Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities at the Norton Museum of Art

January 24- May 3, 2009 Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities

Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities at the Norton Museum of Art brings together two iconic American artists famous for there visions of the west. Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams met in 1929 at the famous salon of Mabel Dodge Lujan in Taos, New Mexico and continued a sometimes tumultuous friendship until their deaths in the 1980's. Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities bring together 40 Georgia O'Keefe paintings and 54 Ansel Adams photographs.

The Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities exhibit was the first time I was able to view Georgia O'Keefe's paintings up close. O'Keefe is most well known for her ability to combine representation and abstraction in her paintings of rocks, flowers, bones, shells, and landscapes. Many of O'Keefe's abstracted representations take on an almost erotic tone. Her canvases of crisply contoured forms have been reproduced for decades and now form a part of the American landscape. I was so disappointed by what I saw. Your eyes light up seeing the paintings that launched a thousand posters and a million calendars but as you get closer the magic evaporates the surfaces are flat and the brushwork lifeless. For the first time in my viewing life, the posters outshine the original work.

While I found fault in Georgia O'Keefe's technical skills as a painter, Ansel Adams was a technical genius. Black, white and every shade of grey in between can be found in the photographic prints of Ansel Adams. Be prepared when you visit the exhibit Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities for the small size of Ansel Adams photographic prints, you need to wait your turn and get in close. Peer into a shadow captured by Ansel Adams and it is like looking through a veil, let your eyes adjust and there is always more to see. While Ansel Adams is famously quoted as saying, "there are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs", he developed the zone system in 1941. The zone system is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development. The depth and clarity achieved by the zone system can be seen in all of Ansel Adam's work.