Why did Georgia O’Keeffe keep many of her early abstract works out of public exhibitions?

Georgia O’Keeffe intentionally limited the inclusion of her early abstract art in public exhibitions after 1923 to control how her work was interpreted by the public and critics.12

During the early 1920s, her husband and promoter, Alfred Stieglitz, frequently associated her abstract works with her gender and sexual identity, leading critics to provide overwhelmingly Freudian interpretations of her art. O’Keeffe, who rejected the essentialist notion that women inherently possess specific character traits, strongly objected to these sexualized and gendered readings. She believed that her abstractions were the primary source of these misinterpretations.1

Consequently, she curtailed the production of such pieces and kept many of them out of the public eye to reshape her image as a serious, hardworking professional. It was only later, from the mid-1940s onward, that she began exhibiting these early works alongside her later abstractions, by which time critical responses were no longer cast in the essentialist terms that had previously defined them.12