Until now, Korean museum-goers could usually see one or two paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe at a time. That changes on Thursday, 12 November 2026, when the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) opens “Georgia O’Keeffe and American Modernism” at its Gwacheon branch. The museum calls it the largest presentation of O’Keeffe’s work in the country to date: nearly 120 works in total, among them 16 paintings by O’Keeffe, according to Yonhap.
Not just one star
As the title promises, O’Keeffe (1887–1986) is shown in context. The exhibition brings in key figures of early 20th-century American art: photographer Alfred Stieglitz, her husband and champion, as well as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and John Marin. Together they stood for an art that turned to American cities and landscapes at a time when Paris was still widely seen as the centre of the art world.
Three chapters
The show is organised in three sections. It opens with the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which O’Keeffe gave to the Art Institute of Chicago after his death, including the portraits Stieglitz made of her over some two decades – an intimate and famous photographic dialogue.
The second section looks at how American modernists answered the transformations of their time, from industrialisation to the rise of the skyscraper. John Marin’s Woolworth Building (The Dance) captures New York’s building boom. Here, too, hangs O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music, an early key work in which she translated the sensation of music into reorganised forms and colours.
The final chapter is devoted to New Mexico, the landscape that shaped the second half of her career. Its emblem is Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses, in which a bleached skull is decorated with artificial cotton flowers – one of the images that made her desert symbolism world-famous.
Beyond a Europe-centred story
For the MMCA, the exhibition is also a statement about art history. The museum says it wants visitors to engage with American modernism beyond a Europe-centred view of Western art. Acting director Youn Tae-wook called the show a rare opportunity to see 16 of O’Keeffe’s works together, spanning her career from early to late years.
The timing is striking: in New York, Christie’s is about to auction a rediscovered O’Keeffe landscape, Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I, on 17 November. While the market focuses on a single canvas, Gwacheon offers the broader picture of an artist and the movement around her.
Visit: “Georgia O’Keeffe and American Modernism”, MMCA Gwacheon, 12 November 2026 – 21 March 2027.