Calder | O’Keeffe

While Calder and O’Keeffe are celebrated for different contributions to twentieth-century art, as well as their enduring influence on contemporary artists, the resonances between their artistic practices have remained largely unexplored. Through carefully considered pairings of paintings, sculptures, jewelry and archival materials, ‘Calder | O’Keeffe’ invites visitors to contemplate congruities and contrasts in their respective revolutionary approaches to abstraction, movement and the dynamic forces that shape the natural world. Although Calder and O’Keeffe worked in distinct artistic languages, each sought to give form to the unseen energies shaping our experience of the world around us. O’Keeffe distilled the landscapes and organic elements of the American Southwest into painted compositions of remarkable clarity and intensity, while Calder transformed gravity, air currents and immateriality into four-dimensional compositions. Viewed together, their works suggest a shared, defining preoccupation with expanding the poetics of space.

The surviving evidence of Calder and O’Keeffe’s relationship points to a friendship grounded in mutual respect and admiration. Photographs from late in their lives document their friendly familiarity, while postcards from Calder suggest a correspondence maintained over many years. Their connection is further embodied in a small number of deeply personal objects. In the late 1930s, Calder created a brass brooch for O’Keeffe formed from the initials of her surname. O’Keeffe wore the pin vertically, so that its K hung from the O, as if an abstract, organic shape rather than a readable monogram. The pin’s rounded lines echo the forms in O’Keeffe’s own work as well as the defining dynamism of Calder’s. In the early 1940s, O’Keeffe also acquired a lyrical black Calder mobile that became a treasured presence in her Abiquiu, New Mexico home. ‘Untitled’ (1942) was a key component of O’Keeffe’s carefully cultivated domestic environment and appears in many photographs of the artist, including a now famous portrait by photographer Dan Budnick.

O’Keeffe once remarked that she recognized her own ‘pelvis bone holes’ in Calder’s forms—a striking moment of artistic recognition that speaks to the unexpected links between their practices. By offering a fresh perspective on Calder and O’Keeffe’s little-known friendship, this exhibition takes its place alongside a series of presentations we've organized over the past 35 years, aimed at revealing new and previously unexplored pathways in the language of modernism and modern culture.