O'Keeffe, "New York with Moon," 1925
I went to the non-library section of the Clark the other day for the first time in months to see “Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence“. Aside from its frankly dull title, it was a perfectly diverting show. I’d never really seen much of Arthur Dove’s work, and his choice to use metallic-colored paints in some frames was almost unavoidably eye-catching. It was like a more tactile version of the semi-abstract semi-cubist Murphy paintings on which I cut my teeth as a first-time docent at WCMA.
Like Murphy, Dove was merely very good, not brilliant. Aside from a handful of exceptions (River Bottom, Silver, Ochre, Carmine, Green [1923] was the only one that pulled me back for a lengthy second viewing) I felt the canvases didn’t stand up to lengthy consideration. What you saw first is whatever you would get, and as you got to the last room featuring Dove’s small watercolor meditations, what you got was pretty sparse, even cartoonish.
Dove, "Fog Horns," 1929
A side effect of the show’s focus on early O’Keeffe was the cloud of muttered inquiries as to the dearth of flower paintings. Anyone seeking the O’Keeffe they were used to had to go all the way to the last room – everything else was from the 20s and 30s, and was accompanied by vitrines holding art criticism books from the same period. Presumably these were present to augment the show’s argument that Dove and O’Keeffe were really the seminal American abstract artists, with a room each devoted to the schools of Freudian or formalist analysis that were broiling at the time that the two artists were painting.
Using text objects is difficult in an exhibition, so it’s hard to fault the Clark too hard for making an attempt. But whereas in the aforementioned Murphy exhibit WCMA could bring out a passel of letters to and from Sara and Gerald that really brought the visitor closer to the family, “Dove/O’Keeffe” professed to bring into light the larger circle of artists and critics in which Dove and O’Keeffe operated while exclusively showing the art of…Dove and O’Keeffe! I left with the vague feeling that the two existed on some desert island for that decade – this despite the wall text’s trumpeting of the story of the others who surrounded them. The only Stieglitz photographs to be found were acrylic prints embedded in the wall text – how easy it could have been to include some real prints! All in all it felt rather more like a monographic (or at least monotonic) exhibition than I’m sure curator Debra Bricker Balken intended.
O'Keeffe, "Sunrise," 1916
