Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

organic forms more to evoke the inner order or formative forces of naturethan to depict any specific thing. Using repeated or radiating shapes thatwere lightly shaded and progressively scaled to suggest expansive motion,he sought to achieve a quality of charged picture space and an interactionbetween form and surface that paralleled the scientific-occult ideas of natureas an integrated field of forces.In a 1916 exhibition catalog, Dove made clear that he tried to capturemore the inward human reaction to nature within an “inner space,” “thereflection from my inner consciousness.” Rather than using abstractionto try to liberate art from nature, as was often seen in European modernism,Dove used it as a way to discover how art and nature can be one, tosuggest the presence of thesupernatural within the natural.In this sense, Dove’s workcan be linked to the ideals ofdivine immanence characteristicof the earlier HudsonRiver School. In turn, Dove’swork has strongly influencedseveral late-twentieth-centurypainters, such as Bill Jensenand Gregory Amenoff.Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) turned to abstraction inpainting shortly after seeing anexhibition of Dove’s paintingsat 291 in New York in 1914. Herown somewhat similar paintingswere exhibited there twoyears later by Alfred Stieglitz,whom she married in 1924 toform one of the great artisticpartnerships of AmericanFigure 14. Georgia O’Keeffe. Blue and Green Music.1919. Oil on canvas. Art Institute ofChicagoculture. Many of her early non-representational paintings were inspiredby music, but others developed a simplified way of conveying the moregrandiose and sublime aspects of the American landscape, especially theWest (Figure 14). Rather than expressing the landscape itself, she was tryingto paint her own inner experience of it. Beginning in 1924, she expandedthis theme to intense, closeup but large-scale views of specific, emblematicobjects of the landscape—especially flowers and later, after she began living121