Known for museum projects as various as the Andy Warhol Museum and the Whitney renovations, New York architect Richard Gluckman was chosen to remodel the 13,000-square-foot structure that began life as a Spanish Baptist church.

 

O'Keeffe Country

The Marions Leave Their Mark

By Laura Beach

SANTA FE, N.M. -- "At great expense we have gathered here the largest collection of crackpots ever seen," General Leslie R. Groves told the brilliant physicists who assembled in Los Alamos in 1942 to build the atom bomb.

Perhaps not since the Manhattan Project have so many of an industry's elite converged at the southern tip of the Rockies to contribute so much so quickly. Their project, no secret, culminated with explosive effect on July 17 with the opening of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Reported in Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report, the event attracted notice in England, France, Germany, Sweden, Japan, Taiwan and Australia, said the institution's besieged spokesman.

It is no small irony that the museum is being billed as the only one in the country dedicated to a female artist. O'Keeffe, who was 98 when she died in Santa Fe in 1986, resisted the gender-based criticism of Marsden Hartley and others of the Stieglitz circle only to become an unwilling feminist mascot in later life.

With some poetic license, museum president Jay Cantor - the charming, socially connected auctioneer who is currently a consultant to Christie's after 20 years with the Park Avenue firm - told those present at the unveiling, "Until today, the problem with Georgia O'Keeffe was that she was a name without a place. The song would perhaps have been better titled `Georgia In My Mind.'"

O'Keeffe made her first brief visit to New Mexico in 1917, the year Alfred Stieglitz organized a solo show of her work at his cutting-edge Manhattan gallery, 291. She returned in 1929, and nearly every summer thereafter. After Stieglitz's death in 1946, she moved to New Mexico permanently, dividing her time between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, 45 miles north of Santa Fe. For years there was talk of a museum, but the standoffish artist's relations with state arts organizations had been prickly at times.

Enter Anne and John Marion. Exercising a sophisticated brand of cultural politics, the Texas philanthropist and her husband, who retired as Sotheby's chairman and principal auctioneer two years ago, got the whole project - museum, collection, endowment, book and study center - off the ground in under two years. In his opening remarks, Cantor acknowledged Anne Marion's contribution. Her "motivation and energetic resolve pushed the project forward with determination, love and amazing grace," he said.

Like O'Keeffe, the Marions are outsiders who fell under New Mexico's spell - its fabled light, paintbox palette, dramatic tableaux, indolent pace and exotic milieu. The couple first visited Santa Fe in 1988. Today they divide their time between homes in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.

Not since John Crosby, who founded the Santa Fe Opera with his own fortune, has an individual more dramatically reshaped the local artistic landscape. Through her $250 million Burnett Foundation, Anne Marion, heir to oil and electronics fortunes, has put roughly $20 million into this small town steeped in tradition; caught up, others would say, in a past that never was.

Since 1993, the foundation has given $1.5 million to the Santa Fe Art Institute; $6.1 million to the College of Santa Fe, housing the Anne and John Marion Center For The Photographic Arts; and a little over $2 million to SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary arts center aimed at broadening the city's sometimes insular vision.

But the O'Keeffe Museum dwarfs other philanthropic ventures. The Marions built and staffed it at a cost to the Burnett Foundation of $9.5 million. In partnership with the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, executors of the painter's estate, the Burnett Foundation endowed the museum with a permanent collection of 33 paintings, drawings and sculptures. Another 67 works have been acquired privately or at auction, or donated by dealers and collectors, among them Gerald and Kathleen Peters, the Stephane Janssen Trust, Eugene and Clare Thaw, and Anne W. Phillips. "Everyone has been speculating on the value of the collection," Cantor acknowledges, "but it is not something we are prepared to talk about."

Noting that it was her "old friend Stanley Marcus," the Texas retailer who Cantor describes as "the great maestro of putting people together," who first put a bug in her ear about "an O'Keeffe project," Marion attracted some of the art world's most influential players to her cause. The museum's board includes Emily Fisher Landau, a New York collector and philanthropist who keeps a house in Galisteo; Joann Phillips of the prominent Washington, D.C., collecting family; and actor Gene Hackman.

Dealers Doris Bry, Nedra Matteucci, Nathaniel O. Owings and Joan Washburn; scholars and museum glitterati Van Deren Coke, Charles Moffett, Earl A. Powell III, Charles Ryskamp, and Theodore Stebbins; collectors Barney Ebsworth and Gilbert Kinney; and O'Keeffe associates Elizabeth Glassman and Juan Hamilton advise the institution.

Smoothly understated and briskly efficient, the museum's first director is Peter H. Hassrick, a Remington and Russell scholar credited with building up Cody's Buffalo Bill Historical Center in the two decades that he was at its helm.

"The O'Keeffe Museum was a fast track thing," acknowledges Hassrick. "The board had just met to talk about the bylaws in December 1995. I was offered a job in January 1996. We got a permit the following December and completed the building six months later."

Though O'Keeffe was notoriously hard to please - she liked to direct her own shows, insisted that assistants wear white gloves and accused Whitney Museum director Lloyd Goodrich of "hanging by the idea, not the eye" - she might well have liked her new home. Notwithstanding one local columnist's complaint that the stepped-roof adobe is like every other museum in town, "brown," its interiors evoke the sensuous colors and textures and spare styling of O'Keeffe's Abiquiu retreat. The 13,000 square foot structure that started life as a Spanish Baptist church was sensitively remodeled by Richard Gluckman, a New York architect whose credits include the Andy Warhol Museum, SITE Santa Fe, the Whitney Museum renovations and the DIA Art Center.

The museum's opening installation features work from every period, beginning with O'Keeffe's early abstractions, New York scenes and flower paintings of the 1920s and progressing to her indelible views of Ghost Ranch, the Chama River Valley and the cloistered courtyards of her mountain homes.

If Hassrick's first job was answering the visiting public's perennial question, "Where are the O'Keeffes?", his second one may be explaining its lingering obsession with a woman who herself once said she could have been a better painter and far less famous.

"People are fascinated with her art - its fundamental beauty, its expression of an inner vision, its transcendence, its empathic portrayal of nature, its remarkable craftsmanship, its `American-ness,' its independence from other art trends, its womanliness, its whimsy, and its controversial character," the director has written. Fascination with O'Keeffe, he adds, stems from "her mystery, her personal strength and independence, her charisma Ï in fact, her whole story."

"It's a long way from Mr Remington," acknowledges Hassrick, who nevertheless finds similarities in O'Keeffe's response to the West. He's not alone. Contributors to The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, the museum's inaugural catalogue, include Barbara Novak, whose Nature And Culture remains a definitive treatise on American landscape art. Additional essays by New York magazine critic Mark Stevens and art historians Barbara Rose and Lisa Mintz Messinger, plus remarks by Hassrick and Anne Marion, make this textured work far more than a beautiful souvenir. Harry N. Abrams, the publisher, had such confidence in the title that it was chosen as a Book of The Month Club selection.

Having recently moved from temporary quarters off Guadalupe Street into their new home two blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts, staff is beginning the ongoing task of augmenting an impressive collection - already the largest in the country - and building an endowment. "The Marions have been very generous, but we want others to participate," Hassrick said last May. In July the museum announced a $3 million pledge from the Esther B. O'Keeffe Foundation to underwrite exhibition galleries; two drawings from the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation, given in honor of the Marions; and $1 million from Emily Fisher Landau to endow a study center. The newly named director of the center is Barbara Buhler Lynes, author of O'Keeffe, Stieglitz and The Critics, 1916-1929 and of the forthcoming catalogue raisonne. The later is sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional support from the Burnett Foundation.

"Your job won't be easy," Groves had cautioned the atomic scientists, who worked feverishly in the forested peaks south of Abiquiu for three years. With brilliance and determination, Anne and John Marion unleashed an artistic force to be reckoned with in just half the time.