Georgina Klitgaard

Georgina Klitgard, born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York, in 1893, was an American artist. Klitgaard was known for panoramic landscape paintings of scenic New York from a bird's-eye view perspective. Her work was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, on April 14, 1929, and in The Art Digest, on November 1, 1929. She painted three murals in United States Post Offices during the Great Depression.

Education

Klitgard graduated from Barnard College and also studied art at the National Academy of Design. She married the Danish writer Kay Klitgaard in 1919. They lived in Bearsville, New York, near an artist colony at Woodstock, New York. She was among the List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1933.

Career

She painted the New Deal era mural Pelham Landscape (1941) at the United States Post Office at Pelham, Georgia. Klitgaard's mural The Running of the Hambletonian Stake at the United States Post Office (Goshen, New York) (a property listed on the National Register of Historic Places) was controversial for featuring harness racing, a subject deemed unworthy for public art. Postal murals of the era were supposed to focus on local history and contemporary life, but the Treasury Department's Fine Arts Section strongly objected to her intention to paint the track, since it considered harness racing to be an inappropriate subject for public art, asking her to paint a local landscape instead. The community indicated its strong support of the track, and she was allowed to paint it.

She died in 1976.