Georgia O’Keeffe’s first major museum retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art took place in 1946.
The exhibition, titled “Georgia O’Keeffe,” was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It marked a major institutional recognition of her career and presented work from several stages of her development, including abstractions, flowers, landscapes, and architectural subjects.
The retrospective opened shortly after the death of Alfred Stieglitz, who had been an important advocate for her work. O’Keeffe was already a prominent American modernist, but the MoMA exhibition helped establish her historical importance beyond the gallery system associated with Stieglitz.
The date can be confused with later museum exhibitions and with O’Keeffe’s first one-person gallery show, which Stieglitz arranged in 1917 at his gallery 291. The 1946 MoMA event was significant because it was a museum retrospective devoted to her work, not simply a commercial gallery presentation.