The Air Itself

This is what makes the presence of the Calder mobile in these two photographs so striking. O’Keeffe not only chose to live with the work but at one point also placed it in direct dialogue with her own painting. She hung the mobile in one home, then reinstalled it in another. When she moved the mobile from Ghost Ranch to Abiquiú, she re-created the aesthetic dynamics of the Ghost Ranch bedroom in her Abiquiú living room, using the Calder as a centerpiece.

In fact, the mobile was not the only Calder work in O’Keeffe’s possession. She also owned a tin ashtray from Calder and a brass brooch that he gave her sometime in the late 1930s, formed wittily using the first two letters of her last name, “OK.” As we know from the many photographs of O’Keeffe wearing the spiraling object (and later a replica she had made in silver to match her gray hair), the brooch, like the mobile, was a focal point of her own self-fashioning.

Taken together, the presence of these objects in O’Keeffe’s life clearly indicates an exchange of some note, yet to this day astonishingly little is known about the friendship between these two titans of American modernism. As a starting point, we are able, at the very least, to map a provisional series of points of contact. The facts as they are known are outlined here.

The two artists ran in differing but overlapping circles. Calder’s cosmopolitan world included Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp and other leading European luminaries. O’Keeffe was more closely associated with figures of American modernism such as Alfred Stieglitz, Arthur Dove and later Agnes Martin. According to O’Keeffe biographer Laurie Lisle, the two met through a mutual friend, the painter William Einstein, sometime between 1932 and 1938. Calder’s gift of the brooch occurred during this period. O’Keeffe visited several of Calder’s New York shows in the 1940s and wrote to Maria Chabot about them. O’Keeffe saw Calder’s 1943 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which she described to Chabot as “amazingly ingenious.” C. S. Merrill recounts that O’Keeffe then asked art dealer Curt Valentin (with whom both she and Calder worked) if she could trade a Gaston Lachaise sculpture she owned for a Calder. Calder visited New Mexico once in 1948, though there is no record that he stopped at O’Keeffe’s. He sent her casual and familiar postcards in the 1960s and 1970s. And then there is a famous photograph of the two artists greeting each other at Calder’s 1976 Whitney retrospective. Nose to nose, they smile warmly at each other, and as The New York Times noted at the time, O’Keeffe exclaimed, “Oh Sandy, how are you? It seems like we’ve known each other forever!”

Calder evidently admired O’Keeffe enough to make her the piece of jewelry (and possibly a second brooch)—something he did for those in his inner circle. And O’Keeffe clearly felt an affinity for Calder’s forms. With the documentary record still so fragmentary, however, we are left to flesh out the story primarily through their work. Already in 1936 they were being grouped together conceptually by figures like Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, who categorized them as “Artists independent of the Dada and Surrealist movements.” Both artists, in distinct yet unexpectedly aligned ways, engaged with abstraction as a means of translating and conveying the embodied experience of the built and natural world. O’Keeffe channeled the shifting skies and lithic hills of the Southwest into distilled, vibrating imagery, condensing landscape and organic form to essential structures charged with tactile sensation. Calder, by contrast, invited the invisible forces of the world—air currents, gravity, motion—directly into the creative process. His mobiles are activated by atmosphere itself, making movement a collaborator in shaping the work, while his jewelry responds to bodily motion and organic growth. Read in relation to one another, Calder’s kinetic forms and O’Keeffe’s paintings reveal a shared sensitivity to rhythm, interval and spatial poetics, suggesting that the affinity in the photographs on these pages extends outward into the very logic of their practices.

In the absence of more detail around their personal and artistic dialogue over the years, we are left to read possibilities into their work and their words. In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, O’Keeffe once wrote: “I like the wind—it seems more like me than anything else—I like the way it blows things around—roughly—even meanly—then the next minute seems to love everything.” In 1955, on the occasion of an exhibition in Caracas, Calder emphasized once again the vital importance to him of movement in art—“spheres of different sizes, densities, colors and volumes, floating in space, surrounded by vivid clouds and tides, currents of air….”

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Hauser & Wirth’s newest California location will open in downtown Palo Alto on October 3, 2026, inaugurated by the first ever exhibition devoted to the mutual admiration and artistic kinship between Alexander Calder and Georgia O’Keeffe. Developed in close collaboration with the Calder Foundation, "Calder | O'Keeffe" will bring together exceptional works by both artists, complemented by archival materials documenting their decades-long friendship.

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Alexis Lowry is Curatorial Senior Director at Hauser & Wirth, where she develops and implements artist-driven programming and collaborations. She was previously a curator at Dia Art Foundation, where she oversaw commissions, exhibitions, public programs and the permanent collection. Lowry holds a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.