Anita Pollitzer showed Georgia O'Keeffe’s abstract drawings to Alfred Stieglitz in 1916. Pollitzer, a fellow student and friend, brought the drawings to Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York.
Stieglitz was a major photographer, gallery owner, and promoter of modern art. He was impressed by O'Keeffe’s work and exhibited some of the drawings that year. Their professional relationship later became personal, and they married in 1924.
This episode is important because it helped introduce O'Keeffe to the New York art world before she had established a public career there. Pollitzer is sometimes overshadowed by Stieglitz in accounts of the discovery, but Pollitzer was the person who delivered the drawings to him. The event also illustrates how artist networks shaped early modernist exhibitions in the United States.