MFA Boston presents first-ever exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and British sculptor Henry Moore are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. Hailed as two titans of modernism, they have long been admired for their extraordinary distillations of natural forms into abstraction—O’Keeffe’s iconic paintings of flowers and Moore’s monumental public sculpture.

Now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), the major exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is the first to bring these two artists together, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing.

Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition includes paintings, sculptures and works on paper, as well as faithful recreations of each of the artist’s studios containing their tools and found objects. Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation.

“While many of our visitors here in Boston will know O’Keeffe’s work and reputation well, they might be less familiar with Moore, one of the most important British artists of the 20th century. The generous loans from the Henry Moore Foundation allow us to recreate the artist’s studio and will really help bring Moore alive and show how found objects played a role in the creation of his large-scale public sculpture,” said Courtney Harris, exhibition co-curator and the MFA’s Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture.

Through careful observation of their surroundings and the objects they collected, O’Keeffe and Moore reimagined natural forms—bones, stones, shells, flowers and the land itself—into dynamic abstractions. Each played with scale, exploring the effects of making small things large. They twisted and turned pieces in space, searching for balance, looking within their complex interiors and exploring how objects transform the spaces around them. The exhibition presents their works both individually and in dialogue, presenting unique juxtapositions such as O’Keeffe’s Red Tree, Yellow Sky and Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge (below).

O’Keeffe often envisioned how miniature forms might become monumental. In Red Tree, Yellow Sky she shows a small piece of wood against a distant landscape, conflating near and far, large and small. Moore similarly made a small thing enormous with Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge, inspired by the breastbone of a bird to create a figurative sculpture that twists in space and encourages viewers to walk around it.

In O’Keeffe’s Pelvis IV (above, back wall center), O’Keeffe plays with scale, depth, and perspective by showing an entire vista through the aperture of a sun-bleached pelvic bone. Her interest in simplification and negative space is mirrored in Moore’s reduction of the human figure to a simple curve in Reclining Figure Bone (above, sculpture at right). His choice of travertine, with its porous texture and off-white color, maintains its connection to his inspiration in a weathered animal bone.

“Looking at O’Keeffe and Moore together, we can see how both artists were inspired by and also made use of natural forms. O’Keeffe hoped that her paintings would make people pay attention to things they usually overlooked—the soft gradations of a flower petal, the patterns within a landscape, or the shapes between two objects. As O’Keeffe said herself, ‘to see takes time.’ The chance to see her work in person is not to be missed.”

Erica Hirshler, exhibition co-curator and the MFA’s Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore is on view at the MFA through January 20, 2025, in the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. Timed-entry tickets, which include general admission, are required for all visitors and can be reserved in advance on mfa.org or purchased at the Museum.

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