Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street
Williamstown, Massachusetts
7 June - 7 September 2009
Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and haunting depictions of the American southwest have secured her position as the most significant American female artist of the twentieth century.
O’Keeffe, often linked with her husband Alfred Stieglitz, credits the American modernist painter Arthur Dove as having the most significant role in the formation of her abstract works.
Dove/O’Keeffe is the first exhibition to explore Dove’s role in O’Keeffe’s early artistic development as well as O’Keeffe’s influence on his work.
From the start of her career, O’Keeffe credited a reproduction of a Dove pastel as her introduction to modernism.
Dove’s use of sensual, abstract forms to evoke the flowing rhythms and patterns of nature had already put him at the forefront of the American modernist movement by the time O’Keeffe entered the scene in 1916.
Both artists were featured at renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery “291”: Dove in 1912, O’Keeffe in 1916.
During the 1920s and ‘30s, critics began to take serious note of the two artists as major American modernist painters, often pairing and comparing them.
In the 1930s, Dove began to look to early O’Keeffe watercolors like Sunrise (1916) for inspiration, long after O’Keeffe had abandoned the medium.
During this period Dove credits O’Keeffe’s “burning water colors” as a means through which he renewed his own work and vision.
Although Dove and O’Keeffe’s approach to imagery ultimately diverged, their shared interest in capturing the ephemeral, fugitive traits of nature such as the play of light on water, the transitions of the sun and moon, and the rustle of the wind through grass, was the basis for an abiding commitment to each other’s works and a profound aesthetic connection that lasted throughout their lifetimes.
This exhibition is organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.
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