Georgia O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, 1929

Georgia O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, oil on canvas, 31 x 40 inches, 1929 (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford)

Painted in the summer of 1929 while visiting D.H. Lawrence at his Kiowa Ranch during O'Keeffe's first trip to New Mexico, the tree stands in front of the house.

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

(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.