Juan Hamilton, an aspiring artist who enriched the last years of painter Georgia O’Keeffe as her much younger caretaker, confidant, and protégé, but who became the object of sensational accusations as virtually the sole beneficiary of her will, died on Feb. 20 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 79.
His death, from complications of a subdural hematoma suffered several years ago, was confirmed by his wife, Anna Marie Hamilton.
For the last decade of Ms. O’Keeffe’s life, nobody was closer to her than Mr. Hamilton. When they met, he was 27, a strapping, rootless, recently divorced potter with a well-sculpted mustache. She was a petite, increasingly blind 85-year-old whose bohemian past, painterly inventiveness and uncompromising devotion to her work made her an embodiment of the spirit of modern art.
A childless widow, Ms. O’Keeffe lived in rural New Mexico, nowhere near her Wisconsin-born relatives. Many of her visitors were strangers — young supplicants who had traveled from far away to seek her blessing and bask in her aura.
Mr. Hamilton was one such pilgrim. Their relationship would ultimately determine what would happen to Ms. O’Keeffe’s estate, estimated to be worth some $90 million, and who would oversee her legacy. It would also mark Mr. Hamilton for the rest of his life, leaving him with a small fortune, an up-and-down career as an artist and memories that followed him to his deathbed.
It all started one morning on Labor Day weekend in 1973. Mr. Hamilton, a handyman at Ghost Ranch, a sprawling property mostly owned by the Presbyterian Church, where Ms. O’Keeffe had her residence.
He knocked on her back door, and when she answered, he asked if she had any odd jobs for him to do. Ms. O’Keeffe said she did not, and he began walking away.
“Wait a minute,” she called after him. “Can you help me pack a shipping crate?”
Mr. Hamilton would later say that he had traveled to Ghost Ranch inspired by a “dream-fantasy” that had come to him while aimlessly driving around: that he would find Ms. O’Keeffe, give her one of his pots and discover that she was in need of a friend, triggering a significant change in both their lives.
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