Georgia O’Keeffe: Art, Image, Style

Exhibition Website

Mar 3 2017 - Jul 23 2017

Brooklyn Museum

New York City, NY


One of America's most iconic artists of the 20th-century, O'Keeffe is best known for her desert landscapes, animal skulls and flower paintings. 

Through 125 works, Georgia O'Keeffe: Art, Image, Style examines how the renowned artist adeptly crafted her image in the public eye, presenting a completely new, highly-focused, and meticulously researched perspective on the unified modernist aesthetic of O'Keeffe's art -- and dress. O'Keeffe considered her clothed body as another canvas on which to proclaim her modernism. Selected paintings by O'Keeffe and photographs of her and her homes by Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Todd Webb and others, will be seen with never-before-exhibited items from her personal wardrobe that highlight her preference for compact masses, organic silhouettes and minimal ornamentation. 

Freshly conserved and shown in this exhibition for the first time, her understated and carefully designed garments dating from the 1920s to the 1980s, presented alongside key paintings and photographs of her throughout her entire career, place O'Keeffe's self-fashioning within the history of artistic identity and demonstrate her influence on leading designers and tastemakers of our day, from Calvin Klein to Valentino.


Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website
Image: Tony Vaccaro, Georgia O’Keeffe with “Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow” and the desert, 1960. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Courtesy of Tony
Vaccaro studio.


Whether or not you go, Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O’Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today’s fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art. As one of her friends stated, O’Keeffe “never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another.” This fresh and carefully researched study brings O’Keeffe’s style to life, illuminating how this beloved American artist purposefully proclaimed her modernity in the way she dressed and posed for photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to Bruce Weber. This beautiful book accompanies the first museum exhibition to bring together photographs, clothes, and art to explore O’Keeffe’s unified modernist aesthetic.

Select Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern to place this book in your Anazin shopping cart.

  • Costume
  • American
  • 20th Century
  • Georgia O’Keeffe
  • Alfred Stieglitz
  • Ansel Adams
  • Todd Webb
  • and others

Exhibition Venues & Dates