Visiting The Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore Exhibit at The Fine Arts Museum in Boston

That’s Jon,  looking at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, standing next to a Henry Moore sculpture.  I took the photo through another Moore sculpture.

There were five, or was it six rooms of paintings by O’Keeffe.  There were also photographs and painting  by other artists, like Edward Weston and Arthur Dove who were her contemporaries.  They all dealt with similar ideas and themes, mostly large abstracted  shapes, like the bones O’Keeffe was famous for painting.

I never thought much about Henry Moore’s sculpture.  I learned about him in my art history classes, but the abstracted figurative shapes never touched me.  Maybe I grew up seeing  too many bad copies of them.

Although when I walked into the first gallery at the O’Keeffe and Moore exhibit at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston yesterday,  I was struck by an oversized abstact sculpture by Henry Moore.  It reminded me so much of one of the bones I found in the woods and sits on the windowsill in my studio.  And at the same time it looked like it was reaching for the sky, about to fly away.

I found that the more abstract, the better I liked Moore’s sculpture.  And when I saw the three inch tall maquette positioned next to a broken sea shell, which was its inspiration, I was hooked.   As if I finally understood his work.

The galleries were crowded so I moved through them choosing to look at the pieces of art that no one else was looking at. I’d spot a painting with no one in front of it and move in close, as if claiming it as mine.

For a little while anyway.

I got homesick in the gallery with O’Keeffe’s  landscapes of New Mexico.   I lived in Taos and explored the surrounding area  for six months twenty five years ago.    It was so different from anything I knew yet it strangely felt like coming home.

It was the last gallery  with O’Keeffe’s bone and sky paintings and three large abstract Moore sculptures that I spent the most time.

When I walked in, I felt as if I’d entered a holy space.  In that room, even packed with  people I could breath.  I could feel the sun smoothed bones and smell the flowers as my eye reached into the nothingness of O’Keeffe’s skies.

Like the first sculpture of Henry Moores’s that I encountered on entering the exhibit, her bones too were floating and flying in space, free from everything that once kept them earthbound.

And it was as if Moore’s sculptures were their three dimensional counterpart.

I have to thank Jon for bringing us to this exhibit.  Without him, his flower photographs and his growing interest in Georgia O’Keeffe, we never would have gone.

And I never would have seen these two artists in a way I hadn’t before and do now.