors. She also exhibited a painting Carousel in the Whitney Studio Club’s famous exhibition Circus in Paint in 1929. Klitgaard’s New York dealer was the prestigious Frank Rehn Galleries, where she began to exhibit in 1930, continuing that relationship into the 1950s. She had solo exhibitions with the Milch Gallery in New York in 1939 and 1940. By the late 1920s, Klitgaard began to show works at museum invitationals. She sent work to the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania each year from 1928 to 1949. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC invited Klitgaard to exhibit each year from 1930 to 1945. Klitgaard also exhibited works at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1930 to 1945 annually. Klitgaard had a solo exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester in 1934.
Klitgaard was also invited to exhibit regularly at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1927 to 1944. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an important patron to Klitgaard, acquiring five works in the early 1930s. From Klitgaard’s submissions to the Whitney annual we see that she summered in Nantucket and visited Florida in the winters. Klitgaard exhibited a Nantucket watercolor in the Whitney annual in 1933 and a Florida subject in 1936.
In 1933 Georgina Klitgaard received a Guggenheim Fellowship which provided funds to travel in Europe. In 1940 the family traveled around the U.S. while Kaj, himself now the recipient of a Guggenheim, wrote Through the American Landscape. During the Depression she was selected to paint murals in post offices in Pelham, Georgia and Goshen (1937) and Poughkeepsie (1940) in Upstate New York. With her murals close proximity to Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, the president personally viewed her Poughkeepsie mural and under his advice adjusted her depiction of a whaling ship. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired Girl and Child Under A Pine Tree, a colorful portrait, in 1939. By the 1940s Klitgaard’s work was also in the permanent collections of the Newark Museum; the New Britain Museum of American Art; and the Dayton Art Institute, as well as other public and private collections.
Klitgaard was a member of the Audubon Artists and the American Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Gravers. She had a studio in New York City located at 659 Fifth Avenue. Klitgaard died in 1976. In Klitgaard’s estate a few works from her travels to Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina remain, in addition to her summer work in Rhode Island and Nantucket. However, the bulk of her exhibited subjects were painted around the Woodstock or Bearsville area.