Abstraction

1924

A show beside Stieglitz’s photographs

Stieglitz arranged a show of O’Keeffe’s works alongside his own photographs at the Anderson Galleries and in the following years helped to organise other exhibitions of her work.

1924

Paints “Petunia, No. 2”

Her first large-scale flower painting, first exhibited in 1925. By the mid-1920s the flowers on her canvases had grown huge, as if seen through a magnifying lens — in all she made about two hundred flower paintings.

11 December 1924

Married: Alfred Stieglitz

1925

Skyscrapers of New York from the thirtieth floor of the Shelton

After moving in 1925 to a 30th-floor apartment in the Shelton Hotel she began a series of paintings of skyscrapers and the skyline: “New York Street with Moon” (1925), “The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.” (1926), “City Night” (1926), “Radiator Building – Night, New York”. In 1928 she painted the East River with the smoking factories of Queens, and her last cityscapes a year later; she later called these works “My New Yorks”.

1927

Retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of her work.

1928

Stir over the sale of six calla lily paintings for $25,000

Stieglitz announced that six of her calla lily paintings had been sold to an anonymous buyer in France for $25,000; there is no evidence the transaction went as he reported. The publicity worked: from then on her paintings sold for higher prices, and within a decade of her move to New York she was the highest-paid American woman artist.