Picture Perfect

Georgia O’Keeffe has been the subject of two major exhibitions that ran concurrently this year. Georgia O’Keeffe, at the Art Gallery of Ontario courtesy of the Tate Modern, was a retrospective that re-examined the American painter’s career, her development and her contribution to modernism. The other, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, at the Brooklyn Museum, was not an exploration of O’Keeffe as a painter, but rather as the craftswoman of a carefully constructed persona indistinguishable from her art. Instead of being shown a room full of her well-known paintings, visitors to the gallery were invited into her closet. On display were the outfits she made or commissioned that reflected her aesthetic—the clothes that were the woman. All her designs, radical for the time, were loose, simple garments, often held together by just a belt or a single pin. The woman underneath was just a breath away. Also on display were photographs by...