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(piano music playing)
Steven: We're in the remarkable Wadsworth Atheneum
in Hartford, Connecticut and we're looking at
Georgia O'Keeffe's The Lawrence Tree.
It's really early O'Keeffe. It dates to 1929.
Beth: It doesn't look like a tree at all.
It looks almost like this organic octopus-like form,
but when you just stop for a second and look at it,
you can see that we're looking up at the branches
of a tree, like we often do when we're lying on the
grass and looking up at the sky.
Steven: I mean, we always take over the artist's view
in a sense, when we look at a painting.
But because the view is so unusual here,
in some ways, we really inhabit her eyes
as she's looking up at that clear, night sky.
Beth: There's something incredibly poignant about it.
We become her or we see through her eyes
at a very particular moment
in a very particular view
on a very particular night.
I have a strong sense of the passage of time
and the momentary and how human life is so brief,
a whole set of things that happened because of this
unusual point of view.
Looking up through the tree at the night sky,
the subject and the point of view come together.
I almost feel the nighttime and this tree
and the smell of the pine.
Steven: Space and time are beautifully interwoven.
Our eye travels up that trunk.
We're lying just just below.
O'Keeffe spoke about how there was a
carpenter's bench just at the base of this tree,
that she liked to lie on.
This was painted on D.H. Lawrence's ranch
during her first summer in New Mexico.
There's something very particular about the way
our eye travels up the tree and then past
this wildlike form that are the needles of the pine
and then beyond that, the sky which intrudes
and just comes towards us and of course
recedes infinitely in dome of that sky.
The radical changes of scale,
speak of both space and time,
our minuteness and our rootedness
in this much larger, celestial space.
Beth: There is that pulling down and that sense of
rootedness in the earth and at the same time
that sublime suggestion of the infinite
and the blue and the way that it
Steven: Yes.
Steven: Apparently, the artist felt that this painting
could be hung in any direction,
but the museum has hung it in a way that
she seemed to have preferred.
Beth: She instructed that the tree appear to be
standing on its head.
(piano music playing)