O'KEEFFE ENSHRINED

By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF

My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it," said the famously cantankerous Georgia O'Keeffe. Last week, when a new museum dedicated to her art opened in Santa Fe, N.M., that quiet world she cultivated disappeared in the crush of celebration. The occasion fueled the sort of media blitz--from Le Monde to the Frankfurter Allgemeine to Town & Country--that she experienced again and again in a career that was launched in scandal when she appeared as the tender (and fully exposed) model in the photographs of her lover and later husband Alfred Stieglitz. She advanced that early fame on the sheer power of her painting, her personality and, increasingly, her role as an icon of feminist strength. With the inauguration of the new building, O'Keeffe joins a small number of disparate American artists with memorial museums: Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Frederic Remington among them. In fact, she is the only American woman artist of great fame to be so honored.

Over 60 years she created some 2,300 works, an endless stream of flowers, landscapes, crosses and skulls that generated enormous attention and an O'Keeffe industry that rarely flagged. In 1987, a year after her death at age 98, 438,000 people visited her retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (By comparison, Andrew Wyeth--perhaps postwar America's most cherished artist--drew 558,000 visitors to his retrospective at the National Gallery.) That same year O'Keeffe's Black Hollyhock with Blue Larkspur, 1929, was sold at auction for the artist's record of $1.98 million. In the decade since, her paintings have seen the curve of descent and rise that the art market, in general, has known. "Now O'Keeffe's values are picking up," says Andrew Schoelkopf, a senior vice president at Christie's in New York City. "She is hot again."

That is evidently the case in Santa Fe. The launch of the museum and the assembly of the 87 works in its nascent permanent collection, worth about $15 million, have come about thanks largely to Texas cattle baroness Anne Marion and her husband John, the former chairman of Sotheby's North America. Approached in 1995 to contribute funds and some of her O'Keeffe paintings to the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, Anne Marion decided on a dramatic and wholly Texan response: establish a museum devoted to O'Keeffe herself.

Plans were formed at a gallop. Marion bought an empty Spanish Baptist church turned art gallery and hired New York architect Richard Gluckman, who was known for his design of the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, Pa., and the site of SITE Santa Fe, an ambitious biennial exhibition of vanguard art that the Marions also helped fund. Not without a certain symmetry, if one's taste runs to icons of the Western spirit, Peter Hassrick, the former director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., was hired to fill the same role at the O'Keeffe.

"There has been enormous appetite for her art in New Mexico for any number of years," Hassrick says, "but it does say something about the endurance of O'Keeffe's reputation that it's causing so much interest now. Museums from Helsinki to Madrid have written to us about organizing O'Keeffe exhibitions, but we want this to be the central place to learn about her work, her life, her circle of contemporaries. That's what the permanent collection and temporary shows are going to provide."

Swathed in the beige adobe seen throughout the Southwest, the museum sits on a quiet street off Santa Fe's main plaza, where galleries selling O'Keeffe wannabes vie with Indians hawking turquoise and silver in the long colonnade of the Palace of the Governors. You enter through glass doors trimmed with New Mexican pine. The installation is spare and elegant, as are the 10 galleries with glowing plaster walls, earth-colored concrete floors and skylights that subtly draw viewers from room to room.

The opening exhibition, curated by O'Keeffe's controversial, longtime assistant Juan Hamilton, comprises 117 pieces and serves as a walk-through of O'Keeffe's career. Among the works on view are early masterpieces from the Evening Star series, which presage whole generations of American abstract art. The surreal animal skulls floating with flowers in their eyes are here, along with the kind of gynecological exposure in the guise of Blue Flower, 1918, that made early audiences cough nervously. And there is the late work From a Day with Juan, 1977, whose white ramp jacked up into heaven presents a bland portentousness that is a lifetime away from O'Keeffe's revolutionary start. Through it all runs a whiff of pure Americana, a longing for an untroubled world sprung from native soil. "It is breathtaking as one rises up over the world one has been living in," O'Keeffe once wrote, "and looks down at it stretching away and away."

--With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York