Georgia O'Keeffe received her first major solo museum retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
The New York exhibition marked an important institutional recognition of her work. By that point, O'Keeffe had spent decades developing abstract drawings, flower paintings, city views, and New Mexico landscapes, while maintaining a distinctive position in American modernism.
The retrospective followed the death of her husband, photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, in 1946. Her later career expanded through museum exhibitions and major works from New Mexico. The year is sometimes confused with the date of her first public exhibitions, which occurred much earlier through Stieglitz’s galleries.