O’Keeffe Exhibit Extended to Los Angeles

A traveling show of more than 100 paintings and drawings by the late Georgia O’Keeffe will come to Los Angeles early next year, museum officials said.

The show, which began last November at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, continued at the Art Institute of Chicago and is now at the Dallas Museum of Art. It had been scheduled to end later this fall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. However, the tour was extended to include a stop next March at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

United Press International reported that the surprise extension was announced Friday by J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery, and Earl A. Powell III, director of the Los Angeles County museum. Neither could be reached for comment Saturday.

The exhibition, sponsored by the Southwestern Bell Foundation, has already drawn more than one million visitors. O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at age 98, spent most of her time in an adobe home in the New Mexico hamlet of Abiquiu.

One of the most reknowned painters of the century, she is particularly well known for her sensuous landscapes with desert themes.

Her work is so popular in Chicago that art lovers there stole 35 of the 200 posters advertising the centennial exhibit as soon as they were displayed.