In 1946, Georgia O’Keeffe became the first woman to receive a retrospective at which museum?

In 1946, Georgia O’Keeffe became the first woman to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized the retrospective after O’Keeffe had already built a substantial reputation through exhibitions at Stieglitz’s galleries and other American institutions. The show surveyed her career rather than presenting only one subject, bringing together abstractions, flowers, city imagery, bones, and landscapes.

The distinction refers to MoMA’s first retrospective devoted to a woman artist. It does not mean that O’Keeffe was the first woman shown by the museum or the first woman included in a group exhibition. A retrospective is a substantial exhibition looking across an artist’s career.

The 1946 exhibition was also significant because Stieglitz died that year. O’Keeffe subsequently took greater control over her own professional affairs and spent more time in New Mexico, where her later work developed through close observation of the region’s architecture and landscape.