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C8 ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Friday, July 24, 1987

Hamilton, Relatives Set To Settle O'Keeffee's Estate


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moved freely through his heady world during their 22 years together, which ended with Stieglitz' death in 1946. But she always came to the desert to be alone.
  She painted sun-bleached cattle skulls hauntingly suspended beside blossoms in the azure sky and tried, again and again, to express on canvas the emotions oddly engaged by a simple wood gate in the adobe wall of her Abiquiu compound.
  She put her brushes down only after a burst artery destroyed her central vision in 1971. The following year, when Hamilton entered her life, she saw him only as if through gauze.
  Young Hamilton learned quickly just how to please the artist, by now a revered elder in the art world. When O'Keeffe needled Hamilton, he needled back.
  "Part of what she liked about me...was that I didn't put her on a pedestal," Hamilton said.
  Soon after his arrival, major changes began occurring. O'Keeffe began changing cooks, lawyers, doctors, art dealers and, in some cases, friends.
  In 1977 Doris Bry, who for years had been O'Keeffe's Manhattan dealer and was so trusted a friend that she was the executor of O'Keeffe's estate, was terminated as her dealer. O'Keeffe immediately sued to recover paintings and cash Bry held. Bry in turn sued Hamilton, charging "malicious interference" and claiming that O'Keeffe "because of her poor vision and advanced age, came under Hamilton's influence and control.
  The cases were settled out of court. The settlement terms were secret.
  Hamilton's influence and affluence grew steadily as he assumed more duties, including screening O'Keeffe's calls and letters.
  Jan Sultan, a friend of Hamilton who every few months gave the pair therapeutic Rolfing massages, said that while O'Keeffe was getting the massage Hamilton would sit nearby making calls or reading letters aloud, recommending reply or rejection.
  Sultan, an ex-merchant seaman, said he and Hamilton "used to really tie some on and get real personal and maudlin. I heard his struggles with whether he could stay on and put up with the demands of this old lady, who would call when he was working on his art and say 'come' and he had to come."
  Among those in Santa Fe who saw O'Keeffe and Hamilton together, however, there was a general agreement that they genuinely cared for one another. Hamilton persuaded O'Keeffe to paint again, despite her near-blindness. One 1979 watercolor, titled "From a Day With Juan No. III," depicts the Washington Monument soaring skyward.
  That summer O'Keeffe, then 91, affixed her unsteady signature to a new will, naming Hamilton executor at a fee of $200,000 and bequeathing him 21 paintings. This will left 52 paintings to eight museums, and most of the remainder to charitable institutions to be selected by Hamilton.
  The next year Hamilton married Anna Marie Erskine, 26, of Phoenix. "Miss O'Keeffe approved," Hamilton said. Later, the Hamiltons and their two small boys lived with O'Keeffe.
  By 1978 Hamilton was managing O'Keeffe's affairs and by all accounts handled them well. She had entrusted him with producing a 1976 Viking book of her work, a volume that won critical acclaim and commercial success. He also helped with a PBS documentary and arranged well-received shows of her work.
  the selective exposure helped create a soaring market for O'Keeffe's works. Sotheby's auctioned her "White Rose, New Mexico," a large 1930 oil, for a record $1.3 million in 1985. In the nine weeks she was alive in 1986, court records indicate her taxable income was at least $1.1 million.

  Hamilton was also developing his own career.
  The owners of the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe and the Robert Miller Gallery in Manhattan apptoached him in the late '70s about selling O'Keeffe works, he said, and he suggested they handle his pots. Today the galleries handle both O'Keeffe paintings and the pots of Juan Hamilton.
  Hamilton's growing influence over O'Keeffee's affairs took a tremendous leap on Jan. 5, 1978, before either gallery deal was struck, when she affixed her by-then ragged signature to a power of attorney.
  The four-page grant of authority gave Hamilton "sole, absolute and unfettered discretion" to file lawsuits, sign contracts, empty safe deposit boxes, hire and fire staff, sell O'Keeffe's property or even give it to charities. The last line stated, in capital letters: "This power of attorney shall not be affected by my subsequent disability or incompetence."
  O'Keeffe could not read the document, so she scrawled on it: "I have this this (sic) read to me...Georgia O'Keeffe"
  The document was notarized, establishing that O'Keeffe was in fact the signatory.
  But the document did not enter the public record for more than six years, until just before noon April 30, 1984, when Hamilton filed it with the Santa Fe County clerk as a necessary prerequisite to the $2 million purchase in O'Keeffe's name of a Santa Fe mansion.
  O'Keeffe already owned two large homes, but Hamilton maintained she needed the Sol y Sombra mansion to be near a hospital in what turned out to be her final 22 months.
  Anna Marie Hamilton, who by then had her two small sons, quickly made Sol y Sombra over with expensive furnishings, except for O'Keeffe's first floor room, which was as consistently spartan as her Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch homes.
  About this time Hamilton also bought, in O'Keeffe's name, three new Mercedes: a sedan, a station wagon and a convertible. She already owned a VW, a station wagon and a Lincoln Continental.

  Thunderclouds threatened Santa Fe when O'Keeffe awoke in Sol y Sombra on Aug. 8, 1984.
  O'Keeffe usually dressed in a white dress with a pink, blue or black overdress. But on this morning she told a nurse that she wanted to wear only white.
  "I'm getting married to Juan today," the 96-year-old invalid announced.
  Months later, Hamilton said, he was astonished to learn that O'Keeffe's household staff believed he had married her. "It's ridiculous," Hamilton said. "I was already married, so how could I marry Miss O'Keeffe?"
  Hamilton said that, because he and Anna Marie had a civil ceremony, the household staff may have wrongly assumed they merely lived together. Yet in the 1970s, when rumors had circulated through the art world that he and O'Keeffe had wed, Hamilton refused to comment, thereby fueling speculation.
  "We could have been married, it was like that," Hamilton now says, pausing and then adding, "What I don't understand is why everyone focuses on money, on sex, not on what matters, on the friendship. Why is that?"
  Then he gave his own answer. "If I had been a young woman and she an old man I doubt anyone would have cared much."
  The events of Aug. 8, Hamilton agreed, could have created the impression that there was a wedding. Old friends came. Flowers filled the mansion, a bounty Hamilton laid to his wife's success at gardening. Dr. Brad Stamm took a sample of O'Keeffe's blood.
  But what was going on that day was not a wedding, but a will.
  Her trembling signature wandering down the paper, O'Keeffe signed two documents: One a codicil that increased Hamilton's share of her estate from 10 percent to 70 percent; the other a document giving Hamilton Sol y Sombra.

  On March 10, 1986, four days after O'Keeffe died at age 98, Hamilton filed the will and related papers.
  Four weeks later her sole surviving sister, Catherine Klenart, challenged Hamilton in court. So did grandniece June O'Keeffe Sebring. Both claimed that Hamilton had exercised "undue influence" to get the aged artist to sign the second codicil. Sebring also challenged an earlier codicil and the will itself, accusing Hamilton of "constructive fraud."
  Sebring's lawyers also questioned the validity of the second codicil because O'Keeffe's near blindness forced "reliance on third parties to inform her of the contents of these documents."
  Sebring's lawyers went straight for Hamilton's jugular. Hamilton said he was intensely offended when they subpoenaed Donald Fineberg, a Santa Fe psychiatrist, and asked if Hamilton had been treated for drug addiction. Hamilton called the suggestion an "outrageous lie." Fineberg, citing doctor-patient privilege, refused to answer.
  A crucial element was to get the state of New Mexico to join the case against Hamilton. O'Keeffe's will directed that Hamilton give unspecified art to the state. The state, argued the lawyers, could be left with a sketch worth as little as $100.
  Hamilton, not wanting the state to join the litigation, then made an offer: The state could choose six O'Keeffes, worth $1.5 million, if it stayed out of the court fight. His offer included a tight deadline and a secrecy clause.
  The state accepted Hamilton's offer, including the secrecy clause. Paul Bardacke, then New Mexico's attorney general, said Hamilton's offer was the best deal the state could get, considering the technical legal complications surrounding the will.
  The relatives failed to get the state to join them, failed to win appeals of unfavorable procedural rulings, and were unlikely to force psychiatrist Fineberg to testify.
  Even so, last fall they got Hamilton to agree to a settlement. They agreed to keep silent about what they had already learned and to keep significant aspects of the settlement secret.
  Hamilton, it was agreed, could keep whatever monies he had already received from his relationship with O'Keeffe, as well as some of the gifts left to him under the original 1979 will. The assets he gave up will go to create a non-profit Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, which the Klenarts and Sebring say meets their intent to make O'Keeffe's work widely accessible to the public.
  In addition, the Klenarts and Sebring each get $1 million in art. Their lawyers will split $1.8 million in fees, to be paid by the O'Keeffe estate.
  On Saturday all three sides are scheduled to ask the court to sign the 36-page agreement.
  Hamilton said he settled for many reasons, notably a desire to get on with his career as a potter. He called the settlement a huge emotional relief.
  "If I were to fight this, spend 10 or 15 years, it would be an entire career and neither Miss O'Keeffe nor I ever intended that," he said.
  "I devoted 14 years to protecting Miss O'Keeffe's privacy. To go the other way now would seem a travesty."