Clark Art schedules Georgia O’Keefe Arthur Dove exhibition

An exhibition that explores the influence of Arthur Dove, the modernist American painter, on the abstract expressionism of Georgia O’Keefe is scheduled to run at The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA from June 7 through September 7, 2009. Entitled Dove/O’Keefe; Circles of Influence, the exhibition will feature 60 major oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and pastels spanning 1910 to the early 1940s. Among the seminal works on view will be O’Keeffe’s Dark Abstraction (1924) and Jack-in-The Pulpit No. VI (1930), and Dove’s Moon (1935) and Fog Horns (1929).

Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack-in-Pulpit – No. 2, 1930. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe [Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.]

Dove inspired O’Keefe from the start

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 around 1916. Dove had been featured at the renowned photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery “291″ in 1912, and O’Keeffe’s work was first shown there in 1916. Works from this period, including Dove’s Abstraction, No. 3 (1910-11) and O’Keeffe’s No. 24-Special/No. 24 (1916-17), established the innovative aesthetic vision
that characterized their early work.

Arthur Dove, Sunrise, 1924. Oil on panel, 18 1/4 x 20 7/8 in. (46.4 x 53 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum. Gift of Mrs. Edward R. Wehr [Milwaukee Art Museum (photo by John R. Glembin); Courtesy of and copyright The Estate of Arthur Dove / Courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.]

The exhibition is organized by the Clark and is curated by Debra Bricker Balken, an independent curator specializing in American modernism and contemporary art who organized a Dove retrospective in 1997. The Clark published an exhibition catalogue authored by Balken and distributed by Yale University Press. This is the first publication to focus on the relationship between Dove and O’Keeffe and explores the nature of art criticism in the early twentieth century as it related to psychoanalytic thought and formalism.

Balken will explore how Dove and O’Keeffe shaped each other’s work and ideas about modern art within the avant-garde culture of early-twentieth-century New York in her opening lecture “Dove, O’Keeffe, and the Critics” at 3 pm on Sunday, June 7. Admission to the lecture is free.