Natural Moderns: Georgia O'Keeffe and Her Contemporaries
Cincinnati Art Museum
It seems odd, don't you think, that the Cincinnati Art Museum's permanent collection lacks even a single work by Georgia O'Keeffe, arguably one of the most recognizable names in 20th Century American art?
By this stage of the game, however, an O'Keeffe acquisition isn't about to happen anytime soon, according to Julie Aronson, curator of American painting and sculpture. The cost of an O'Keeffe is simply prohibited.
Her work, however, is at the center of Natural Moderns: Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Contemporaries, a small but powerful exhibition hanging through Jan. 14.
The show grew out of a trade (of sorts) when the CAM disassembled its spectacular Joan Miro mural to loan to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. While the museum doesn't normally engage in such bartering, Aronson said, the loan was so extraordinary that it seemed OK to ask for something in exchange.
Since the Phillips Collection's strong suit is Modernist American paintings - Duncan Phillips was an avid collector of O'Keeffe and others in the "Stieglitz Circle" that make up this exhibition - Aronson found this an opportunity to bolster (at least temporarily) the museum's deficiency.
The 11 paintings in the exhibition demonstrate how nature inspired American painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and O’Keeffe. Key works on display include O’Keeffe’s "Red Hills, Lake George" and Dove’s "Sand Barge."
The four artists were members of the famed Stieglitz Circle, named for photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who championed avant-garde art in America, Aronson said. Between the two World Wars, the Stieglitz Circle worked to define a distinctly American form of modernism.
Phillips, who had already exhibited the first Picassos and Matisses seen in American, soon began collecting their work. He even paid Dove a stipend for a while in exchange for first refusal rights to all of his paintings.
"They were all very passionate about nature, and that comes through in their work," Aronson said, "but their approaches were quite different.
“The artists utilized varying degrees of representation in these works, with Dove creating the most imaginative and abstract imagery of the four.”
“Visitors will see the adventurous and experimental nature of these artists through every painting in the exhibition,” she said.
The exhibition panels offer poetry and other writings by the artists that help explain their attachment to nature and how they attempted to depict the natural world through their eyes.
A version of this story originally appeared in Go!, the arts and entertainment section of the JournalNews, Hamilton, Ohio.
Painting information:
O'Keeffe, Georgia
Red Hills, Lake George
1927
Oil on canvas
27 x 32 in.; 68.58 x 81.28 cm.
Acquired 1945
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
