What was Georgia O’Keeffe’s first one-person museum retrospective, held in 1946?

Georgia O’Keeffe’s first one-person museum retrospective was held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1946.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a major retrospective of O'Keeffe’s work in 1946. The exhibition was a significant institutional recognition of an artist who had already developed a distinctive place in American modernism through abstraction, flowers, urban scenes, and Southwestern subjects.

The retrospective opened shortly after the death of O'Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz. It also helped establish a broad view of her career rather than presenting her only as a painter of flowers or as Stieglitz’s artistic discovery.

Other major museums later organized important O'Keeffe exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Those institutions are strongly associated with her legacy, but MoMA hosted the first one-person museum retrospective.