Georgia O'Keeffe

Barney bought his first Georgia O'Keeffe for $47,000. By 2012 he estimated it was worth eight to ten million dollars. That wasn't the point. The point was that Charles Buckley, his St. Louis Art Museum friend, was at that auction, and made an introduction Barney describes as being like asking whether I could fit in a meeting with the president of the United States. The man across the room was Lloyd Goodrich, the curator and director who had co-organized O'Keeffe's 1970 Whitney retrospective with Doris Bry, and who had written a great deal of the American-art scholarship Barney had been teaching himself from. Goodrich pronounced the painting Barney had just bought O'Keeffe's best.

The Invitation to Abiquiu

A year later, Doris Bry called Barney with an invitation: Georgia wanted him to come down to Abiquiu. Barney, busy and private, at first turned it down. Then he did the arithmetic. It was 1974. Georgia was 87. One day I'm going to read in the New York Times obituaries that she died, he thought. This may be my last opportunity. He called Doris back.

Standing at Georgia's door, the first thing that struck him was her presence — all black as was her habit, not a large woman but much larger than her frame. The icebreaker came from a detail Barney had been missing for twenty years of looking at photographs of her: the small silver pin at her collar. Up close, he realized it read “OK”. It was her mark. On the pictures she loved best, she signed the back OK inside a little Star of David. Barney's major O'Keeffes carry the designation.

The Message to a Friend

Georgia famously did not explain her pictures. About Barney's 1930 abstraction Black, White and Blue, she offered a cryptic clue: This was a message to a friend. If he saw it, he didn't know it was to him and wouldn't have known what it said. And neither do I. Barney thought it was a brilliant non-answer.

A year after that first O'Keeffe, Doris called again. Georgia was selling her other great abstract painting from her personal collection, Music — Pink and Blue No. 1. Barney bought it. The painting is now at the Seattle Art Museum, one of the consummated O'Keeffe gifts Barney's estate made permanent there.

Barney went to New Mexico many times. Georgia never came to him. He understood she knew he wasn't going to exploit her. On about his fourth trip, sitting out at Ghost Ranch, he asked if she would mind if he took pictures of her. She didn't.

Juan's Forty-Five-Minute Monologue

Juan Hamilton, Georgia's young assistant, had a habit of eulogizing her still-living work. One dinner at the ranch, Juan built to a crescendo about how Georgia was doing her best work in her nineties — better than in the 1930s, better than in the '50s and '60s. He turned to Barney. You agree with that, don't you, Barney?

Barney loved Georgia but he loved her early work best. He did not agree. Georgia painted her last unassisted oil picture at age 84 in 1972, shortly before her eyesight began to fail. She continued afterward with helpers, looking through binoculars and directing them. She had been a great painter for nearly seventy years. Barney's conviction that her great work belonged to the 1920s and '30s is why his O'Keeffes, a generation later, remain the pictures that matter.