In January 1923, a 35-year-old painter named Georgia O’Keeffe mounted her first major exhibition of 100 works, including oils, watercolours, pastels and drawings. One of the people who attended the opening in New York was Marcel Duchamp, whose display of a urinal he called Fountain had caused an uproar in the art world six years earlier. Duchamp approached her, O’Keeffe recalled many years later, and demanded, “But where is your self-portrait? Everyone has a self-portrait in his first show.” O’Keeffe would continue to defy expectations for the rest of her remarkable career—not only about the traditional self-absorption of the artist, but also about “his” presumptive gender.
O’Keeffe’s career had been launched in 1916, with a small exhibition of charcoal drawings at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291. Precisely 100 years later, the largest exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe’s works ever mounted in Britain will appear at the Tate Modern this summer (6th July to 30th October), following the opening of its new £260m extension and complete gallery rehang. Featuring over 100 works, the exhibition will include Jimson Weed, White Flower No 1 (1932), purchased in 2014 for $44m, the largest sum ever paid for a painting by a woman—a qualification that tells its own story. O’Keeffe’s gender has always been a focal point in a field still dominated by male artists. “Men put me down as the best woman painter,” O’Keeffe famously once said. “I think I’m one of the best painters.”
Black Mesa Landscape by Georgia O’Keeffe (1930)
© 2016 GEORGIA O'KEEFFE MUSEUM/ DACS, LONDON.
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