(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)