Georgia O’Keeffe: 1945 woman of achievement

I’m making my way through the more than one thousand articles on Georgia O’Keeffe in The New York Times database. Lots of goodies!

On February 10, 1946, the Times reported on the Women’s Press Club dinner in Washington, DC, attended by President and Mrs. Truman and 600 guests. Atom scientist Dr. Lise Meitner was presented with the club’s first “Achievement Award,” and ten other women across the professions were named “women of achievement” for the year 1945.

In the company of women like choreographer Agnes de Mille and Ruth M. Leach, vice president of IBM, O’Keeffe was honored. The citation:

To Georgia O’Keeffe, who can make a landscape live and who this year continued her record of one-woman New York exhibitions which have been annual art events since 1921.

Actually, O’Keeffe began her run of annual exhibits in 1923, and it would soon end, with the death of her dealer/husband, Alfred Stieglitz, later in 1946.

Click here to read the full article.

Georgia O’Keeffe may be the most egregiously over-interpreted artist of all time. The interpretations, and the narratives, have gotten so thick that it’s hard to see past them to the paintings.