By Trevor Fairbrother

The MFA’s Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore builds a case for two artists that many are inclined to think of as “unlikely bedfellows.” Brava! 

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ann and Graham Gund Gallery, Boston, through January 20

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: courtesy of the MFA

It puzzled me to learn that the San Diego Museum of Art had organized a large exhibition titled O’Keeffe and Moore. True, the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) and the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) both produced representational work that slanted lyrically towards abstraction. But don’t the differences between them outweigh the similarities? The project flagged one tie-in that I found intriguing: in 1946 New York’s Museum of Modern Art gave each of them a “retrospective.” O’Keeffe’s show opened in May and didn’t travel; Moore’s opened in December, then was staged in Chicago and San Francisco. The museum published a catalogue for Moore but not O’Keeffe. The artists met at MoMA’s December opening, but they did not correspond and there’s nothing to indicate they took a serious interest in each other’s work.

Anita Feldman, the exhibition’s curator, appears to be the first to pursue parallels between the lives and the art of O’Keeffe and Moore, but the accompanying publication she edited sheds little light on the project’s genesis. This spurred me to find the backstories that I summarize forthwith. I hope my inferences will enhance understanding of the show.

In the mid-’80s Anita Feldman moved from California to England to earn a master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She established a career in the UK after completing a thesis on the contemporary New York sculptor Richard Serra. During an 18-year stint at the Henry Moore Foundation she curated numerous exhibitions and wrote the first books on Moore’s textiles (2008) and his plasters (2011). She returned to the US in 2014 to serve as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at the San Diego Museum of Art. A 2015 visit to O’Keeffe’s residences in New Mexico inspired Feldman to develop the current exhibition.

The lightbulb moment occurred when she saw O’Keeffe’s collections of bones, seashells, stones, and the gnarled remains of trees. Feldman had long been familiar with the “treasure trove of natural forms” that Moore assembled with a very similar aesthetic motivation. She now looked for more connections between their practices. For example, in an era of Fascist threats and nuclear bombs, both artists moved permanently to rural settings. Moore opted for a village in Hertfordshire in 1940, O’Keeffe for the desert terrain of New Mexico in 1949. In their homes and work spaces they harbored shapely fragments gathered during forays in the natural world. Each collection had totemic allure for its owner and embodied a quest for solace through the close observation of nature.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: courtesy of the MFA

I learned from press coverage that Feldman’s installation in San Diego followed the interpretative framework presented in her catalogue essay. She began by using earlier works to introduce the artists. The goal was to demonstrate a shared interest in natural forms and reflect on their distinctive forays into the realms of non-objective art and Surrealism. Both explored surprising juxtapositions of images and ideas, including straight edges and curves, positive and negative spaces, and contrastive textures. They pushed for compositions in which nature, viewed in close-up, slips ambiguously into abstraction.

The next came the core of Feldman’s project: recreations of O’Keeffe’s and Moore’s individual studios, featuring dozens of curios and studio trappings from their estates. Any museum-born version of a historic interior inevitably feels ersatz and contrived, but the goal here was comparative as well as illustrational. Moore’s habitat suggested someone who was comfortable with a little chaos: it was askew, messy, and cluttered. O’Keeffe’s domain was shipshape: it emanated a stylishness and precision akin to the carefully finessed surfaces of her paintings.

The latter part of the installation in San Diego systematically compared each artist’s engagement with specific motifs: bones, horns and skulls; stones; flowers, shells, and the play of inner and outer forms. It concluded with works in which the artists brought a sense of landscape space into play with the natural forms they savored in their studio collections. Each paid tribute to the resilience and metaphoric power of bones.

For its presentation of O’Keeffe and Moore the MFA added about 40 works by numerous artists, all from its permanent collection. The website notes that an in-house curatorial team (Courtney Harris and Erica Hirshler) “customized this traveling exhibition for a Boston setting.” While this kind of adaptation is not unusual, in this instance the results ended up scrambling Feldman’s programmatic clarity. As far as I can tell, Feldman is not mentioned anywhere inside the galleries. Because the show was originally scheduled for three cities – San Diego, Albuquerque and Montreal – the MFA’s additions are not presented in the catalogue.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: courtesy of the MFA

In Boston the first smallish gallery is a gourmet sampler plate, an invitation to “open your eyes and mind to [the artists’] parallel rhythms.” The walls are painted reddish orange, riffing on O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952), one of the works the museum added. To my eyes, this lipstick-loud room is excessively hard on every work displayed in it, especially the stately and subtle O’Keeffe painting owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Red Hills and Bones, 1941). I imagine the MFA expects that this blazing start to impress its targeted audiences.

The second space – larger and off-white – presents the theme “O’Keeffe, Moore and Their Contemporaries.” It showcases the MFA’s large bronze by Barbara Hepworth, Rock Form (Porthcurno), which steals too much space to little end. The addition of 14 photographs is far more worthwhile.  It was disappointing not to find any of the MFA’s lovingly sensuous photographs of O’Keeffe taken by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz. Was this omission connected to the museum’s choice to downplay the topic of eroticism in its characterizations of Moore and O’Keeffe?The only whiff of this topic is a demurring comment about Weston’s photographs of shells included in a label text: “As was the case for O’Keeffe and her flowers, many viewers perceived sexual qualities in Weston’s photographs. Like O’Keeffe, he denied it. “I had no physical thoughts,” he said. “[I] never have. I worked with clearer vision of sheer aesthetic form.”

The middle of the exhibition houses the two studio reconstructions with separate areas for each artist. This is the moment when the MFA provides text panels that summarize each person’s life and work. The Moore zone makes scant effort to evoke for visitors the green and pastured countryside he loved; the corresponding O’Keeffe portion, on the other hand, features several fine paintings inspired by the landscapes of New Mexico and the buildings she owned there.

The beginning with the end of the MFA’s Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. Montage of photos: Trevor Fairbrother

The show ends with a suite of rooms that touch on the motifs that Feldman singled out to close her show in San Diego. In Boston, the thematic subgroups have whimsical titles: “Looking for Balance,” “The Space Between,” “Looking Within,” “Nestled Forms,” “Flowers,” “Looking Through,” and “Holes.” Happily, the last room retains Feldman’s crescendo: O’Keeffe’s predominantly blue and white paintings of landscapes and bones pictures surround Moore’s pale and monumental reclining figures. Critic Murray Whyte nailed it in the Boston Globe: “In a final gallery, the harmonies [between the artists] are so simpatico that they seem almost chummy. Reclining Figure Bone, a 1975 Moore sculpture in porous travertine that could be the fossil remains of an alien species abandoned on Earth millions of years ago, rests close to O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV, 1944, a view of a rising moon through the void of a cattle’s leg socket. Smooth but still so visceral, Moore’s piece suggests a point of view beyond the thing itself. Look past, and through, to truly see.”

It is helpful to consider O’Keeffe and Moore in the context of the demands of commercial enterprise Today, many museums speculate on novel ways to package crowd-pleasing “Giants of Modern Art,” which was the subtitle added for this show’s airing in Montreal. In what has become a passing parade of blockbusters, one often sees the word “and” used to announce a new spin on big-name artists. Prior to Feldman’s current gambit, other Americanists organized exhibitions titled O’Keeffe and New Mexico (2004), O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams (2008), O’Keeffe and the Camera (2008), O’Keeffe and the Fashion of Her Time (2020). In 2013, when Feldman was based in England, she curated a doubleheader titled Moore Rodin (2013). Perhaps the long sojourn abroad prepared and empowered her to make an O’Keeffe show that is “different.” She’s an outlier in the Americanist field. It is admirable that her topic came from a spark of inspiration in O’Keeffe’s studio. She diligently tracked similarities and built a case for two artists that many are inclined to think of as “unlikely bedfellows.” Brava!

Trevor Fairbrother just wrote a short text for Frank Egloff’s exhibition of recent paintings at Anthony Greaney, Somerville, MA. © 2024