Skulls and feathers, bodies and mountains, bones and shells are highlighted against blue skies and blue walls in “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants of Modern Art” currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). The artists are equally well-known and beloved but put them together, and their work takes on added dimensions. When you view Moore’s white curves, polished and shining, juxtaposed with O’Keeffe’s stark white bones hovering in the sky, you see both artist’s work anew. Peering under the smooth white, rounded knee of his Thin Reclining Figure to see her painting of white rounded camelia flowers and curved white antlers in Spring; or looking through the two round travertine (limestone) holes with the texture of bone in his Reclining Figure Bone to see two O’Keeffe oils, Pedernal-From the Ranch #1 and Pelvis IV, is unique and surprising.

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Space, light, shadow and color can be sculpture. The way so many of Moore’s figures cast shadows as if another darker figure was lying beside the body are like O’Keeffe’s black shadow in In the Patio, I, with the rectangles receding as blocks of stone. Her Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 hangs near his tall bronze, Working Model for........

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