What was Georgia O'Keeffe's first major one-person museum exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943?

Georgia O'Keeffe's first major one-person museum exhibition was a 1943 retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The exhibition surveyed her career and presented her as an important American modernist rather than merely as the subject of Alfred Stieglitz's photographs. By that point, O'Keeffe had developed several recognizable bodies of work, including abstractions, flower paintings, city views, and New Mexico imagery.

A retrospective differs from a first solo gallery show: it normally reviews an artist's work across a substantial period. O'Keeffe had already exhibited at galleries and had received significant critical attention before the Chicago museum exhibition.

The Art Institute of Chicago was especially relevant to her biography because she had studied there earlier. The 1943 exhibition therefore connected her professional recognition with one of the institutions where her artistic education had begun.