Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore

American painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and British sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) are among the most distinctive artists of the 20th century. 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.

This major exhibition is the first to bring these two artists into conversation, using compelling visual juxtapositions to explore their common ways of seeing. Each artist experimented with unusual perspectives, shifts in scale, and layered compositions to produce works that were informed by their surroundings – O’Keeffe in New Mexico and Moore in Hertfordshire, England.

Though both O’Keeffe and Moore remained within reach of city life, the two artists worked in rural settings, where they amassed large personal collections of animal bones, stones, seashells, and other natural materials that served as key sources of inspiration.

Featuring more than 150 works, Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore 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. The studio installations illuminate the heart of their artistic practice – something rarely made visible in museum spaces – and create richer portraits of O’Keeffe and Moore by encouraging visitors to imagine how they worked and lived.

Organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, the exhibition is an unprecedented collaboration with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Henry Moore Foundation. In addition to about ninety works by Moore and sixty by O’Keeffe, the MFA’s presentation draws on the Museum’s modernist collection to put O’Keeffe and Moore in dialogue with other mid-20th-century artists active in the United States and in Europe – among them Edward Weston, Barbara Hepworth, Arthur Dove, and Jean Arp – all of whom engaged with creating abstraction from nature.