Dali: Disruption and Devotion (though December 1, 2024)
Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore (through January 20, 2025)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) has had some blockbuster shows lately, including a new one on Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. You’ve only got the rest of November to catch one on Salvador Dali. These two shots might inspire you to get to the MFA before the Dali show closes. There is great synergy between these three icons of the art world.
Technically, the soon-to-close Dali exhibit isn’t the main draw at present; that would be the O’Keeffe and Moore show. But maybe you can already spot where I’m heading. I shall be brief with the Dali exhibit as what you see at the MFA are 30 works borrowed from the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, which I visited in March and reviewed on this blog.
Dali worked hard at self-promotion and succeeded in making himself famous and notorious. He is probably the most celebrated surrealist painter of all time, though he neither invented the genre nor was necessarily its finest exemplar. But is there anyone who doesn’t know of his melting watches or his fool-the-eyes perspectives? The very word “surrealism” alerts you of the movement’s intent; it’s not “real” in a literal sense and probably not very realistic in a figurative sense either. Dali and others extrapolated from dreams to explore the subconscious. How does one paint that? If you ever had a literal dream like some of Dali’s works, you’d consider seeking psychiatric help! One could argue, though, that his imagination is no more disturbing than the concrete horrors of human history.
The MFA’s show stresses Dali’s “disruption”– of art, hidden desire, decorum– and his shift to “devotion.” After decades of surrealism he gravitated to religious mysticism. He was always an egoist, but he tempered it with an increasingly rigid adherence to Catholicism.
Oddly, that’s my segue to O’Keeffe and Moore. A non-Catholic confession: I was baffled when I first heard the MFA was putting these two into the same show. After all, we often think of O’Keeffe’s New York modernism, her New Mexico desert canvasses, her erotic/vaginal flowers, and her clotheshorse personal style. It seems a weird coupling with the England-born and bred Moore. He was a competent painter, but he was best known for his monumental bronze sculptures–the kind that are often so massive that they adorn museum courtyards instead of commanding gallery space. Other than the fact that they were contemporaries–born in 1887 and 1888 respectively and died in the same year (1986)– how do they match up?
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| O'Keeffe |
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| Moore |
Courtesy of MFA curators with a better eye than yours truly, pretty darn well! Modernism proved the same thing that Dali grasped: There’s a lot more to art than duplicating what what’s at the end of our noses. In ways both different and overlapping O’Keeffe and Moore imagined things in their essence, not merely their outward forms. Shapes are art and the best art depicts them in some sort of balance.
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| Moore |
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| Moore |
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| O'Keeffe |
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| O'Keeffe |
Moore was famous for the “holes” in some of his sculptures. A hole in context is called “negative space” and functions to draw the viewer into a work, be it two-dimensional (painting, engravings, photos…) or a three-dimensional sculpture. Many of them wouldn’t work without the negative space–even if it’s a thin cleft in a rock or a peek at the horizon.
Color is art, but the trick is in how you use it. Skies are seldom actually turquoise or acidic green, but that’s where another kind of balance comes into play. If you’ve ever seen a Van Gogh up close you know another trick: Texture is art.
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| O'Keeffe |
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| Moore |
Still another way O’Keeffe and Moore line up is that both had workshops filled with found objects–bones, stones, twigs, sherds, shells, discarded materials–in which they saw something else waiting to come out or be assembled. (Try this at home, kids—tell your parents your room isn’t “junked up;” it’s art waiting to happen.)
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| O'Keeffe use of skull |
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| Moore workshop |
And some art is just “cool” in ways that are hard to define! Kudos to the MFA for this thoughtful show. There’s still more at the MFA right now, but I’ll save it for another posting.
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| Moore cross |
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| O'Keeffe cross |
Rob Weir
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