What was Georgia O'Keeffe's first major one-person museum exhibition in New York?

Georgia O'Keeffe’s first major one-person museum exhibition in New York was her 1946 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition surveyed O'Keeffe’s work across several periods rather than presenting only one subject. It included abstractions, flowers, city imagery, and paintings connected with the landscapes of New Mexico. The retrospective helped establish the range and seriousness of her achievement for a broad museum audience.

The 1946 exhibition was also a landmark for MoMA: O'Keeffe became the first woman to receive a retrospective there. That distinction is often the most frequently quoted fact about the show, but the exhibition also mattered because it brought together work from a career that had developed since the 1910s.

Later exhibitions expanded public understanding of O'Keeffe, including a major Whitney Museum retrospective in 1970. Those later shows should not be substituted for the 1946 MoMA exhibition when asking about her first major New York museum retrospective.