Unique Santa Fe Museum Planned for Works of Artist Georgia O’Keeffe

For all its renown as an arts center, Santa Fe never has provided a satisfactory answer to a frequent question from visitors: Where are the O’Keeffes?

That will change with the opening next year of a museum devoted to the works of Georgia O’Keeffe.

One of the foremost American artists, O’Keeffe had a nearly 60-year association with northern New Mexico, spending the last four decades of her life in a tiny village near here.

The stark landscape inspired some of her best-known paintings.

But art lovers who develop a taste for O’Keeffe at museums in New York City or Paris or Tokyo have to settle for seeing only a handful of her works when they visit the place with which she is most closely identified.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, scheduled to open in the summer of 1997, promises a permanent collection of her art “unequaled by any museum in the world,” according to director Peter Hassrick.

The fledgling private operation recently was given 33 of the late artist’s works, believed to be the largest group ever to go to a single institution.

The multimillion-dollar collection--the museum won’t put a price tag on it--includes oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, pastels and a cast-aluminum sculpture. They were done between 1914 and 1982.

The new museum was founded by Anne and John Marion, who live in Fort Worth, Texas, and Santa Fe. She is a philanthropist and heir to Texas ranching and oil interests; he is former chairman of Sotheby’s North America, the auction house.

Anne Marion is president of the museum and of the Burnett Foundation of Fort Worth, named after her great-grandfather. The foundation donated the 33 works to the new museum, in conjunction with the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, which is in charge of distributing the artist’s estate.

The Burnett Foundation also bought a downtown Santa Fe gallery and a couple of adjacent buildings to convert to a 7,350-square-foot museum and office complex.

Renovation should be finished by late spring.

The new museum will be just a few blocks from the state-owned Museum of Fine Arts, which has 14 O’Keeffes. The proximity is no accident; the two museums plan to collaborate, rather than compete.

They may swap the artist’s work, for example, with one museum borrowing from the other for a special exhibit. Volunteer guides for the O’Keeffe museum will be trained at the state museum.

The multiday or annual passes that get visitors into several state museums will also gain them entry to the O’Keeffe museum.

And, in an unusual arrangement not yet finalized, the O’Keeffe museum plans to donate some of its revenue from admissions to the state museum.

The idea, Hassrick said, is “for each institution to profit from the existence and the expertise and the resources” of the other.

Stuart Ashman, Museum of Fine Arts director, has no doubt that the new museum will be “the most important O’Keeffe collection in the world.”

Ashman said he expects it to generate increased public interest in the arts and to reinforce Santa Fe’s importance as an arts center.

“I think it’s enriching the arts community in a way we couldn’t do--and couldn’t justify doing” at the taxpayer-funded state museum, Ashman said.

The recently announced donation brings to 37 the number of O’Keeffe works given or pledged to the new museum. Hassrick said he hopes the permanent collection will eventually number 60 or 70.

Hired in January, Hassrick spent the last 20 years as director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo. A Denver area native and an expert on Western artist Frederic Remington, he has had a longtime interest in O’Keeffe.

Working from temporary offices where white walls are lined with posters featuring O’Keeffe paintings, Hassrick rides herd on tasks ranging from courting private collectors to figuring out where museum visitors will park.

There are major collections of O’Keeffe’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, but there is no institution dedicated exclusively to O’Keeffe.

“I believe that this is, in fact, the first single-artist museum devoted to a woman artist in the United States,” Hassrick said.

O’Keeffe warrants it because of the significance and breadth of her work, he said.

“She was a pioneer . . . not only because she was a woman artist, but because of her commanding presence in the early modernist scheme of things,” Hassrick said.

“There were other artists who were important, who were shoulder to shoulder with her . . . but there is something about O’Keeffe’s work that makes it especially American.”

Born in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe attended art schools in Chicago and New York City, and taught in Virginia, Texas and South Carolina.

She began visiting New Mexico in 1929 while living in New York. she moved here full time in 1949, after the death of her husband, famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

She lived in the village of Abiquiu and at a ranch nearby, moving to Santa Fe a couple of years before her death in 1986 at age 98.

Hassrick envisions the museum as not only a significant repository for her art, but a study center for matters related to O’Keeffe.

He has, for example, begun discussions with the University of New Mexico about a photographic survey of O’Keeffe, whose picture was taken by many major figures in American photography. The research could lead to an exhibit at the museum.