The current exhibit spotlighting Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore at the Museum of Fine Arts is wonderful in many ways. Among other things, it offers a variety of works by these two artists; it displays models of the artists’ studios, which provide a window into their creative process, and it meditates in a particularly delightful way on how both artists use negative space. But it is at its most brilliant when it grapples with the question of what it means to depict reality. This aspect of the exhibit has so much depth that it demands the attention of the rest of this review. Regrettably, this means leaving out many other excellent elements of that exhibit. Readers should go and think about these elements themselves.
A placard in the exhibit displays the following quote from O’Keeffe: “Nothing is less real than realism.” It then goes on to display works by O’Keeffe and Moore that depict things that can be looked at in multiple different ways. For example, Moore’s statue “Standing Figure: Knife Edge” depicts a fragment of a bird’s breastbone that also looks like an abstract, animate — perhaps humanoid — figure. O’Keeffe’s painting “Pelvis IV” (1944) depicts a pelvic bone with the moon behind one of its holes, which also looks like an eye.
To O’Keeffe, these works, and others like them, depict reality better than realism. Why? Here’s a theory: Think about what the realist does. The realist thinks she is depicting objective reality, but really, she is depicting reality from a single perspective. Say she is painting a house. She can capture only one angle of the exterior at a time, but not the house as it actually is in its entirety. To borrow a phrase from Thomas Nagel, there is no “view from nowhere”. So, the realist gives us not objective reality but instead one way to look at reality.
The works of O’Keeffe and Moore, on the other hand, give us a much healthier helping of reality. Think about “Pelvis IV.” When we take it in, we are first struck by the fact that it looks like an eye. Then, after a moment, we zoom out and see it as a bone and the moon. Once we have done this, we can toggle back and forth mentally between seeing it as a bone and a moon and seeing it as an eye. We then recognize that there are two distinct stances on this painting — neither of which is privileged over the other. Both are real and seeing them both gives us access to more of reality.
When we recognize this, we realize that we often think we are looking at objective reality when we are really only taking in one perspective and missing out on many others. For example, someone might see a book on a table. She may think of herself as grasping its objective features, but, really, she sees much more. If the book is a gift, she will see it as such. If it is a personal favorite, she will see it as a delight. If she is busy and the book is in her way, she will see it as an obstacle.
The same can apply to how we relate to other people and to the natural world. Our dispositions that operate at a subconscious level might make us see certain people as threats or as beneficial to us even when we think we are seeing them objectively. It might also, as it has for so many, make us see the environment as nothing but a collection of resources ripe for exploitation.
The antidote to this is not to try to get more objective. As discussed, there is no view from nowhere — every stance is from a perspective. The antidote instead is the one of O’Keeffe and Moore — it is to see more than just our stance. This will shake us from our myopia. It will make us see that there is so much more to the world than what we thought there was.
Perhaps more than ever, most of us need to be shaken in this way. The great gift of the MFA’s exhibit is that it gives the patron who is committed to taking in its offerings carefully a chance to have this happen. Please, seek it out.
