A big honking Georgia O'Keeffe show opens at the Whitney Museum tomorrow, with 130 objects documenting her abstract work. (The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum hoards 1,149 drawings, paintings and sculptures; her catalogue raisonné includes only 821 paintings and 1,137 drawings.) And some people, as they have for the last one hundred years, think this is not a worthy exhibition-pretty much because she is a lady, with lady interests. THAT WAS HER FIRST MISTAKE.

Leon Neyfakh gets to the bottom of it in the Observer today:

"No one gets any street cred for saying Georgia O'Keeffe is a really beautiful painter," said Reagan Upshaw, the director of the Gerald Peters Gallery. "Instead you get, 'Oh, come on, I'll bet you like her. I bet you like little kids with big eyes, too. How sweet.' You don't get no respect!"

LET US TURN THE CLOCK BACK. It is the New Yorker, from 1926.
Isn't that weird how it reads as absolutely sarcastic? (You know, because it's so insane and purple.) And yet it is not.

The lady problem, of course, is a problem with men:

Brother. Of course, absolutely everyone has something to say about O'Keefef! According to Wikipedia, in the early 1910s, the artist went west: "She was inspired to go there because of the natural beauty of the nearby large Palo Duro Canyon, carved by wind and water.[6] She also drew flowers that looked like a vigina!" Great job, Wikipedia defacement crew.