O’Keeffe refused permission. Nonetheless, Lowe published the book to glowing reviews and it remains a definitive and insightful work on the photographer’s life.
In June, under a banner announcing the Stieglitz exhibition, O’Keeffe walked up the steps to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show’s second venue. She could scarely help remembering that some seventy years earlier she and the great photographer had been discovered by Emmy at his home, which had been no more than a hundred yards away. She thought of the years that she and Stieglitz had lived in tiny rooms in Lee Stieglitz’s home on East Sixty-fifth Street.
Staying as they usually did at the Stanhope Hotel, O’Keeffe and Hamilton invited Pop artist Andy Warhol to lunch. Warhol questioned them for his Interview magazine. Afterward, he observed, “Georgia . . . does know everything that’s going on, it’s just that she moves older.”9 Hamilton commissioned Warhol to do a diamond dust double portrait of him and O’Keeffe.
As part of the festivities for the Stieglitz show, Ashton Hawkins, then the secretary and general counsel for the Metropolitan, hosted a dinner in O’Keeffe’s honor to which he invited other distinguished women, such as former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the playwright Lillian Hellman, and former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. The artist, however, was not amused by the grand company. Hamilton had to cut her roast beef for her. When someone asked her about not painting, she snapped, “Hell, what makes you think that I’m not painting anymore?” She commented that she was painting inside her head, where she could still see colors quite clearly.10
After the Metropolitan retrospective, Hamilton took O’Keeffe for a carriage ride in Central Park. Having just seen Stieglitz’s photographs, her memories flooded back. She told Hamilton of the day she walked in the rain in that very park, ending her relationship with Arthur Macmahon. (In 1917, flocks of peacocks inhabited the park, and Stieglitz was once arrested for stealing feathers from a bird’s tail.)
After Ted Reid attended the opening of the Whitney retrospective, he continued to write to his former flame. Following her appearance on Good Morning America in 1976, Reid wrote to say that she looked well and “best of all, you have not lost any of your sharp thinking.”11 Two years later, after receiving a signed copy of her Viking book, he invited her to the West Texas Normal School reunion. She declined. Reid died at age eighty-seven on May 30, 1983.
A year later, she learned that Ansel Adams had died of a heart attack. When Hamilton reported the news, she replied unhesitatingly, “Oh, yes. He didn’t take good care of himself, did he?”12
At ninety-five, she had outlived most of her friends. Her sister Claudia had had a stroke in 1980 and lost much of her memory. Despite her physical health, O’Keeffe was also growing senile; she couldn’t recognize her niece Catherine Krueger and her husband, Earl, though they had visited the artist the previous year. She told her niece June Sebring, “I’ve lived too long.”
In November of 1983, O’Keeffe made her last international trip: she celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday with Hamilton, his wife, and their children on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where Hamilton’s parents had a home. “We walked on the beach, its dark gray volcanic sand, a huge crescent beach with palm trees, surf, beautiful sunsets,” Hamilton recalled.13
Although O’Keeffe has been compared to Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin for her decision to take herself out of the mainstream to pursue her work, Hamilton detailed a difference that he considered significant. “Unlike them, she really took care of herself. She did not have a destructive streak that was underlying both those guys. She was balanced, organized. On any day, she’d say, ‘Make sure the dogs have water, that the pump wasn’t going dry, that the garden is irrigated, the girls were paid, the taxes were paid, there is wood in the boxes.’ Her drawers were straightened out. Before she started painting, she liked to have all her drawers in order. And,” he paused for emphasis, “she wore panty hose.”14
O’Keeffe did not collect the Radcliffe College Lifetime Achievement Award given to her in 1983 and turned down other honorary degrees offered by St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut, and Salve Regina, The Newport College in Rhode Island. An abrupt letter to St. Joseph’s, which owned two O’Keeffe paintings, stated: “Miss O’Keeffe is no longer accepting honorary degrees.” O’Keeffe either didn’t know or didn’t care. At this advanced age, she noted, “I’m bored with my history, my myth.”
XI
O’Keeffe’s body was failing. Christine Taylor Patten, O’Keeffe’s weekend nurse beginning in 1983, was a witness to her decline.
O’Keeffe still rose at six each morning, but Patten had to elevate her legs for half an hour before she could walk. The artist ate breakfast while warming herself before the piñon logs burning in her bedroom fireplace.
Once a day, O’Keeffe and Patten took a walk around the driveway. To keep count of the circuits, and because she wanted to complete an equal number of laps per day, O’Keeffe would pick up a stone each time she walked the path. But she was always cold: even when the weather was mild, she donned her black quilted silk jacket, gloves, and scarf.
Even in her nineties, she continued to be interested in cooking and food. During their first months together, O’Keeffe helped Patten bake bread, kneading the dough and warning, “If you don’t treat the yeast right, your bread won’t be any good.”1 She took her main meal at midday, sitting erectly in the formal dining room, using her simple white china, her heavy silver, and her linen napkins. O’Keeffe ate with deliberation, always having a soup or salad before the main course. At five o’clock, each evening, O’Keeffe ate her light dinner on a tray in the studio and insisted the curtains be drawn even if a glorious sunset was visible. She had grown security conscious. (Before going to sleep, she always asked if the doors and gates were properly locked.)
By the spring of 1984, she was noticeably weaker. Her feet were so swollen with edemic fluid that she could no longer walk. The woman who had taken such pride in her stamina spoke with yearning of her long hikes in the hills and arroyos around Ghost Ranch. She had difficulty breathing and suffered from incontinence. She was afraid to be alone. Although she liked pancakes, O’Keeffe couldn’t bear having Patten away from her in the kitchen for the time it would take to make them.
Even on weekends, when it was agreed that Hamilton would stay with his wife and children, O’Keeffe called him each morning to ask if he would drive her to Ghost Ranch. When Hamilton refused, she would continue calling him until he grew angry. Like a petulant child, she would demand that Patten take her for a ride in the car.
O’Keeffe did not complain of pain, stoically enduring the indignities and discomforts of aging in silence. One morning, however, Patten found her sitting in the corner of her bedroom. As she started to help her get dressed, O’Keeffe cried, “I don’t know how I can get through another day and I don’t know why I have to!”2
The stress of O’Keeffe’s physical decline was driving Hamilton to the edge of a nervous breakdown. During the early eighties, he and O’Keeffe had made regular winter visits to Esther Johnson’s estate on Jupiter Island in Hobe Sound, Florida. Away from the freezing temperatures of northern New Mexico, O’Keeffe reveled in the humidity and the heated, saltwater swimming pool.
During one such visit, Hamilton drove Johnson and O’Keeffe down to Palm Beach to have dinner at Montsorrel. Anita lived alone in the 44,000-square-foot mansion with a staff of servants, collections of Louis XV furniture, Sevres porcelain, and many of her sister’s large paintings which she’d been buying and receiving as gifts since her purchase of a calla lily in 1926. In a grand dining room overlooking the Atlantic, three liveried footmen attended to Johnson and the two elderly O’Keeffe sisters. O’Keeffe wanted to show her friend Anita’s “wall of glass,” the floor-to-ceiling windows that opened at the touch of a button to let in the sea breezes.
In March of 1984, Hamilton decided to move O’Keeffe into Anita’s home in Palm Beach. Anita was being treated for throat cancer, an
d he felt the two sisters could receive medical attention at home, together. He installed himself and his family at Johnson’s house and made the hour drive back and forth to Palm Beach. But the move didn’t prove helpful to O’Keeffe’s health. In the unfamiliar setting, she grew disoriented and was unable to comprehend Hamilton’s frequent absences.
O’Keeffe’s condition escalated to pneumonia, and she was rushed on a Lear jet to the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s hospital in Santa Fe.3
She was now too frail to survive in her remote homes far from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. Her treasured solitude had become a threat to her survival. Hamilton purchased a hacienda in Santa Fe. Sol y Sombra, as it was called, is a 1937 adobe on twenty-six acres near Old Santa Fe Trail. The property was bought in O’Keeffe’s name for some three million dollars from art dealer, Gerald Peters. It included guest houses, a large studio, and a garage.
O’Keeffe was moved to the ground-floor library, a room with a fireplace, bathroom, and a private entrance, which allowed for her nurses to come and go. Some of O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu staff were housed in the guest quarters. Hamilton, his wife, and their boys lived in the rest of the house.
Hamilton had O’Keeffe’s spiral sculpture moved to the lawn outside her bedroom window. One night, he invited the Santa Fe Chamber Music Group to play privately for her as a soothing pleasure. But even her joy in classical music now failed her. She no longer listened to records, complaining, “It’s a pain to hear it and know that I’m not hearing it right.”4 When books were read to her, O’Keeffe could not concentrate. A nurse read from Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the volume that had been so influential when she was in her twenties. After a few pages, O’Keeffe stopped her nurse abruptly, saying, “Stop, I can’t believe I ever liked that.”
In her final years, O’Keeffe lost any sense of time. When asked whether she had made her white shawl, the once accomplished seamstress replied, “Oh, no. I have never made anything.”5 She remembered her past with greater precision than the present day. Stieglitz surfaced often in her remarks. When Patten asked O’Keeffe about her favorite place, other than Ghost Ranch, she expected to hear about Spain or China. Instead, O’Keeffe brightened and replied, “Amarillo, Texas. There were beautiful yellow trees there, the most beautiful yellow trees in the world.”6
As she lay in bed, O’Keeffe would stare out the window yearning for a peaceful surrender to the inevitable. In a recurring dream, she went through a dark tunnel and across a patch of grass, but when she reached the gate, she couldn’t manage to open it. Upon awakening, O’Keeffe pleaded with Patten, “Would you please come with me and help me through that gate? I am so afraid to go by myself!”7
Carol Sarkisian was another of the ten nurses and attendants who cared for O’Keeffe. She and her husband, artist Paul Sarkisian, had become friendly with both O’Keeffe and Hamilton in the mid-seventies. Carol Sarkisian had made many kimonos for O’Keeffe, out of her preferred 100 percent cotton fabric.
As her nurse, Sarkisian dressed O’Keeffe, oiled her legs and back, and brushed her hair. According to Sarkisian, O’Keeffe wore the kimonos because they disguised the fact of her mastectomy, undergone in 1955 but kept a secret. O’Keeffe refused to wear a brassiere with a prosthetic breast.8
Sarkisian was working at Sol y Sombra for three shifts a week in 1985 as a nurse to O’Keeffe and as a friend to Hamilton. “O’Keeffe and Hamilton had the same sense of humor, which is probably what got them together in the beginning,” she recalled. “Juan talked about quitting but he never quit. He was being a dutiful son.”9
O’Keeffe could walk around the house or to the back porch, but increasingly she found it difficult to leave her bedroom. In Abiquiu, she had often sat outside in the sun, but she rarely ventured from the house in Santa Fe. Her determinedly erect posture had collapsed, and she sat with her shoulders slumped, her jaw slack.
One night, mutual friends invited Patten to dinner with the Hamiltons. By the end of the evening, Hamilton was complaining, “I take care of everybody; nobody takes care of me.”10
On the afternoon of July 10, Hamilton came to see O’Keeffe and ordered Patten out of the room. He left after half an hour, and Patten found O’Keeffe agitated and convinced that she and Hamilton would have to be married.
The first week of August 1984, O’Keeffe’s attorney, Gerald Dickler, arrived from New York. When Hamilton told O’Keeffe that he was going to pick him up from the airport, she reminded him, “Tell him about our plan.” The next morning, Hamilton came into her room in the morning and urged Patten to hurry in getting her ready. O’Keeffe insisted on a white kimono with billowing sleeves. Anna Marie had filled the house with flowers. After lunch, while O’Keeffe napped, her New York and Santa Fe attorneys met with Hamilton. Judge Oliver Seth dropped by. Soon, all were animatedly discussing her will.
O’Keeffe, who may have believed that she and Hamilton were to be married, signed the second codicil to her 1979 will on August 8. Under the new terms, Hamilton would inherit the bulk of her estate, including Sol y Sombra, and most of the paintings that had been promised to museums. The agreement increased the value of his inheritance to approximately sixty-five million dollars. The codicil was read aloud to O’Keeffe, who signed, though she was blind and nearly deaf. Her signature was barely legible.
It is possible that O’Keeffe added the final codicil to her will in response to several overtures that had been made to her about establishing a museum in her name. According to O’Keeffe Museum curator Barbara Buhler Lynes, “She may have hoped that such an institution would materialize before or shortly after she died, in which case all of the works in her collection could be kept together.”11
In April of 1985, O’Keeffe was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan. She remained bedridden and could not attend the ceremony. She was barely conscious of the fact that her sister Anita had passed away that year.
After visiting O’Keeffe nearly every day for a year, in the first week of March 1986, Hamilton decided to take advantage of the spring break from his boys’ school and travel to Acapulco with his family. On the morning of March 6, he received a phone call from the housekeeper that O’Keeffe had been taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital because she was having difficulty breathing.
The Hamiltons boarded a return flight that morning. Waiting in Houston for the connecting flight to Albuquerque, Hamilton called the hospital. He was told that O’Keeffe had died at noon.
O’Keeffe had requested that there be no funeral or memorial service. Her body was cremated in Albuquerque and her ashes returned in a small urn to Hamilton. He drove north of Abiquiu and took the dirt road to the foot of the mesa. He hiked to the top of the Pedernal. Pausing until the wind was blowing to the north, he threw the ashes so they would be scattered over her beloved Ghost Ranch.
CODA
Ray Krueger happened to be en route to visit O’Keeffe when he heard of her death. The only member of the family in the vicinity, he went to Santa Fe and asked to see the will, the codicils, and the power of attorney. As an attorney, he could hardly help but notice that the codicils added to her 1979 will dramatically increased Hamilton’s inheritance. Although O’Keeffe had not mentioned family members in any of her wills, New Mexico probate law favors the family’s interests.
Advised by Krueger, Catherine Klenert, the last remaining O’Keeffe sister, and June Sebring sued Hamilton for “undue influence” over O’Keeffe as she changed her will. They challenged only the two added codicils—not the 1979 will in which they went unnamed.
In January 1987, less than a year after O’Keeffe’s death, an out-of-court settlement was announced. On June 5, Hamilton accepted the terms of the 1979 will.
In the settlement, two family members each received about a million dollars in art and cash. Hamilton was left with approximately two dozen paintings, Ghost Ranch, all of O’Keeffe’s letters to him, and many copyrights.1 Of the fifty-one paintings meant for museums, nine had been sol
d before the artist’s death. The rest were distributed as planned.2 Ten additional works were given to the Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, and the University Art Museum, University of New Mexico. Both had been named in the 1979 will.
In November 1987, when the artist would have turned one hundred, the Georgia O’Keeffe Centennial exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art, organized by Jack Cowart, with Hamilton as co-curator.
In 1989, the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation was established by members of the O’Keeffe estate, with Elizabeth Glassman named as president in 1990. The original board of directors was comprised of Krueger, Sebring, and Hamilton, who had to put aside their personal differences to oversee the future of the artist’s legacy. In addition, the foundation has a series of rotating directors on its board. Since 1999, they are Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, and Anne d’Harnoncourt, George D. Widener Director and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In 1999 the two-volume catalogue raisonné of O’Keefe’s work was written by Barbara Lynes with a contribution by Judith Walsh of the National Gallery of Art, which served as co-publisher with the O’Keeffe foundation. The catalogue raisonné documented more than two thousand paintings, watercolors, pastels, drawings, sketches, sculpture, and ceramics, nearly half of which were reproduced for the first time. The foundation also secured National Historic Landmark status for the Abiquiu house and studio, and in 1995, began opening the residence to tours by the public. In 1999, Glassman stepped down and Santa Fe attorney Robert Worcester was named president and Agapita Judy Lopez became the foundation director.
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