The odd couple: O’Keeffe and Moore at Montreal Museum

When an art museum pairs a painter and a sculptor as if their distinction is without a difference, you can’t help questioning it. ?

The new exhibit at the Montral Museum of Art - “O’Keeffe and Moore: Giants of Modern Art” – presents these artists like a matched set owing to the fact that they were both modern artists with a bent on naturalism.

But isn’t that like saying there’s a commonality between, say, Michelangelo’s sculpture and Da Vinci’s painting because they were both Renaissance artists intent on the human form?

Saving art history?

Art News magazine heaps praise on the Montreal museum’s “talented curators” for making the connection between Moore and O’Keeffe, and for their contention that art history “has done itself a disservice by studying? O’Keeffe and more in isolation.”

“Isolation”? Since when does a focus on any one artist disserve art history? And what mutuality is there between Moore’s sculpture that evoke voluptuous reclining female and O’Keeffe’s painting of an ascetic pelvic bone?

What would O’Keeffe say?

And given Moore’s abstract evocations of the female form, would O’Keeffe be comfortable sharing her flower paintings in an exhibit space with him?

She has vehemently denied the general view that her signature paintings of flowers are pictures of female anatomy.

O'Keeffe was so embarrassed by the likening of her flower paintings to female genitalia that she told New York art critic Emily Genauer, who had remarked how perfect it was to see her carrying flowers: "I hate flowers. I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move.''

A possible rationale for Montreal Museum of Art to show these two artists together would be to use O’Keefe’s work to refute More’s beliefs.

Historian? Katherine Hoffman quotes Moore in her 1991 book “Explorations: The Visual Arts Since 1945” saying, “Appreciation of sculpture depends upon the ability to respond to form in three dimensions, and many people are “form-blind, rather than color-blind.

Where does that leave O’Keeffe who painted bones and blossoms to appear three-dimensional.

And when Moore said, “Each particular carving I make takes on in my mind a human...a personality,” where does that leave O’Keeffe’s paintings of stark bones that are so far from ?personality?

Perhaps a better artist? to pair O’Keeffe with, if you have to pair her with anyone, is Barbara Hepworth whose sculptures did not aim for what Moore sought – a persona. Her interest was mass and space in sculpture.

Hepworth’s “Pierced Stone,” for example, showing an opening in an otherwise solid shape, is a kind of play with a form’s outside and inside. And one look at O’Keerfe’s painting of a pelvic bone is a vision of outside and inside.

?Art News unwittingly tied Hepworth to O’Keeffe when it pictured? O’Keeffe, holding a pelvis bone to her eye, and catch the vision within, and quoting her saying, “Abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.”

Sounds like something Hepworth would say. Despite her use of impersonal geometric shapes – rectangles, spheres, cones and cylinders -? Hepworth’s work, like O’Keeffe’s, relates to nature.

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