Georgia O’Keeffe became the first woman artist given a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
The exhibition marked an important institutional recognition of O’Keeffe’s distinctive modernist style. By then, she was already known for enlarged flower paintings, abstract works, New York skyscrapers, and landscapes associated with New Mexico.
The Museum of Modern Art, commonly called MoMA, had opened in Manhattan in 1929 and became a major center for modern art. O’Keeffe’s 1946 retrospective helped establish her as a major American artist rather than merely an artistic figure connected with photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz.
This exhibition is sometimes confused with O’Keeffe’s later 1970 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two exhibitions were different: MoMA presented the earlier 1946 retrospective, while the Whitney organized the major 1970 survey.