Painter Georgia O’Keeffe and sculptor Henry Moore were contemporaries who never met, but their art speaks to a similar perspective on the natural world. A new exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, reveals these connections and more ways the artists were “in conversation” with the worlds around them.
While O’Keeffe was in New Mexico holding animal skulls up to the sky to see how light shone through them, Moore was surrounding himself with similar found objects from nature in his studio in Hertfordshire, England.
At the new exhibit in Boston, see faithful recreations of each of the artists’ studios containing their tools and found objects, as well as O’Keeffe’s luminous paintings and Moore’s large-scale public sculptures.
“O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects,” Erica Hirshler, the Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the MFA, said in a statement about the exhibit. “As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed.”
The exhibit, simply titled Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, is the first to bring together these two artists and presents their works individually, as well as juxtaposed with one another to illuminate ideas like playing with scale and negative space. It includes more than 150 works of art, including drawings and photographs by other artists, that reimagine natural forms as dynamic abstractions and tell us more about O’Keeffe and Moore’s way of seeing things.
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is organized by the San Diego Museum of Art as an unprecedented collaboration between the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation. Before Boston the exhibit also stopped in Montreal. It’s on view at the MFA from October 13 through January 20, 2025, in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. It requires timed-entry tickets, which include general admission.
