Alfred Stieglitz, courtesy of Brooklyn Museum

In April 1917, as the final show at his gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, Alfred Stieglitz mounted Georgia O’Keeffe’s first solo exhibition. A centennial is the sort of occasion curators can’t resist, and it should be the raison d’être of Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern (a show in which, fittingly, vexingly, Stieglitz looms large). But curators can’t resist self-congratulation either, and the Brooklyn Museum wants us to relate the show to its 1927 exhibition of the artist’s work. Fair enough. Anyway, O’Keeffe belongs to that very small pantheon: an artist whose work doesn’t need a reason to be revisited.

Living Modern is an exhibition the like of which I’ve never before encountered. It’s an assemblage of art, photography, and relics, principally clothes, and explores how one of the last century’s most gifted artists constructed one of the last century’s most enduring personas. A more accurate title might have been Georgia O’Keeffe: The Brand.

In her exhaustive biography of the artist, Roxana Robinson quotes O’Keeffe on one of her instructors at the Art Students League, William Merritt Chase: “He arrived for class in a silk hat, flower in his button-hole, fur-lined coat, very light gloves, spats, and a neat brown suit. When he entered the building a rustle seemed to flow from the ground floor to the top that ‘Chase has arrived!’” Robinson posits that the way in which Chase embodied the role of artist had an effect on his pupil; wherever she learned it, Living Modern documents how O’Keeffe made this role her own.

Clothes don’t make the man (I’m hard pressed to imagine the museumgoers of the future queuing up to see Schnabel’s sarongs) but clothes have an interesting role in the making of the woman, at least this particular woman. There’s something gutsy in Living Modern’s decision to show the artist’s wardrobe alongside roughly contemporaneous work. I don’t personally buy that the organic forms of O’Keeffe’s early watercolor abstractions are related to the dresses she favored. Still, it’s daring to relate the pintucks on a linen blouse (attributed to the artist herself) to the botanical detail in her 1928 painting 2 Yellow Leaves. Why not?

There’s every reason to be skeptical of an exhibition that includes the artist’s shoes, and it’s hard to imagine Living Modern being mounted 20 years ago. The whole notion just sounds so trivial, so material, so sexist, so utterly beside the point. But O’Keeffe is a confounding case. Just as she was maturing as an artist, she became entangled with Stieglitz, as lover and companion, yes, but also as subject. His photographs of beautiful young O’Keeffe were artistic exploration, and they were collaboration (she feels like the co-author of those photographs). But it’s impossible to ignore her beauty, her nudity, her exposure. The clothes on view here, designed or modified by the artist, are a riposte to the Stieglitz photos (too many of which end up in the show). They’re testament to the fact that Georgia O’Keeffe, Inc. wasn’t something Stieglitz dreamt up.