Georgia O'Keeffe became the first woman to receive a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
The Museum of Modern Art presented a major retrospective of O'Keeffe’s work in 1946. The exhibition was significant because it made her the first woman to receive a solo show at MoMA, confirming her position as a leading American modernist.
The retrospective was organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s founding director and one of the central figures in defining the museum’s modern-art collection. By that point, O'Keeffe had developed several recognizable subjects, including enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, desert landscapes, and animal bones.
The year can be confused with 1946 events in O'Keeffe’s personal life: Alfred Stieglitz also died that year. The MoMA exhibition therefore marked both a major public recognition of her career and a period of profound personal change.