CINCINNATI.- Visitors to the Cincinnati Art Museum will see the beauty of the American landscape through the eyes of four twentieth-century masters in Natural Moderns: Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Contemporaries. This one-gallery exhibition is on display August 12, 2006, to January 14, 2007.

From oceans to mountains and from sunsets to moonlit nights, the eleven paintings in the exhibition demonstrate how nature inspired American painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Key works on display include O’Keeffe’s Red Hills, Lake George and Dove’s Sand Barge.

Dove, Hartley, Marin, and O’Keeffe were members of the famed Stieglitz Circle, named for photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who championed avant-garde art in America. (Stieglitz and O’Keeffe married in 1924.) Between the two World Wars, the Stieglitz Circle worked to define a distinctly American form of modernism, finding meaning in the American landscape and the natural world, which they expressed in thoughtful and highly personal works of art.

All of the works in Natural Moderns are on loan from The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, which features a renowned permanent collection of works by impressionist and twentieth-century European and American artists. The museum’s founder, Duncan Phillips, championed living American artists of the Stieglitz Circle, acquiring the world’s largest collection of paintings by Dove, as well as masterworks by O’Keeffe, Hartley, and Marin.