Georgia O'Keeffe received a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1946.
The exhibition, Georgia O'Keeffe, was organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum's founding director. It surveyed her career and established her as a major figure in American modern art. The retrospective opened soon after the death of her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, and helped mark a new phase in her public reputation.
O'Keeffe had already exhibited widely by this point, including through Stieglitz's galleries and major American museums. Her paintings of flowers, New York architecture, landscapes, and bones had attracted both praise and debate, especially because critics often interpreted her flower paintings through a narrow Freudian lens she rejected.
The 1946 exhibition is sometimes confused with later O'Keeffe retrospectives, including the large 1970 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The MoMA retrospective belongs to the immediate postwar period and is a key milestone in the recognition of an American woman artist within the modernist canon.