An organic alliance: Exhibit examines the parallels between Georgia O'Keeffe and sculptor Henry Moore

At first glance, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the sculptures of Henry Moore seem to have little in common.

A one-of-a-kind exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum proves otherwise by uniting these artists for the first time.

A traveling exhibit, organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, shows that while the pair worked on different continents, their careers and contributions to the artistic development of the 20th century reveal many parallels. The show features 65 works of art from each.

While Georgia O’Keeffe was holding up a small pelvic bone of a gray fox against the New Mexico sky, framing the landscape and imagining the curve of the bone on a vast scale, the British artist Henry Moore, 11 years her junior and halfway around the world, was also holding up small bones and other objects against the sky, peering through their apertures to the open landscape and sheep fields of Hertfordshire.

San Diego Museum of Art curator Anita Feldman first noticed the parallels when she visited Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum for a conference in 2015. Feldman worked at the Henry Moore Foundation for 18 years. She also works as deputy director for curatorial affairs and education.

“That was the first time I had seen her studio, and I was really struck by the similarities,” Feldman said. “They both held up really small pieces of bone to the sky and looked through the world around them.”

While other Modernist artists also used natural forms as a pathway to abstraction, no other artists apart from O’Keeffe and Moore centered their art on this fundamental technique. Both amassed great collections over their lifetimes of animal skulls and bones, gnarled tree roots and twisted driftwood, smooth and hollowed river and flint stones, internal coils of seashells and interlocking pebbles, and drew from its vast resources daily, fusing the shapes of the human figure in plaster and terra-cotta with those of the natural world, and questioning our relationship with the environment.

Moore mused, “The value of certain types of modern sculpture may be that it opens people’s eyes to nature, that they pick up things which they wouldn’t look at otherwise; and they look at things with a new eye.” The sentiment is echoed in the reminiscences of O’Keeffe: “I have picked flowers where I found them. I have picked up seashells and rocks and pieces of wood where there were seashells and rocks and pieces of wood that I liked … I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

Both artists worked briefly in Surrealism, played with scale, paired forms together, exploring their sensitivity to textures and light.

The exhibition recreates the artists’ studios.

Moore coined his a “library of natural forms.” The items showcased include both cow and sheep bones from local fields, as well as the skull of a rhinoceros, a giraffe neck bone and minke whale vertebra, given to him by a zoologist friend.

“For these artists, bones were very alive,” Feldman said. “(O’Keeffe) said the bones were more alive than the animals walking around.”

Moore enhanced the relationship of his works to their environment by incorporating space within them. He broke the figure into multiple parts and pierced his sculptures to create holes, making space a part of the sculpture and bringing the landscape into the very form of the work.

Professionally, both received solo shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in post-World War II 1946.

The museum “spent that year devoted to these two artists,” Feldman said. “Their work is so life-affirming, based on nature. We’ve kind of lost that pathway in modern art.”

While O’Keeffe traded New York for Abiquiú, Moore left London during the Blitz for Hertfordshire and its surrounding farms. Best known for his mammoth public art sculptures, the artist worked primarily on a much smaller scale, Feldman said.

An organic alliance: Exhibit examines the parallels between Georgia O'Keeffe and sculptor Henry Moore

“He enlarged only 10% of his ideas,” she said.

Moore worked in stone, wood and even stalactites from caves.

“You can even start seeing O’Keeffe’s flower paintings in a new way,” Feldman continued. “Historically, they’ve been interpreted sexually, which O’Keeffe vehemently denied.

“They’re both exploring the relationships of forms,” she continued. “It just gives you a different way of looking at her work that isn’t gender-based. It is the way women artists were looked at at the time.”

Both were heavily influenced by photography — O’Keeffe by her husband, the impresario Alfred Stieglitz, as well as Ansel Adams and Todd Webb. O’Keeffe used their cropping techniques in her compositions. Moore also worked with photographers.

Both were considered iconic artists in their own countries.

“Her work was often seen as the epitome of American painting,” Feldman said. “Moore was also very much seen as this national symbol,” Feldman said.

“His work resonates in a very humanistic way,” she added. “He works in very abstract and representational ways. He didn’t see an inherent contradiction; he embraced everything.

“After the war, there was a need for new public sculptures,” Feldman continued. “His family groups speak to the everyday person. They speak to all communities. That was a very new kind of public sculpture.”

Before Moore, public sculptures usually referenced some version of equestrians, military heroes or royalty.

In 1986, both Modernist icons died, and with their passing came the end of a watershed artistic era. The two met once in 1946 during Moore’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. O’Keeffe had her retrospective there, MoMA’s first of a woman artist, only a few months earlier.