Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove Featured at The Clark

Visiting the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, ought to be on everyone’s day-trip list: an important collection of European and American art, especially Impressionism; a quietly stunning new addition (2008) by one of the world’s great architects (Tadao Ando); and currently a compelling show of the early work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove — all set in nearly 150 acres of verdant quiet.

The O’Keeffe/Dove show will be remarkable to those who know mostly Southwestern O’Keeffe and Dove not at all. Both artists were born in the 1880s, both had their first shows at the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, who later famously married O’Keeffe. And through Stieglitz they finally met in 1918. Each owned examples of the other’s art.

Dove is generally acknowledged to be the first American abstract painter. After nearly two years in Paris, he came home to Geneva, NY, and began to use the latest French techniques to paint his surroundings. But Dove quickly developed an intensely personal style of brushwork and color that gave his pictures a bright, radiant quality. They are at the same time flat and dimensional — and intensely personal. The surfaces somehow invite you in.

O’Keeffe, on the other hand, did not find her own personal style until she saw her first Dove work in 1914. She struggled with the new techniques, eventually caught up and then set out on the journey that would make her an icon of American art and, especially, the American Southwest. What is most interesting, however, is how cold and hard her surfaces are compared to Dove’s. He is intimate, she is impersonal; his pictures seem small, hers — no matter the size — feel large. Hers are more surface, his more feeling. He was a deeper painter, I think.

Seeing and enjoying Ando’s Stone Hill Center, up a hill from the Clark’s main building, is equally rewarding and perhaps more important. The center houses the institute’s art conservation work, an outdoor cafe and two small galleries for special shows. (A second building has been designed by Ando and will be built in the future).

Even though he won architecture’s most famous award, the Pritzker Prize, in 1995 (ironic, isn’t it, that the Pritzker family’s Hyatt Hotels gave us the now clichéd building-cum-atrium?), Ando is virtually unknown and unbuilt in the United States. Only a house in Chicago, the Pulitzer Foundation building in St. Louis, the magnificent Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX (an exquisite, low, linear design of concrete and glass set in the midst of reflecting pools in that hot — and generally ugly, in this writer’s opinion — city), and now Stone Hill represent Ando’s work here. (A house, stable and mausoleum for the once-hot designer Tom Ford is under construction in Santa Fe, NM. And, no, there is no indication of who or what the mausoleum will house.)

The Clark building is of steel, cedar and glass. The outside walls are concrete imprinted with wood-grain textures that minimize the boxcar form of the building itself. There is a triangular porch jutting out over the hill; more than half the building — all the lower floor — is buried in the hill itself. The result is a low structure that seems part of the landscape. This is very fine design that doesn’t need to shout about itself.

The Clark is at 225 South St., Williamstown, MA. Galleries are open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., through Nov. 30. Call 413-458-2303 for information.