In her later years, OKeeffe was photographed by s Essays

In her later years, O'Keeffe was photographed by such giants as Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz, and Irving Penn; Andy Warhol made a screenprintof her in shimmery gold. But the most indelible portraits are the ones taken by Alfred Stieglitz, her professional champion and husband of twenty-two years. It was Stieglitz who arranged O'Keeffe's first major New York City exhibit, at the Brooklyn Museum, ninety years ago. It was he, too, who promoted anatomical readings of her paintings; "finally," he said, when he first saw them, "a woman on paper." (O'Keeffe, meanwhile, insisted that she was thinking not of vaginas but of scale; she thought flowers were beautiful, and that more people would look at them if they were presented very large.) The couple's relationship was complicated, a tangle of romantic and professional bonds. O'Keeffe worked to maintain her independence, frequently travelling without Stieglitz and keeping her maiden name. But the public persona t hat would solidify her status in American art was shaped indelibly by the pictures he lovingly, obsessively made of her. In his photos, the angles of her open collars elongate her neck; she does not smile easily, or often. Her severity has its own sensuality.Not everyone will find meaning in seeing O'Keeffe's personal effects displayed in a museum setting. A review of "Living Modern" inThe New Republicregistered skepticism at the very idea of an exhibition that includes an artist's shoesthe notion, the reviewer wrote, "sounds so trivial, so material, so sexist, so utterly besides the point." Yet "Living Modern" makes clear that O'Keeffe's style was not ancillary to her genius but fundamental to it. Like all icons, she eventually became a kind of shorthand, her New Mexico home the subject of Calvin Klein ads and fashion editorials that borrowed her look and sought to channel her mystique. A portrait of Charlize Theron taken at the ranch, for Vogue, displayed in the exhibit's final ga llery, shows the actress in a white blouse under a fitted black dress, her chin pointed away from the camera in O'Keeffean profile. But there's only so much you can do to replicate the look of a woman who was so fierce an individual, so seemingly predestined to "live a different life." Even in photographs in which O'Keeffe gazes directly at the camera, she telegraphs an elegant aloofnessnot a coldness, exactly, but a demand to be seen from a distance, like the vast Southwestern landscapes that she made her own. Looking into her face repeated on gallery walls, I was reminded of the way a horizon invites one's eye to the farthest possible point. Our gaze shifts; the horizon stays the same.