Which 1970 museum retrospective helped renew interest in Georgia O’Keeffe’s career?

The Whitney Museum retrospective helped renew interest in Georgia O’Keeffe’s career in 1970.

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York mounted a major O’Keeffe retrospective in 1970. The exhibition arrived during a period when feminist artists and writers were reexamining the position of women in American art history.

The show helped introduce O’Keeffe’s work to a new generation and encouraged broader discussion of her importance as an independent modernist. It also challenged the tendency to define her only through Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs or through simplified interpretations of her flower paintings.

The exhibition is sometimes confused with O’Keeffe’s 1946 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA’s show was earlier and marked her first solo museum retrospective in New York; the Whitney exhibition came later and contributed to her renewed visibility in the 1970s.