On September 9, 1916, Georgia O'Keeffe sent a letter to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz complaining that he had exhibited her drawings without her permission. He had received the drawings from a mutual friend and hung them at his 291 Gallery in New York, telling visitors they were "the purest, finest, sincerest things that have entered 291 in a long while."

He had not asked her. She was teaching in Canyon, Texas. She found out by letter.

O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, and trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York. She had largely given up painting by 1912, convinced she could only reproduce the styles she had learned rather than produce something of her own. A year of study with Arthur Wesley Dow at Teachers College changed that. She began making abstract charcoal drawings that were unlike anything else being produced in America.

Stieglitz became her dealer, her promoter, and eventually her husband. He also became the primary interpreter of her work: his letters and critical introductions consistently read her large flower paintings as sexual imagery — a reading O'Keeffe disputed for the remainder of her life and that critics continued to impose regardless. "I had no desire to paint the sexual form," she wrote in her autobiography.

She moved to New Mexico permanently in 1949, three years after Stieglitz's death. She painted the desert, the bones, the sky, and the adobe architecture until she was ninety-eight, when failing eyesight made painting impossible. She lived to ninety-eight.

The sexual readings of her work are still in every survey textbook.