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 until now has been hung with the base of the tree at the top left corner. A Wadsworth’s curator said when O’Keeffe sold the painting to the atheneum she indicated it could be hung in any direction. The painting depicts a ponderosa pine O’Keeffe encountered on D. H. Lawrence’s Taos, N.M., ranch.