Georgia O’Keefe

Art museums

~ MaryG ~ 22 Comments

My husband and I are very different. In fact, we’re almost complete opposites. He likes a lot of things that I will never ever be into like weightlifting in gyms, football and other contact sports like rugby, and hardcore (punk) music. I like a lot of things that he will never ever be into like singing in choirs, going to musicals, and swimming.

For many years, we just kind of did our own thing. I went to the beach with friends, while he stayed home and went to the gym…

But if you’re going to stay married to one person for your entire adult life, you must come up with at least a few shared activities, especially after your kids fly the coop, or you will have absolutely nothing interesting to talk about!

One of the things we both like to do is go to art museums. We have memberships at a few local museums and we go to their major exhibitions. Yesterday was the Georgia O’Keefe and Henry Moore exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

It was an interesting idea. They took two artists who worked in different mediums (a painter and a sculptor) in the same time period (early 20th century) and put them side by side. The idea was to see how they were grappling with similar themes in their work, especially nature and tension/balance between shapes, and appreciate how they influenced each other.

The galleries were quite crowded (a great sign for art museums!), but that made it a bit difficult to fully consider the interplay between the two artists. Still, I think I got the idea.

This gallery, with a large Moore sculpture in the foreground and O’Keefe paintings on the walls, shows what the curators were going for with this exhibit.

My husband liked the Moore sculptures best. Me? I just love those famous Georgia O’Keefe flower paintings. As many times as I’ve seen them reproduced as prints and posters, the originals are so nuanced and gorgeous. What can I say? I like flowers and pretty colors. (They sort of reminded me of the Northern Lights.)

And then, for something completely different, we took a stroll through a Salvador Dalí exhibit. The famous Spanish surrealist was truly an extraordinary painter. Interestingly, he was a contemporary of Moore and O’Keefe. All three lived through World War II—an event so monumental no artist was unaffected by it.

The Three Ages (Old Age, Adolescence and Infancy) by Dalí, 1940. If you look closely, each section of the painting is a double image (i.e. the left side is a standing, stooped figure and also an old man’s face).
“This painting revisits Dalí’s most famous composition, The Persistence of Memory, which by the early 1950s had become emblematic not only of Dalí, but also of the Surrealism movement.
Here Dali once again places melting watches in a barren landscape, but now the context is the post-war atomic age. An elaborate grid of bricks recedes toward the distant horizon, the boxy shapes becoming missile-like forms. Typical of the artist, the picture’s meaning is ambiguous, though very much of the nuclear era.”