Achim Borchardt-Hume, the Tate Modern’s director of exhibitions, said a key reason for hosting the retrospective was to offer O’Keeffe the “multiple readings” she had been denied in the past as a female artist.

“O’Keeffe has been very much reduced to one particular body of work, which tends to be read in one particular way,” he said. “Many of the white male artists across the 20th century have the privilege of being read on multiple levels, while others – be they women or artists from other parts of the world – tend to be reduced to one conservative reading. It’s high time that galleries and museums challenge this.”

Tanya Barson, who will curate the Tate Modern show, emphasised how much O’Keeffe had resisted the sexual reading into her paintings, which began in the 1920s but was then revived by feminists in the 1970s who took her work as a statement of female empowerment.

The Freudian theory that her flower paintings were actually close studies of the female vulva were first put forward in 1919 by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who first promoted O’Keeffe’s work and later became her husband.