Where Two Artists Stand on Common Ground

"Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is a two-star standoff, slightly pointless, in which 42 of her romantic visions of the West confront 96 of his. The painter and the photographer were both greatly taken by New Mexico, and sometimes turned to the same subjects, but outside of that their pictures aren't much alike. Nor were the artists.

Adams (1902-1984) wore a cowboy hat, and came on like a mountain man, rough-hewn, cheery, garrulous. O'Keeffe (1887-1986) appeared cooler. She had the reserve of a duchess.

Taos, where they met in 1929, was chockablock with artists, thanks in part to the salon of hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan, who had a spacious hacienda that she liked to fill with moderns. Everybody went there: D.H. Lawrence, Greta Garbo, Carl Jung, Stuart Davis. Adams was wowed. O'Keeffe he found imposingly beautiful, as did everybody else. "She has the most impressive physical presence of anyone I have ever met," he wrote. Being 15 years his senior, and not a raw provincial but a Manhattan-polished sophisticate, O'Keeffe was less impressed. Later she would sniff at the thought of the young upstart "capering through life -- making a monkey of himself to attract attention." They were not best friends.

The connecting affinities in "Natural Affinities," which was organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, feel pretty vaporous. Both artists were mentored by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), the famous New York art scout, dealer and photographer. (She married him; "I loved him," Adams wrote.) Both scrutinized the landscape, and emptied it of people. And both became hugely famous. The catalogue describes them as "beloved eminences." Okay. Now look at the art.

She was a colorist. He worked in black-and-white. She lent her clefts and blossoms a strong erotic charge. His are sexless. He focused sharply on particulars. She generalized. Surface is what most pushes them apart.

His are fine. His poetry is conventional, old-fashioned, operatic, like that pumped into the 19th-century landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. But his printing is impeccable. Peer deep into his shadows and there's always more to see. His grays innumerable. In the darkroom, he had no peer.

O'Keeffe was no technician. She might not be so famous if her pictures didn't look better on the page than they do on the wall. Reproduction helps her. Her best images may strike you as piercing and mysterious. But don't get too close. Her brushwork is mostly blah, her surfaces dead.

Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Eighth and F streets NW, through Jan. 4. For information call 202-633-1000 or visit http://www.americanart.si.edu.