Juan Hamilton, an artist, caretaker, and protégé of famend painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the only beneficiary of her will, died in his Santa Fe, New Mexico dwelling on February 20 at 79 years outdated.
He died from issues associated to a subdural hematoma, which occurred a number of years in the past, in accordance 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 easy methods to work with clay from native potters.
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 Faculty 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 at least one one other has been debated and in the end stays unclear, as detailed within the New York Times, Hamilton took care of the getting older artist in her closing years. In trade for his devotion, he acquired her $90 million property (slightly below $40 million of O’Keeffe’s art work and roughly $50 million in property at the moment) and have become chargeable 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 opinions by artwork critics Grace Glueck and John Russell. Although, that stage of notoriety later light 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moved into O’Keeffe’s dwelling in Santa Fe because the artist’s well being declined till her demise at 98 years outdated in 1986.
“There isn’t 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 goal,” the Washington Put up reported on the connection in 1987.
Finally, Hamilton agreed to revert to an earlier model of O’Keeffe’s will, granting the household thousands and 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 numerous many years, he in the end sold more than 100 items from his assortment through Sotheby’s, netting $17.2 million, in 2020.
