Cincinnati, Ohio – Visitors to the Cincinnati Art Museum will see the beauty of the American landscape through the eyes of four 20th-century masters in Natural Moderns: Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Contemporaries.  This one-gallery survey exhibition is on display Aug. 12, 2006 to Jan. 14, 2007.

From oceans to mountains and from sunsets to moonlit nights, the 11 paintings in the exhibition demonstrate how nature inspired American painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe.  Key works on display include O’Keeffe’s Red Hills, Lake George and Dove’s Sand Barge.

“Each artist turned to his or her experiences of nature for inspiration, but their approaches were quite different,” said Julie Aronson, curator of American painting and sculpture, who organized the exhibition.  “The artists utilized varying degrees of representation in these works, with Dove creating the most imaginative and abstract imagery of the four.”

 Dove, Hartley, Marin and O’Keeffe were members of the famed Stieglitz Circle, named for photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who championed avant-garde art in America.  (Stieglitz and O’Keeffe married in 1924).   Between the two World Wars, the Stieglitz Circle worked to define a distinctly American form of modernism, finding meaning in the American landscape and the natural world, which they expressed in thoughtful and highly personal works of art.

“Visitors will see the adventurous and experimental nature of these artists through every painting in the exhibition,” said Aronson.

All of the works in Natural Moderns are on loan from The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, which features a renowned permanent collection of works by impressionist and 20^th-century European and American artists.  The museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, championed living American artists of the Stieglitz Circle, acquiring the world’s largest collection of paintings by Dove, as well as masterworks by O’Keeffe, Hartley and Marin.

Visit the Cincinnati Art Museum at : http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/