Boston Art: O’Keeffe & Moore at the MFA

This expansive and informative exhibit celebrates the work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, two contemporaries who explored similar subject matter and themes, but never met. (Much of her work was created in seclusion in New Mexico, his on a remote farm in Hertfordshire, in the UK.) I’m a huge O’Keeffe fan. I’ve been to a week-long painting workshop at Ghost Ranch in the simmering heat (where I had to avoid rattlesnakes while hiking), visited the O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and her home studio in Abiquiú, and gone to several O’Keeffe exhibits over the years. I was surprised to gain so many new insights into O’Keeffe and her work from this show. Among them: the one encounter of sorts between O’Keeffe and Moore was that the Museum of Modern Art gave each of them a retrospective in the same year: 1946. (O’Keeffe’s was the first retrospective of a woman artist.)

Inside the Studio

Georgia O’Keeffe’s home studio in Abiquiú, New Mexico, recreated  

The recreated studios of both artists add an extra dimension to this exhibit, while revealing key similarities and differences between them. These full-scale studios contain found objects, tools, work aprons, and art supplies from the artists’ actual studios, on loan from the respective foundations. Moore’s studio floor is plaster-splattered, and all his work and storage surfaces are cluttered. O’Keeffe’s studio is pristine and spare; nothing is out of place. Moore has an eclectic, scattered collection of found objects, while O’Keeffe’s found objects are more like a staged and highly curated Instagram feed. But there are commonalities among the objects collected that echo throughout the works they created. Both were avid collectors of bones, stones, skulls, horns, shells, and other natural fragments, gathered during long walks outdoors. (It’s not clear where the shell with attached coral that formed the inspiration for Moore’s fabulous Mother and Child sculpture was found, but shells and shell spirals and patterns were important to both artists. O’Keeffe collected many of her shells here in Maine, during multiple visits to Long Sands Beach in York.) Their collections held totemic appeal for them, and offered both inspiration and solace.  

Henry Moore’s sculpture studio in Hertfordshire, UK, recreated down to the plaster-splattered floor

Moore’s studio also features a wonderful video where he talks about his process, and the importance of play and chance. For new sculpture ideas, Moore would work very small at first, often by creating a plaster cast of found objects. He would then hold the small model sculpture (maquette) up and look through its open spaces, turning it around in his hands to view it from every angle. Working with plaster enabled him to combine objects, carve away or add to them. Only after perfecting a sculpture’s shape would he begin to scale up. I remember Art History 101 with Vincent Sculley, and his insistence that we walk around a sculpture and view it from every angle, observing every facet of the surface. Walking through this show and around the sculptures, I felt that of all the sculptures I’ve seen, Moore’s offer the most rewarding views of this “walk around” approach, far more rewarding than classical sculpture.   

Sculpture

This exhibit abounds with sculpture, including more than 80 of Moore’s works at differing scale, including maquettes. A maquette is small-scale model for a larger sculpture, created to visualize how it might look and sometimes to work out approaches and materials for how it might be made. Maquettes are often fascinating works of art on their own, conveying the immediacy of the artist’s first conceptualization of an idea. This is certainly the case with the maquette for Moore’s Mother and Child Statue. A small wall case includes both the found object (shell, with coral attached) and the maquette. In the center of the room is the much larger, final sculpture in stalactite.

Henry Moore, found shell and maquette for Mother and Child

Henry Moore, Mother and Child, stalactite

One of my biggest surprises from this exhibition was to learn that O’Keeffe was also a sculptor. She created at least three major sculptures in her life, including the one included in this exhibit. O’Keeffe came up with the idea for these sculptures very early on in her career. The maquette for her first Abstraction, a form reminiscent of a mourning figure created in the year of her mother’s death, was created in 1916, but not cast until 1979. The sculpture highlighted in this exhibition, also titled Abstraction, was conceptualized and created as a maquette in 1946, but wasn’t cast until 1979. It features a prominent spiral form that is reminiscent of both shell spirals and flowers, and it stands in the center of a small room, surrounded by O’Keeffe flower paintings. (Overall, there are far fewer flower paintings in this show than landscape paintings.)

Georgia O’Keeffe, Abstraction, 1946, cast 1979-1980, white lacquered bronze

"When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment," wrote O'Keeffe. "I want to give that world to someone else." I was quite taken with the cast shadows of this sculpture, and their radiating flower-like forms. While she is known for her vividly colored flower paintings that are often interpreted as having sexual connotations (which she insistently denied), one of my favorite flower paintings in this show, The White Calico Flower, is in a more muted color scheme.

Georgia O’Keeffe, The White Calico Flower, 1931, oil on canvas

Once a maquette is created, calipers are used to measure the form along all of its various dimensions; it can then be enlarged to any size. This was the case with the O’Keeffe sculpture on display here, Abstraction, which was cast in various materials in different sizes throughout her life. The version in the exhibit, which is about four feet tall was cast in bronze then coated in white lacquer. In one of the more iconic images of O’Keeffe, she is shown standing next to a ten foot tall version of this statue, which was executed in dark aluminum. An interesting aside: in this  photo she is wearing an brooch of her initials (OK) made for her by Alexander Calder, one of the few pieces of jewelry she ever wore. Calder shared O’Keeffe’s fascination with shell spirals and other organic shapes. O’Keeffe had this brooch, originally cast in brass, recreated in silver once her hair faded from black to gray, then white, as she thought that silver would be more flattering to her appearance. She preferred to wear the brooch vertically (with the letter K below the letter O).  

Georgia O’Keeffe posing in front of a ten-foot high version of her Abstraction sculpture

This show, a celebration of shape and form, is enhanced by the inclusion of select photographs by Edward and Brett Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and others, providing a broader context for the focus on "organic abstraction." Like O'Keeffe and Moore, these photographers turned stones, shells, and flowers into thoroughly modern compositions. By isolating small elements of shapes or color gradations within larger objects, or by emphasizing the spaces between objects, they sought to make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked. These are all images that encourage close, slow looking, for, as O’Keeffe said, “to see takes time.” 

 Playing with Scale

Georgia O’Keeffe, Purple Hills, 1935, oil on canvas (top) and Back of Marie's No. 4, 1931, oil on canvas

Both O’Keefe and Moore experimented with unusual perspectives and shifts in scale. O’Keeffe often exaggerated scale in her landscapes, conveying monumental forms with monumental simplicity. There would often be only a thin squiggle of bright blue sky at the top of a painting, providing a chromatic contrast to the massive ochre or red rocks. (In Cliffs Beyond Abiquiú, there’s the tiniest triangle of blue sky at the top of the steep cliff walls.) Both the simplification and exaggeration of form were a result of her following the teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow, who was in turn inspired by Japanese artists such as Hokusai. Dow stressed composition over imitation, and the importance of reducing shapes to their essence.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Cliffs Beyond Abiquiú, Dry Waterfall, 1943, oil on canvas

O’Keeffe sometimes used these massive forms as a backdrop for enlarged skulls or bones, often floating in the air, Surrealist-fashion. She created several paintings of her beloved Pedernal mountain using the holes in pelvis bones as a framing device. As a New Englander, I’ve always found the skulls and sun-bleached bones a little off-putting and morbid, but they clearly resonated with both O’Keeffe and Moore, who seemed to see them more as symbols of life than death. "The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive," she wrote. For O’Keeffe they were an inescapable part of the desert landscape she so loved. The wall label for Red Hills and Bones notes that the abundance of animal bones in the 1930s was attributable to abnormal weather (first snow, then drought), a U.S. Forestry Service project that cut off trails to water, and government-controlled killing of wild horses.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Hills and Bones, 1941, oil on canvas

Holes

The rooms in this exhibit are divided into key themes including “The Space Between,” “Looking Within,” “Nestled Forms,” “Flowers,” “Holes,” and “Looking Through.” For Moore and O'Keeffe, gaps and apertures provided novel ways of seeing: by looking through holes, fresh design opportunities arose. O’Keeffe painted several of her favorite vistas through holes in sun-bleached pelvic bones, enabling her to play with scale, depth, and perspective. She would often hold up bone fragments outside, looking through them at the brilliant blue Southwest sky, searching for the most interesting negative shape. subjects. She once said: "I was the sort of child that... ate around the hole in the doughnut, saving...the hole for the last and best…I like empty spaces... Holes can be very expressive."

Moore believed that a hole was "a shape in its own right, the solid body was encroached upon, eaten into, and sometimes the form was only the shell holding the hole." As O’Keeffe did, Moore more often held up bone fragments or maquettes against the sky, observing the negative spaces. He always wanted viewers of his sculptures to be as intrigued by the spaces between and around forms as they were by the material itself. And he favorite travertine as sculpture material, as its porous texture and off-white color was reminiscent of weathered animal bones.

With holes as a shared motif of these artists, the pairings related to holes are particularly fun. Here’s one such pairing:

Looking through a hole in Henry Moore’s sculpture to a hole in a pelvic bone in an O’Keeffe painting

A final note for artists: As you are pondering your artistic future and focus over the next four years of you-know-who, it’s interesting that both O’Keeffe and Moore moved to remote, rural locations in the 1940s, during an era ripe with the threats of Fascism and nuclear war. (Moore also endured Second World War air raids on London.) Both created some of their greatest works amidst terrifying times, while focusing their sights squarely on the beauty of the natural world.