Georgia O'Keeffe

On March 14, 1973, at the estate auction of the great dealer Edith Halpert, Barney bought Georgia O'Keeffe's 1930 abstraction Black, White and Blue for $47,000. At the same sale he bid a John Marin watercolor up to $46,000 before it went, for $47,500, to John D. Rockefeller — a near-miss Barney enjoyed recounting: “I've often thought I cost him about $25,000 by bidding it up.” But the painting was only half of what he got that day. Charles Buckley steered him across the room to Lloyd Goodrich, the former Whitney director and the foremost O'Keeffe authority alive, who looked at what Barney had just bought and said the words every young collector dreams of:

The Invitation to Abiquiu

The next year the phone rang: Georgia's assistant Doris Bry, saying Georgia wanted him to come to New Mexico. Barney — busy, private, faintly disbelieving — almost said no. Then he did the arithmetic that had never once failed him. It was 1974. Georgia was in her late eighties. “One day,” he thought, “I'm going to read in the New York Times obituaries that she died. This may be my last opportunity.” He called Doris back and went.

She met him at the door in her habitual black, a small woman who somehow filled the frame. The thing that finally broke the ice was a detail Barney had been staring at for twenty years without seeing: the little silver pin at her collar. Up close, it read “OK.” It was her signature made into jewelry — and on the pictures she loved best she signed the back “OK” inside a small Star of David. Barney's greatest O'Keeffes carry that mark.

“You've Seen O'Keeffe”

What Barney loved about her was that she suffered no fools and told no lies, which meant he could do the same. She was, at that point in her life, mobbed by admirers and pilgrims, and she'd developed a way of handling the pushiest of them. Barney watched her do it once. A stranger had wormed her way onto the property and was gushing, angling to be shown around. Georgia turned slowly, presented herself from three angles, and said: “Well, there's O'Keeffe's front, there's O'Keeffe's side, there's O'Keeffe's rear end. You've seen O'Keeffe.” And she shut the door.

With Barney she was different, because she trusted that he wasn't there to take anything. He went to New Mexico many times over the years; she never once came to him. About that first painting he owned, Black, White and Blue, he asked what it meant, and got a classic O'Keeffe non-answer: it had been 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 the most brilliant dodge he'd ever heard.

A year after the first purchase, Doris called again: Georgia was parting with her other great personal abstraction, Music—Pink and Blue No. 1. Barney bought it, and later gave it to the Seattle Art Museum. Buckley, who knew that Barney's St. Louis friend Joe Pulitzer — grandson of the Joseph Pulitzer — had wanted it, suggested a wind-up: “Call Joe and tell him you found it in his grandfather's attic.”

The Wedding Georgia Didn't Believe In

In 1981 Barney was marrying his second wife, Trish, and the guest list was doing what guest lists do — ten became twenty-five became a hundred became two hundred. Barney solved the problem the way he solved most problems: laterally. “We need to go somewhere to get married where nobody's invited,” he told Trish. So they were married at Georgia O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiu, where the guest list was necessarily zero.

It was a magnificently odd little ceremony. Georgia was a witness. Her secretary, Pita Lopez, was the other. The best man was the gardener, Maggie Lopez, drafted fresh from the horse manure. The officiant was a judge who drove up from Tierra Amarilla and, by all appearances, mostly wanted to see the inside of the famous house. And throughout the whole thing, Georgia held the bride's hand and murmured, again and again, the least romantic blessing ever offered at a wedding:

The Man Who Knew O'Keeffe

Fifteen years of friendship made Barney something close to an authority. He could unmask a forgery over the telephone: told once that a suspect canvas was signed on the front, he answered instantly, “Well, then, for sure it's not an O'Keeffe, because she never signed anything on the front of a canvas.” He said it plainly and without much modesty: “I'm positive that I know more about O'Keeffe than anybody alive — professional or not.” And when he and Georgia's assistant Juan Hamilton once argued a fine point of her work in front of her, it was Georgia who ended it: “Barney knows what he's talking about.”

That same Juan liked to insist Georgia was doing her finest work in her nineties — better than the '30s, better than the '50s. At a Ghost Ranch dinner he built to a peak and turned to Barney: “You agree with that, don't you, Barney?” Barney, who adored Georgia and loved her early abstractions above everything, did not agree, and wouldn't pretend to. She had painted her last unassisted oil around 1972, as her eyesight failed, and worked afterward with helpers and binoculars, directing. She had been a great painter for the better part of seventy years. Barney's stubborn conviction that her genius lived in the 1920s and '30s is exactly why, a half-century on, the O'Keeffes that carry his name are the ones that still take the breath away.