Georgia O'Keeffe received her first major museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1970.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented Georgia O'Keeffe: a Retrospective in 1970. The exhibition surveyed her career and helped establish her as a central figure in American modernism for a broad museum audience.
By then, O'Keeffe had been exhibiting for more than half a century. Her work ranged from early abstractions and enlarged flowers to New York skyscrapers, Lake George scenes, New Mexico landscapes, and paintings of bones. A retrospective was especially significant because it placed these different periods into one continuous artistic story.
The exhibition is sometimes confused with later major surveys, including the 1987 exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art and other institutions. O'Keeffe was already highly respected before 1970, but the Whitney retrospective marked an important institutional recognition of the full scope of her career.