This week we celebrate the birth of two influential artists born 47 years apart. Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887), the mother of American modernism, and Claude Monet (November 14, 1840), one of the founders of French Impressionist painting, may have practiced different styles, but both shared a love of nature, as can be seen in the vast majority of their paintings. Flowers, in particular, seemed to capture their imaginations!
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. —Claude Monet
Claude Monet, Water Lilies, 1908, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Meadows Foundation, Incorporated, 1981.128
I know I cannot paint a flower. I cannot paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time. —Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe, Yellow Cactus, 1929, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, the Patsy Lacy Griffith Collection, bequest of Patsy Lacy Griffith, © The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 1998.217
Stop to smell the roses and help us celebrate these renowned artists by visiting their works for FREE in the DMA’s collection galleries sometime this week!
Julie Henley is the Communications and Marketing Coordinator at the DMA.