ART

Exhibition planners in Hartford, Conn., went out on a limb in hanging a familiar painting by Georgia O’Keeffe upside-down from its usual position, but a curator says that’s what the artist wanted. The Wadsworth Atheneum owns the 1929 painting, “The Lawrence Tree,” and hung it with the tree extending from the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. However, the painting has been part of a traveling retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and has been hung with the base of the tree at the top left corner. The position was changed because of a 1930 photograph and a 1931 letter by the artist that were made available to exhibition planners by O’Keeffe’s longtime companion and the manager of her estate. Elizabeth Kornhauser, the Wadsworth’s curator of American painting, sculpture and drawing, said when O’Keeffe sold the painting to the Wadsworth, “she indicated to us that it could be hung in any direction.”