In 1916, photographer and New York gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was shown a series of charcoal abstractions.

Stieglitz, who had promoted such artists as Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso, was so impressed with these images he included them in a group exhibit that year.

The pieces, considered among the most radical art produced in the United States at the time, were by Georgia O'Keeffe, best known today for her iconic flower canvasses.

The artist's abstractions are the focus of a new traveling exhibit opening today at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

The 100-plus images provide a narrative of O'Keeffe's career and her passion for abstract art, from her first explorations in 1915 until her death in 1986.

"Our desire was to present them in a way that people would realize that she was among the most innovative artists of the 20th century," said Barbara Buhler Lynes, the museum's curator.

The exhibit is coming to Santa Fe following successful runs at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

Time magazine listed Abstraction among the top 10 art exhibitions of 2009 and The New Yorker's Calvin Tomkins rated it as one of the best museum shows of that year.

"Many people came to the show dubious about her art and left convinced of the quality and invention of her work," said Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney. "This is a seminal aspect of an artist they thought they knew."

Buhler Lynes said the curators of the show were nervous about the public response prior to the Whitney opening last fall because O'Keeffe has not been so well-regarded by New York critics in the last 40 years. "She has always been kind of dismissed as the creation of Alfred Stieglitz and really not taken seriously as an artist, primarily because she's best known for her representations of flowers," Buhler Lynes said.

Few remember that O'Keeffe's flowers were innovative for their time. When they were unveiled in the Seven Americans show organized by Stieglitz (by then her husband) in 1925, critic Edmund Wilson observed, "Georgia O'Keeffe outblaze(d) the other painters of the exhibition."

"I think a lot of the issues of her being dismissed have to do with the nature of her most popular images, and the fact that they are so popular. When anybody is that popular, then the integrity of their work gets called into question," Buhler Lynes said.

Or, as Bruce Robertson, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, put it, "O'Keeffe tends to be pigeonholed as either a painter of flowers or a painter of skulls in New Mexico. And she is so 'over-posterized,' so over-reproduced. But it's only a small selection of what she actually does that gets reproduced, so it tends to marginalize her from the big questions."

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction encourages viewers to set aside preconceived notions of her work and see it anew. "She holds up. She's unique. She's all her own. And I think that's what she wanted to be," said Elizabeth Hutton Turner, one of the show's curators.

IF YOU GO

What: Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

When: May 28 to Sept. 12; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sundays through Wednesdays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays.

Where: Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St.

Cost: $10; seniors and students over 18 with ID, $8; New Mexico residents, $5; youths free. The museum is free to everyone from 5 to 8 p.m. on the first Friday of every month.

Curators: Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art; Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum; Bruce Robertson, University of California, Santa Barbara; Elizabeth Hutton Turner, University of Virginia

For more information: www.okeeffemuseum.org or 946-1000.