Giants of Modern Art
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Georgia O’Keeffe, “Pelvis with the Distance,” 1943 (courtesy of Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/ Artists Rights Society, New York)
Two of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, crossed paths in 1946 when the two had back-to-back solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.
On the surface, the two seemed to have little in common, although both came from poor, large families and both were friends of Mexican superstar artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. O’Keeffe was an American best known for her extreme close-up paintings of sexually evocative flowers. Moore, a Briton, created massive, curvaceous bronze sculptures in varying degrees of abstraction.
Neither artist was known to express any particular interest in the work of the other.
But last year, the two artists were united in a travelling exhibition of their work, first at the San Diego Museum of Art, then at the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico and, now, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from Feb. 10 to June 2, 2024. It turns out the two icons have much in common.
Henry Moore at work in his maquette studio, about 1960, gelatin silver print (photo courtesy of The Henry Moore Foundation)
George O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art contains more than 120 examples of the two artists’ work. As the exhibition catalogue points out, both artists were inspired by the curving lines found in the natural world around them – especially in the shapes of bones, rocks, driftwood and shells, which they both collected obsessively. These same curving lines are echoed in O’Keeffe’s flowers and Moore’s sculptures. The similarities are often uncanny.
The curator of the exhibition, Anita Feldman, deputy director of curatorial affairs and education at the San Diego Museum of Art, began noticing these similarities in the two artists’ work about a decade ago after visiting O’Keeffe’s studios in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Previously Feldman had worked 18 years at the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, England.
Yousuf Karsh, “Georgia O’Keeffe,” 1956 (photo courtesy of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Estate of Yousuf Karsh)
As Feldman told the San Diego Union-Tribune, she suddenly began to see “connections,” an almost eerily “similar vision” shared by the two artists. “How can you look at O’Keeffe and say that she was just painting flowers? Or that she’s just painting women’s sexuality? When you see that she’s really focusing on form in a very sculptural way, it’s the same language that Henry Moore was working in.”
In O’Keeffe’s oil painting Pelvis with the Distance, 1943, a white animal pelvis is held aloft against a blue sky and similarly coloured hills. The lines of the pelvis are reminiscent of Moore’s white marble semi-abstract sculpture Thin Reclining Figure, 1979-80.
Georgia O’Keeffe, “Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. III,” 1930 (courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.)
Compare O’Keeffe’s oil painting, the phallic Jack-in-the Pulpit No. 3, 1930, with Moore’s Working Model for Upright Internal/External Form, 1951. O’Keeffe’s upright flower shows a spadix (the Jack) emerging from a hood-like spathe (the pulpit). Moore’s bronze sculpture is like an abstract version of O’Keeffe’s flower.
Georgia O’Keeffe, “Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettias,” 1936 (© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, photo courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)
Both artists were inspired by animal skulls as the exhibition reveals. O’Keeffe’s oil painting Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettias, 1936 depicts a weathered, disintegrating mule skull against a pale pink landscape. Moore’s etching Elephant Skull Plate XVIII, 1969, simply focuses on the curves of a skull in extreme close-up.
Henry Moore, “Elephant Skull: Plate XXVIII,” 1969 (courtesy of The Henry Moore Foundation)
The exhibition introduces us to the artists’ earliest works, their life drawings, early studies from nature and the influence of Surrealism. During the 1930s, Surrealism inspired O’Keeffe to explore dreamlike imagery and Moore to create what he called his transformation drawings, depicting natural forms metamorphosing into human figures.
At the heart of the exhibition are recreations of rural studios of O’Keeffe and Moore containing each artist’s vast collection of found objects. Their abrupt departures from the art centres of New York City and London occurred at similar moments in their artistic careers.
In 1941, following the bombing that damaged his home and studio in London, Moore relocated to Hertfordshire, England.
In 1946, O’Keeffe moved from New York to the desert of New Mexico, where she had spent many previous summers. Though they remained within reach of city life and did not retreat into complete social isolation, the artists chose country settings that offered each of them total immersion in the natural world.
Roger Wood, “Henry Moore in the top studio, Perry Green, with Upright Internal/External Form,” about 1953 (photo courtesy of The Henry Moore Foundation)
The O’Keeffe and Moore exhibitions in New York in 1946 raised the international profile of these two already-established artists. Reviews were positive except for the ones written by Clement Greenberg, one of America’s most influential art critics at the time.
Greenberg is perhaps best known in Canada for his visit in 1962 to the then-annual Emma Lake Workshop to mentor some Saskatchewan artists and, in some cases, to bless their art as only a New Yorker could do.
Greenberg claimed Moore’s sculptures lacked originality and O’Keeffe’s paintings had “very little inherent value.” Art scholars have speculated that Greenberg especially panned O’Keeffe because of his jealousy of Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe’s photographer husband, and the almost god-like promoter of certain genres of American modern art.
Stieglitz died in 1946 during O’Keeffe’s run at MOMA. Greenberg inherited his mantle, becoming America’s most influential critic of modern art. What influence – if any – Greenberg had on Moore and O’Keeffe has been reduced to little more than a gossipy footnote.
After their 1946 exhibitions, Moore and O’Keeffe continued their parallel ascents in the art world but they never met again. Both died in 1986.
Henry Moore, “Working Model for Upright Internal/External Form,” 1951 (courtesy of The Henry Moore Foundation)
And now, 78 years later, we are still studying their work, finding new ways to interpret, to exhibit and to find commonalities in their remarkable art.
“The two artists pioneered and shared a coherent vision and approach to modernism,” Feldman says in a catalogue essay. “While other modernist artists also used natural forms as a pathway to abstraction, notably Piet Mondrian and Hans Arp, no other artists apart from O’Keeffe and Moore centred their art on this fundamental aspect.” ■
George O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from Feb. 10 to June 2, 2024.
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