GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: FLOWERS, SKULLS, DESERTS

Biosketch

Lisa Messinger Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 For seven decades, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) was a major figure in American art. Remarkably, she remained independent from shifting art trends and stayed true to her own vision, which was based on finding the essential, abstract forms in nature. With exceptionally keen powers of observation and great finesse with a paintbrush, she recorded subtle nuances of color, shape, and light that enlivened her paintings and attracted a wide audience. Her primary subjects were landscapes, flowers, and bones, explored in series over several years and even decades. The images were drawn from her life experience and related either generally or specifically to places where she lived. Born in 1887 near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe received art training at the Art Institute of Chicago school (1905), the Art Students League of New York (1907–8), the University of Virginia (1912), and Columbia University’s Teachers College, New York (1914–16). She became an art teacher and taught in various elementary schools, high schools, and colleges in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina from 1911 to 1918. During this period, she produced a remarkable series of charcoal drawings that led her art—and her career—in a new direction. These daring works of 1915–16 (50.236.2) orchestrated line, shape, and tone into abstract compositions. It was through these drawings that O’Keeffe came to the attention of the prominent photographer and New York gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz in January 1916. After supposedly exclaiming, “At last, a woman on paper!” he exhibited her drawings at the 291 gallery, where the works of many avant-garde European and American artists and photographers were introduced to the American public. With his encouragement and promise of financial support, O’Keeffe abandoned teaching and arrived in New York in June 1918, to begin a career as an artist. From then until his death in 1946, Stieglitz vigorously promoted her work in twenty-two solo exhibitions and numerous group installations. The two lived together almost immediately and were married in 1924. The ups and downs of their personal and professional relationship were recorded in Stieglitz’s celebrated photographs of O’Keeffe (1997.61.12), taken over the course of twenty years (1917–37). As a new member of the Stieglitz circle, she associated with some of America’s most distinguished early modernists—painters such as Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth, and photographers such as Paul Strand and Edward J. Steichen, as well as influential art critics and writers. Their discussions about art, and the example of their work, both validated and influenced O’Keeffe’s own work. During the 1920s, O’Keeffe painted a series of architectural pictures that dramatically depict the soaring skyscrapers and aerial views of New York City. But most often, she painted landscapes and botanical studies that were inspired by annual trips to the Stieglitz family summer home in Lake George, New York. In her magnified close-ups of flowers (69.278.1), begun in 1924, O’Keeffe brings the viewer right into the picture. Enlarging the tiniest petals to fill an entire 30 x 40 inch canvas emphasized their shapes and lines and made them appear abstract, when in fact they were based on her observations of nature. Such daring compositions helped establish O’Keeffe’s reputation as an innovative modernist. Toward the end of the decade, the strains of dealing with the New York art world, her growing boredom with Lake George, and her deteriorating relationship with Stieglitz took their toll on her physical and emotional health. In response, she made her first extended trip to New Mexico in 1929. It was a visit that had a lasting impact on her life, and an immediate effect on her work. Over the next twenty years, from 1929 to 1949, she made almost annual trips to New Mexico, staying up to six months there, painting in relative solitude, then returning to New York each winter to exhibit the new work at Stieglitz’s gallery. This pattern continued until she moved permanently to New Mexico in 1949. There, O’Keeffe found new subjects to paint in the sun-bleached animal bones and the rugged mountains that dominate the terrain. Two of her earliest and most celebrated Southwestern paintings—Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (52.203) and Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses (Art Institute of Chicago) from 1931—exquisitely reproduce a skull’s weathered surfaces, jagged edges, and irregular openings. Rather than signifying death, O’Keeffe said that the bones symbolized the eternal beauty of the desert. Later, she painted fanciful canvases that combined skeletal objects and landscape imagery in the same composition (59.204.2). The results were provocative and unsettling, and the odd juxtapositions and discrepancies in size and scale led some to call these works surreal. Between 1943 and 1945, she also explored another variation on the bone theme in her large series of Pelvis pictures, which focused on the contrasts between convex and concave surfaces, and solid and open spaces (61.565.36). Although the desert bones of New Mexico had initially sparked O’Keeffe’s imagination, it was the region’s majestic landscape, with its unusual geological formations, vivid colors, clarity of light, and exotic vegetation, that held her attention for more than four decades. Often she painted the rocks, cliffs, and mountains in dramatic close-up, just as she had done with her flower subjects. One of her favorite settings was a site she nicknamed the “Black Place” (59.204.1), which she interpreted both panoramically and in tight views emphasizing the ragged juncture of two hills. O’Keeffe eventually owned two homes north of Santa Fe—the first, her summer retreat at Ghost Ranch, was nestled beneath 700-foot cliffs and looked out to the flat-topped Pedernal in the distance, while the second, used as her winter residence, was in the small town of Abiquiú. While both locales provided a wealth of imagery for her paintings, one feature of the Abiquiú house—the large walled patio with its black door—was particularly inspirational. In more than thirty pictures between 1946 and 1960 (Black Door with Red, Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia), she reinvented the patio into an abstract arrangement of geometric shapes. From the 1950s into the 1970s, O’Keeffe traveled widely around the world, making trips to the Far East, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and Europe. Flying in airplanes inspired her last two major series—aerial views of rivers (It Was Blue and Green, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), and expansive paintings of the sky viewed from just above the clouds (Sky Above Clouds IV, Art Institute of Chicago). In both series, as well as in the later patio door pictures, O’Keeffe increased the size of her canvases, sometimes to mural proportions, reflecting perhaps her newly expanded view of the world. The seven works in her Sky Above Clouds series (1962–65) are the most dramatic of her later years. When in 1965 she successfully translated this motif to a monumental canvas measuring 24 feet in length (with the help of assistants), it was an enormous challenge and a special feat for an artist nearing eighty years of age. The last two decades of the artist’s life were relatively unproductive as ill health and blindness hindered her ability to work. When she died in 1986 at age ninety-eight, her ashes were scattered over the New Mexico landscape she had loved for more than half a century. Her rich legacy of some 900 paintings has continued to attract subsequent generations of artists and art lovers who derive inspiration from these very American images. ________________________________________ Citation: Messinger, Lisa. “Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geok/hd_geok.htm (October 2004)

Red Poppy (1927)

Recommended Media

Timeline

1887 November 15: Georgia Totto O’Keeffe born to Francis Calyxtus O’Keeffe and Ida Totto O’Keeffe at family dairy farm, near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, the first girl and the second of seven children, including Francis Calyxtus (1885-1959), Ida Ten Eyck (1889-1961), Anita Natalie (1891-1985), Alexius Wyckoff (1892-1930), Catherine Blanche (1895-1987), and Claudia Ruth (1899-1984 1892–1900 Attends Town Hall School and, along with sisters Ida and Anita, receives art lessons at home; furthers art instruction with Sarah Mann, a local watercolorist. 1901–1902 Attends Sacred Heart Academy in Madison, Wisconsin, for first year of high school (as boarder); receives art instruction from Sister Angelique. 1902 Fall: O’Keeffe family moves to Williamsburg, Virginia. 1902-1903 As a sophomore, attends Madison High School; lives with her aunt, Leonore (“Lola”) Totto. June 1903: joins family in Williamsburg. 1903–1905 Fall 1903: attends Chatham (Virginia) Episcopal Institute, as a boarder. June 1905: graduates. Elizabeth May Willis, Chatham’s principal and art instructor, recognizes and encourages O’Keeffe’s interest in art. In senior year O’Keeffe serves as art editor of the school yearbook Mortar Board. 1905-1906 Fall 1905: attends School of The Art Institute of Chicago and studies with John Vanderpoel; lives with uncle and aunt, Charles and Alletta Totto. Summer 1906: with family in Williamsburg, recovering from lingering illness; remains there through the next summer. 1907-1908 Fall-spring: attends Art Students League, New York; studies with William Merritt Chase, F. Luis Mora, and Kenyon Cox; rooms with Florence Cooney. January 1908: attends exhibition of works on paper by Auguste Rodin at The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (291), operated by Alfred Stieglitz; sits for portrait by fellow student Eugene Speicher. April 1908: possibly sees exhibition of works by Henri Matisse at 291. June 1908: awarded League’s 1907-8 Still Life Scholarship. Summer 1908: as scholarship winner, attends League’s Outdoor School at Lake George, New York. 1908-1911 Fall 1908: moves to Chicago to work as free-lance commercial artist, again living with uncle and aunt, the Tottos. Around 1910: becomes ill with measles and moves to Charlottesville, Virginia, to live with mother, sisters, and brothers, who move there from Williamsburg sometime in 1909. Fall 1911: temporarily takes over Miss Willis’s teaching schedule at Chatham Episcopal Institute, who indicates in 1912 letter, “Miss O’Keeffe had charge of my Art Department last fall.” 1912 Summer: attends drawing class at University of Virginia, Charlottesville, taught by Alon Bement, of Teachers College, Columbia University, who introduces her to ideas of his mentor, artist-teacher Arthur Wesley Dow, head of Art Department at Teachers College.August: moves to Amarillo, Texas, as supervisor of drawing and penmanship in public schools; holds position through spring 1914. 1913 Summer: returns to Charlottesville to work as Bement’s assistant at University of Virginia (and continues to teach there summers through 1916). 1914-1915 Meets Arthur Macmahon, a political science professor from Columbia University, who is teaching summer school at University of Virginia and with whom she becomes close friends. Fall 1914: enrolls at Teachers College, Columbia University. December 1914-March 1915: attends exhibitions of works by Georges Braque, John Marin, and Pablo Picasso at 291. Fall 1915: moves to Columbia, South Carolina, to teach art at Columbia College. October 1915: makes decision to chart new direction for her art and produces seminal series of charcoal abstractions, some of which she sends to her friend Anita Pollitzer in New York during the period October-December. 1916 January: Pollitzer takes group of O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings to Stieglitz at 291 on New Year’s Day. O’Keeffe sends Pollitzer additional work and begins a thirty-year correspondence with Stieglitz, which is particularly intense in 1916-18. March: returns to Teachers College to attend the Dow course in methods specified by West Texas State Normal College, Canyon, as prerequisite to assuming position there. May 1: mother dies in Charlottesville; attends funeral following day. May 23: Stieglitz opens group show at 291 that includes some of O’Keeffe’s charcoal drawings. June: leaves New York for Virginia to teach with Bement. Late August: moves to Texas to begin teaching job. Stieglitz includes O’Keeffe work in an informal group show at 291. 1917 April 3: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe, first one-person show of her work, at 291; August: vacations in and around Ward, Colorado, with sister Claudia. On way back to Texas, stops in Santa Fe for first time and is immediately impressed by New Mexico’s vast skies and vistas and the stark beauty of its landscape forms. Early winter: becomes ill. 1918 Late February: granted leave of absence from teaching responsibilities and, on February 21, moves first to San Antonio and later, in March, to a farm in Waring, Texas. Relocating rejuvenates O’Keeffe. May: Stieglitz sends Strand to Texas to discover if O’Keeffe would consider moving to New York. June 10: O’Keeffe and Strand arrive in New York, and O’Keeffe moves into studio apartment at 114 East 59th Street that Stieglitz’s niece, Elizabeth, is not using. July 8: Stieglitz leaves Emmeline Obermeyer Stieglitz, his wife since 1893, to live with O’Keeffe. That month, he begins photographing O’Keeffe in earnest, and she resigns from West Texas State, accepting Stieglitz’s offer to underwrite a year of painting. November 11: O’Keeffe’s father dies in Petersburg, Virginia. 1921 February 7: Stieglitz retrospective exhibition opens at The Anderson Galleries (145 prints, 1886-1921); several nudes within the 45 photographs of O’Keeffe create sensation with public and critics. 1923 January 29: Stieglitz opens Alfred Stieglitz Presents One Hundred Pictures: Oils, Water-colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, American, an exhibition of over 100 works at The Anderson Galleries. He organizes exhibitions of her work annually until his death in 1946. 1924 March: Stieglitz opens Alfred Stieglitz Presents Fifty-One Recent Pictures: Oils, Water-colors, Pastels, Drawings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, American, at The Anderson Galleries and, simultaneously, opens an exhibition of 61 of his photographs. September 9: Stieglitz’s divorce from wife finalized. November: O’Keeffe and Stieglitz move to apartment at 35 East 58th Street and, on December 11, are married in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. 1925 March: Stieglitz opens Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs & Things, Recent & Never Before Publicly Shown, by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz at The Anderson Galleries, in which O’Keeffe’s large-format paintings of flowers are first exhibited. Mid-November: O’Keeffe and Stieglitz move to the Shelton Hotel, on Lexington Avenue between 48th and 49th, living first on 12th floor and, subsequently, on other floors until 1936, when they move to 405 East 54th Street. 1926 February: Stieglitz opens Fifty Recent Paintings, by Georgia O’Keeffe, at The Intimate Gallery, which includes first of many depictions of New York architecture completed between 1925 and 1932. 1927 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings, 1926, at The Intimate Gallery. April: O’Keeffe at Lake George. June: first retrospective, Paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, opens at The Brooklyn Museum. 1928 January: Stieglitz opens O’Keeffe Exhibition, at The Intimate Gallery. April 21: he announces sale of six O’Keeffe calla lily paintings for $25,000. 1929 February 4-March 17: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings, 1928, at The Intimate Gallery. April 27: O’Keeffe and artist Rebecca Strand (wife of photographer Paul Strand) leave for Santa Fe, New Mexico; after arrival, move to Taos as guests of arts supporter-writer Mabel Dodge Luhan, who provides O’Keeffe a studio. December 13: Paintings by 19 Living Americans, with five works by O’Keeffe, opens at the Museum of Modern Art. December 15: Stieglitz opens final gallery, An American Place, in Room 1710, 509 Madison Avenue, with Marin exhibition. 1930 February: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: 27 New Paintings, New Mexico, New York, Lake George, Etc., at An American Place, which includes earliest paintings of New Mexico crosses and of San Francisco de Assís Church in Ranchos de Taos. Late April: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. June-September: O’Keeffe guest of Luhans in Taos. 1931 December 27: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: 33 New Paintings (New Mexico) at An American Place, the first exhibition with paintings of bones. 1932 April: O’Keeffe accepts $1500 commission to paint mural for powder room in Radio City Music Hall, scheduled to open at end of year. June and August: travels to Canada and paints barns, crosses, and the sea. October: faced with technical and other difficulties, abandons Radio City Music Hall commission and stops painting entirely. 1933 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings—New & Some Old, at An American Place. O’Keeffe becomes ill and moves to New York apartment of sister Anita Young. February: admitted to Doctor’s Hospital, suffering from psychoneurosis. From March through April: recuperates in Bermuda. In October, is recovered enough to begin drawing at Lake George. 1934 January: begins painting after 13-month hiatus, and on January 29, Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe at “An American Place,” 44 Selected Paintings 1915-1927. March-April: O’Keeffe again travels to Bermuda. June: travels to New Mexico. August: first visit to Ghost Ranch, a dude ranch north of Abiquiu. Stunning landscape configurations around Ghost Ranch provide new inspiration for O’Keeffe’s work. 1935 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Paintings (1919-1934), at An American Place. July: travels to New Mexico, and until August 2, stays at Garland’s ranch, then moves to room at Ghost Ranch. 1936 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Recent Paintings, 1935, at An American Place. April: O’Keeffe and Stieglitz move from Shelton Hotel to penthouse apartment at 405 East 54th Street. June: O’Keeffe travels to New Mexico; first summer living in the house at Ghost Ranch she buys in 1940, Rancho de los Burros. July- Fall: receives $10,000 commission from Elizabeth Arden to make large painting for new exercise salon in New York. 1937 February: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: New Paintings, An American Place, New York, N.Y. July: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. December: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: The 14th Annual Exhibition of Paintings With Some Recent O’Keeffe Letters, at An American Place. 1938 May: O’Keeffe travels to Williamsburg, Virginia, to receive honorary degree from College of William and Mary, the first of many she would receive during her lifetime. Summer: O’Keeffe receives commission from advertising agency N. W. Ayer to travel to Hawaii to produce paintings for a Dole Company promotional campaign. August: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. 1939 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils And Pastels, at An American Place. Late January-April: O’Keeffe travels to Hawaii. 1940 February: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils and Pastels, at An American Place. August: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. 1941 January: Stieglitz opens Exhibition of Georgia O’Keeffe, at An American Place. May: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. 1942 February: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Recent Paintings, 1941, at An American Place. June: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. December: O’Keeffe moves with Stieglitz to 59 East 54th Street, her last New York address. 1943 January: O’Keeffe in Chicago to install and attend events related to opening of retrospective, Georgia O’Keeffe, at the Art Institute of Chicago. March: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings-1942-1943, at An American Place. April: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. 1944 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings—1943, at An American Place. April: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. 1945 January: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings, 1944, at An American Place. May: O’Keeffe to New Mexico. December: purchases Abiquiu property from Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe. 1946 February: Stieglitz opens Georgia O’Keeffe, at An American Place. O’Keeffe begins organizing retrospective, Georgia O’Keeffe, to open at The Museum of Modern Art in May. July 13: Stieglitz dies. Late September: O’Keeffe returns to New Mexico. 1947 January through early summer: O’Keeffe in New York (where she primarily lives until 1949), working to settle the Stieglitz Estate, which results in the distribution of his art collection to numerous public institutions. 1949 June: leaves New York to live permanently in New Mexico, where she habitually spends winter and spring in Abiquiu and summer and fall at Ghost Ranch. 1950 July: O’Keeffe begins organizing Georgia O’Keeffe: Paintings 1946-1950, to open at An American Place in October. Edith Halpert, owner of The Downtown Gallery, becomes O’Keeffe’s exclusive agent. 1951 February-March: O’Keeffe travels to Mexico for six weeks with Spud Johnson, Elliot Porter, and Porter’s wife, Aline. Trip includes drive to Yucatán with Rose and Miguel Covarrubias and meets Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo. 1959 Brother Francis dies. January-April: travels via San Francisco and Honolulu to Southeast Asia, the Far East, India, the Middle East, and Italy. 1960 July: O’Keeffe helps organize Georgia O’Keeffe: Forty Years of Her Art, the retrospective that opens in October at the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum. Late October-November: O’Keeffe makes second trip to Asia. 1961 Sister Ida dies. Spring: helps organize and install what will be her last exhibition at The Downtown Gallery, Georgia O’Keeffe: Recent Paintings and Drawings, which opens in early April. 1963 Doris Bry becomes O’Keeffe’s exclusive agent. 1965 Summer: in garage at Ghost Ranch paints her largest clouds picture. 1966 March: attends opening of retrospective, Georgia O’Keeffe: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist from 1915 to 1966, at the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth. 1970 Early October: installs retrospective, Georgia O’Keeffe, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. 1971 Early in year: loses central vision; retains only peripheral sight. 1972 During year, completes last unassisted oil painting, though continues to work in oil with assistance until 1977. (Works unassisted in watercolor and charcoal until 1978 and in graphite until 1984.) 1973 November: meets potter-sculptor Juan Hamilton, who becomes her assistant and, later, her close friend and representative. (Among other things, Hamilton is a travelling companion and facilitator, making possible completion of several projects, including Viking Press publication Georgia O’Keeffe [1976] and Perry Miller Adato video Georgia O’Keeffe [1977]). 1977 January: receives Medal of Freedom from President Gerald Ford. 1984 March: O’Keeffe moves, with Hamilton and family, to large house in Santa Fe, Sol y Sombra, to be nearer medical facilities. 1985 Sister Anita Young dies. Awarded National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan. 1986 March 6: O’Keeffe dies at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Santa Fe.
Black Place (1945)
Blue Line (1919)
Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931)

Web Resources: Print

BIOGRAPHY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O%27Keeffe BIOGRAPHY (Britannica): https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georgia-OKeeffe BIOGRAPHY (Biography Channel): https://www.biography.com/artists/georgia-okeeffe O’KEEFFE MUSEUM: https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/ MET MUSEUM OF ART: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geok/hd_geok.htm NATIONAL GALLERY (Art Works): https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.2311.html#works MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (including Art Works): https://www.moma.org/artists/4360 BROOKLYN MUSEUM: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/georgia_o_keeffe ARTICLE (The Guardian): https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/01/georgia-okeeffe-tate-modern-exhibition-wild-beauty NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/books/review/carolyn-burke-foursome.html ARTICLE (Sotheby’s): https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/georgia-okeeffe-a-force-of-nature
Drawing No. 2 (1915)
White Flower (1932)
Two Calla Lilies (1928)

Web Resources: Visual

OVERVIEW (5-minute TED TALK): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KQeu_mTYTQ 1977 INTERVIEW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v71awD38Qy4 OVERVIEW (15 min. Gene Hackman narrator; O’Keeffe Museum): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV1w0IK_sdA OVERVIEW OF LANDSCAPES THAT INSPIRED HER (O’Keeffe Museum; 2021; 10 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJw4pkLKAeE TEN FACTS ABOUT O’KEEFFE (geared for younger students/amateurs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNonjbHI1Cw
Blue and Green Music
Rams Head and White Hollyhock
Calla Lily Turned Away
My Backyard
Oriental Poppies
East River from Shelton Hotel

Six Representative Paintings

Ranchos Church (1930)
Ram's Head, Blue Morning Glory (1938)

O'Keeffe's Will and Settlement

Los Angeles Times BY LEAH BETH WARD JULY 27, 1987 12 AM PT SANTA FE, N.M. — District Court Judge Patricio Serna in a court hearing here on Saturday approved a final settlement in the contested estate of the late artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who died March 6, 1986, at the age of 98. The settlement calls for the establishment of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation in Abiquiu, the village where she lived and painted her trademark landscapes. About $38 million worth of O'Keefe artworks and photographs taken by the artist’s late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, will be distributed by the foundation. Sitting on the board will be Juan Hamilton, a 41-year-old sculptor and O'Keeffe’s longtime companion; June O'Keeffe Sebring, a niece; and a representative of Catherine Klenert, O'Keeffe’s sister. The settlement gives Sebring and the Klenert family art and money not to exceed $1 million. Hamilton receives at least 24 works of art, a photograph by Stieglitz, the Ghost Ranch, and writings and papers of O'Keeffe. Artwork by other, unidentified artists and some of O'Keeffe’s personal property also will go to Hamilton, who refused to disclose the value of what he receives. The settlement admits to probate O'Keeffe’s 1979 will and a 1983 codicil, but denies a controversial 1984 codicil, which shifted about 60% of the estate to Hamilton.
Artist’s Estate Settled Amicably ED MORENO July 25, 1987 SANTA FE, N.M. (Associated Press) A judge approved a final settlement Saturday for the disposition of the estate of the late artist Georgia O’Keeffe that includes formation of a foundation to distribute many of her paintings to museums.The settlement approved by District Judge Patricio Serna had been tentatively approved June 5 by Miss O’Keeffe’s longtime companion, John Bruce ″Juan″ Hamilton, and members of her family, who had been disputing the terms of Miss O’Keeffe’s will.The entire estate was valued at $65 million.″I think it’s in the best interests of all parties, and certainly of Georgia O’Keeffe’s estate, to not be tied up in years of litigation and extreme costs,″ Hamilton said after the three-hour hearing.Miss O’Keeffe died at the age of 98 on March 6, 1986.The dispute involved the pre-eminent painter’s will, executed in 1979, and two codicils, or amendments, in 1983 and 1984.The 1984 codicil transferred the ″residual″ estate of 42 paintings worth about $47.2 million, or everything that was not specifically bequeathed to individuals or museums, to Hamilton. That codicil superceded the 1979 will, which had given the residual estate to charitable organizations for public display.Under the settlement, those 42 paintings will go to the foundation. Hamilton will get 24 other paintings.The artist’s sister, Catherine Klenert of Milwaukee, and a niece, June O’Keeffe Sebring of Kailua, Hawaii, had contested the will and codicils, alleging Miss O’Keeffe had been improperly influenced by Hamilton, 41, her companion and business adviser for 14 years.The centerpiece of the settlement is the formation of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, a non-profit foundation that will distribute the 42 residual artworks to museums and other institutions, said Raymond Krueger, grandson of Mrs. Klenert, an attorney and heir in the estate.Among other provisions in the settlement:-More than 36 paintings with an estimated value of $19.8 million will be given to the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the Brooklyn Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.-Yale University will receive all letters, correspondence and clippings, to join similar materials from the estate of Alfred Stieglitz, Miss O’Keeffe’s husband of 22 years until his death in 1946.-The state of New Mexico will receive five paintings valued at $1.5 million to satisfy estate taxes.-The foundation received the artist’s home at Abiquiu, and it will become the headquarters of the foundation.-Under the 1979 will and the 1983 codicil, which were affirmed by Serna, Hamilton gets about 10 percent of the estate, including the artist’s Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiu, and at least 24 paintings, with an unspecified value, as well as a photograph by Stieglitz, all of Miss O’Keeffe’s correspondtoward Miss O’Keeffe’s family.ence to him, certain copyrights, and works of other artists.-The Klenerts will receive five paintings and $295,000 in cash and Ms. Sebring will receive eight paintings and $489,,600 in cash.Ms. Sebring’s lawyer, Jerry Wertheim, said his investigation found that when the 1984 codicil was signed, ″Miss O’Keeffe was indeed weak. She was blind and deaf, basically. She was very frail and was having problems in mentation and remembering and those problems that are very common in a person who was very ill.″Jeffery Fornaciari, Hamilton’s lawyer, said that if the case had gone to trial, Hamilton could have shown that ″there are strong factual and legal bases for upholding all of Miss O’Keeffe’s testamentary documents.″Hamilton said after the hearing that he has no ill feelings
Lake George (1921)
Above the Clouds (1962)
Black Iris (1926)