Barbara Buhler Lynes, the preeminent Georgia O'Keeffe scholar, remembers the first time she was enraptured by the artist's oeuvre. It was 1987, one year after O'Keeffe's death. Lynes, a Renaissance art historian at the time, visited the National Gallery of Art’s centennial exhibition in her honor. In an interview with Hyperallergic , Lynes recalled that the dozens of paintings and drawings on view, including a collection of early abstract works, sparked a question that would launch her decades-long scholarship on O'Keeffe: “Why had she turned away from abstraction, which was the most innovative thing happening in American art at the time, to essential representational imagery, which was much more traditional?” Inspired by O’Keeffe’s art and personal history, Lynes researched and published the artist’s definitive catalogue raisonné in 1999, for which she personally examined 2,029 works.…