Juan Hamilton, an artist, caretaker, and protégé of famend painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the only real beneficiary of her will, died in his Santa Fe, New Mexico dwelling on February 20 at 79 years previous.
He died from issues associated to a subdural hematoma, which occurred a number of years in the past, in line with his spouse Anna Marie Hamilton.
Born John Bruce Hamilton on December 22, 1945, in Dallas, Texas, he grew up in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, the kid of fogeys Alan and Claire (Kitzmiller) Hamilton, who served as Presbyterian missionaries. Throughout this time, he adopted the title Juan and commenced studying the best way to work with clay from native potters.
Associated Articles
Hamilton lived between Manhattan’s Higher West Facet and Glen Rock, New Jersey in highschool, and earned a bachelor’s diploma in studio artwork from Hastings School in Nebraska, and later studied sculpture at Claremont Graduate College in California.
At 27, Hamilton was a divorced potter and handyman on the sprawling Ghost Ranch property, owned by the Presbyterian Church, the place 85-year-old O’Keeffe resided. After knocking on the door and asking for odd jobs, she had him pack a transport crate—and thus started a decade-long, scandalous relationship.
Whereas the character of their relationship to 1 one other has been debated and in the end stays unclear, as detailed within the New York Instances, Hamilton took care of the getting old artist in her closing years. In trade for his devotion, he obtained her $90 million property (just below $40 million of O’Keeffe’s art work and roughly $50 million in property at the moment) and have become liable for overseeing her legacy.
In fact, proximity to O’Keeffe additionally spurred Hamilton’s artwork profession as a sculptor, with a 1978 present in New York that included attendance by the likes of Andy Warhol and Joni Mitchell, in addition to rave evaluations by artwork critics Grace Glueck and John Russell. Although, that stage of notoriety later pale as years previous.
In 1980, Hamilton married Anna Marie (Prohoroff) Erskine, who had additionally traveled to Ghost Ranch. Collectively, that they had two sons Albert and Brandon. The household moved into O’Keeffe’s dwelling in Santa Fe because the artist’s well being declined till her demise at 98 years previous in 1986.
“There is no such thing as a query that it was Hamilton, not family members, who cared for O’Keeffe in her closing years, and that he additionally gave her life pleasure and objective,” the Washington Submit reported on the connection in 1987.
In the end, Hamilton agreed to revert to an earlier model of O’Keeffe’s will, granting the household hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, and leaving him with greater than two dozen artworks and far of her property. The Georgia O’Keeffe Basis was established to handle the property’s affairs.
Although Hamilton held on to the artwork and ephemera he inherited from O’Keeffe for plenty of a long time, he in the end bought greater than 100 objects from his assortment by way of Sotheby’s, netting $17.2 million, in 2020.
