“Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art”

While Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore did meet once, they did not maintain a correspondence. They worked in different media and lived on opposite sides of an ocean. Curators of “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art” emphasize similarities such as the large families they were born into, their coinciding retrospectives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1946, their rural retreats in the second half of their lives and their deaths, both in 1986.

It is not only their “coherent vision” that is paramount in the exhibition; these artists had a “shared reliance on organic forms as a pathway to abstraction.” The exhibition frontis also tells us that the “comparable artistic explorations engaged them in a dialogue across space and time.” With this in mind, it is surprising that within the substantial 247-page catalogue, no reason is provided for the dialogue or even addressed by scholars, as if these commonalities were pure coincidence.

With generous loans from Texas to the Tate, the show assembles around 150 maquettes and masterpieces in oil, bronze, marble and fibreglass, creating a feast for the eyes. Some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s canvases were gleaming, indicating they have been either carefully stored or recently restored. To this, the sheer joy of seeing so many landscapes suggested that her oeuvre had been mis-marketed with a bias toward her flowers. Augmenting the works, gallery walls were painted in hues evoking the burnt siennas of O’Keeffe’s desert ranch and the mossy greens of Moore’s Albion. These shades served as a binding agent, providing a sumptuous backdrop to the pieces, along with shaped walls that echoed rounded compositional elements.

While elements such as these trumpet complementary dialogues between painting and sculpture, scholars otherwise overlooked the magic ingredient, literally the elephant in the room, that would have explained the shared aesthetics between these “Giants of Modern Art.” Located in the heart of the cities both artists called home were extensive repositories of deep time laid bare for all to see. Specifically, the public collections in natural history museums of New York and London that played such a central role in the urban experience of those cities exhibited geological and paleontological discoveries that had been unearthed in recent years. These included the massive fossilized bones belonging to sauropod dinosaurs such as the apatosaurus, brachiosaur and brontosaurus, fragments of which had only recently been unearthed in the Bone Wars of the American West. Proudly displayed in public collections of museum halls to raucous acclaim, these “giant lizards” achieved notoriety particularly after a massive composite mount of Diplodocus carnegii was displayed in New York after 1907. “Dippy” became so popular that the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh circulated plaster casts around the world. Their first destination was London, where Moore was living. These monumental fossils must surely have impacted the young sculptor, as he spent much of his career registering the bulbous forms, concave/convex surfaces and towering scales, reworking the alien morphologies into monumental works such as The Arch, located in London’s Kensington Gardens. He also emulated the rough-hewn and chalky surfaces using his own fibreglass and travertine materials. In the Montreal show, we see this in works such as Reclining Figure: Bone and Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge.

Though most of the works in the show were completed prior to the artists’ rural retreats, the exhibition restages both artists’ studios of their later years, offering insights into their artistic practice and collecting habits. Their procurement of animal bones, stones and other natural detritus mirrors the displays they would have seen at their local natural history museums. Moore’s studio contained elephant and rhinoceros skulls and whale vertebrae; his studio looked more like the laboratories of London’s Natural History Museum, where paleontologists “restored” musculature to fossil fragments. Indeed, photographs of naturalist technicians working on fossil reconstructions look conspicuously similar to Moore working in his studio. Similarly, O’Keeffe’s studio evinces collections of stones arranged neatly along windowpanes, replicating the vitrine specimens she must have seen in geological collections. It should be noted that these proclivities were hardly modern; rather, they were common practice among both gentlemen scientists and novice collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, who displayed similar specimens in their cabinets of curiosity well into the 20th century.

It cannot be denied that “O’Keeffe and Moore” is a resounding crowd-pleaser; the Montreal museum welcomed 25,000 visitors in its first six weeks. Popular as the exhibition is, the exclusion of this connection to natural history was a missed opportunity by scholars; it would have underscored rather than detracted from the exhibition concept by providing the glue that rationalized the coupling of these unlikely bedfellows. Stronger scholarship would have cemented some of the most consequential developments in 20th-century art so convincingly achieved at the Montreal museum, and Moore and O’Keeffe’s duet continues to reverberate in today’s sensibilities. Indeed, we need only glance through the interior catalogues of West Elm, Crate & Barrel or Restoration Hardware to find their palettes and forms recreated for contemporary consumers, revealing that biomorphism has gone mainstream and is very much part of our present-day zeitgeist. The strongest testament to this point can be found in the Gilder Center at New York’s present-day Natural History Museum, which opened in 2023. With its curvilinear hallways and rounded windows, it could be described as an oversized Henry Moore sculpture, suggesting that the visual languages of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore have come full circle. ❚

“Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art” was exhibited at Musée des beauxarts de Montréal, Montreal, from February 10, 2024, to June 2, 2024.

Alexandra Karl has been a member of International Association of Art Critics since 2018. Links to her articles and projects can be found at www.alexandra-karl.com.