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O’Keeffe and the only beneficiary of her will, died in his Santa Fe, New Mexico residence on February 20 at 79 years outdated.
He died from problems associated to a subdural hematoma, which occurred a number of years in the past, in response to 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 how you can 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 delivery 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 finally stays unclear, as detailed within the New York Times, Hamilton took care of the getting old artist in her remaining years. In change for his devotion, he obtained 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.
After all, 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 critiques 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, they’d two sons Albert and Brandon. The household moved into O’Keeffe’s residence in Santa Fe because the artist’s well being declined till her dying at 98 years outdated in 1986.
“There isn’t a query that it was Hamilton, not family, who cared for O’Keeffe in her remaining years, and that he additionally gave her life pleasure and function,” the Washington Submit reported on the connection in 1987.
Finally, Hamilton agreed to revert to an earlier model of O’Keeffe’s will, granting the household tens of millions 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 various a long time, he finally sold more than 100 items from his assortment through Sotheby’s, netting $17.2 million, in 2020.
