Georgia O'Keeffe Art Exhibit Poster

The image in this poster is one of Alfred Stieglitz's photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, made during the decades-long sustained portrait project he undertook of her between 1917 and 1937. Stieglitz produced over 300 photographs of O'Keeffe across that period — her face, her hands, her body — which together constitute one of the most extended photographic studies of a single subject in twentieth-century art.

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz met in 1916. She was twenty-eight, an art teacher in Texas, virtually unknown. He was fifty-two, married, internationally established as a photographer, and ran the small Manhattan gallery known simply as “291” which was the principal venue for European and American modernism in the United States. A mutual friend had shown him a group of O'Keeffe's charcoal drawings; he exhibited them at 291 without her permission. O'Keeffe came to New York to see her own show on the wall, and a thirty-year correspondence began that runs to roughly twenty-five thousand pieces of paper.

Stieglitz separated from his first wife in 1918 and O'Keeffe moved to New York. They lived together from then on, married in 1924 once his divorce was finalised, and remained married until his death in 1946. From 1929 onwards O'Keeffe spent extended periods in New Mexico, where she eventually settled permanently and where the landscape became central to her mature painting.

The photographs Stieglitz made of her shaped how O'Keeffe was seen by the public for the rest of her life — sometimes to her advantage, sometimes against her interests. She herself wrote that Stieglitz's idea of a portrait was never a single image but a composite addressing “an idea and personality too large to fit in a single photograph.”

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