Juan Hamilton, an aspiring artist who enriched the last years of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe as her much younger caretaker, confidant and protégée, 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 was 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 lives.
At first he did menial chores for her. Eventually, he took on more personal tasks, like cutting her food at meals and handling her correspondence. Sometimes he stayed with her for a little while in the evening to listen to Beethoven piano sonatas. They began traveling together — to Antigua, Guatemala, Morocco, New York.
He also took on the roles of editor and curator, helping to produce books and exhibitions about Ms. O’Keeffe and her late husband, the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, that won glowing reviews, including from Joan Didion and the art critic Hilton Kramer.
With Mr. Hamilton’s encouragement, Ms. O’Keeffe took up watercolor for the first time in decades and appeared in a 1977 documentary, which The New York Times described as “the first time that the artist has agreed to a film portrait of herself and her work.”
The inspiration went both ways. Working in both clay and bronze, Mr. Hamilton went beyond pottery into sculpting abstract shapes, gaining a fine control over the way lacquer and polish reflect light.
In a 1977 interview with ARTnews, Ms. O’Keeffe said of Mr. Hamilton, “I think there’s something in him that is like pure crystal.”
The Times included the two in a 1979 article headlined “The Older Woman‐Younger Man Relationship: A Taboo Fades.” Friends said their connection was not sexual, just intensely affectionate.
“There is prejudice against us because she is an older woman,” Mr. Hamilton told People magazine, “and I’m young and somewhat handsome.”
Gallerists hoping to reach Ms. O’Keeffe had to go through him, and his sculptures began to be widely exhibited. The Times art critics Grace Glueck and John Russell both praised his abstract bronzes.
In 1978, he had a show in New York, and Andy Warhol and Joni Mitchell attended. So did a representative of Doris Bry, Ms. O’Keeffe’s recently fired agent, who served Mr. Hamilton with a lawsuit accusing him of “malicious interference” in Ms. Bry’s relationship with Ms. O’Keeffe.
That suit and two others involving Ms. O’Keeffe and Ms. Bry were settled, but the incident was a sign of things to come. “There was lots of jealousy, lots of ‘let’s get Juan,’” an unnamed friend told The Washington Post.
In 1980, Mr. Hamilton married Anna Marie (Prohoroff) Erskine, another Ghost Ranch pilgrim, and they had two sons, Albert and Brandon. When Ms. O’Keeffe’s health deteriorated, the family moved in with her in Santa Fe, near a hospital. She died at 98 in 1986.
By then Mr. Hamilton had power of attorney over her affairs. But after her death something new emerged: In 1984, a codicil to Ms. O’Keeffe’s will had transferred “just under $40 million worth of O’Keeffe’s artwork” and “approximately $50 million worth of property” from charitable institutions to Mr. Hamilton, a lawyer for June Sebring, a niece of Ms. O’Keeffe’s, later said in court.
Ms. Sebring was one of several relatives to accuse Mr. Hamilton of having exerted “undue influence.” A series of bitter attacks followed. In a deposition, Catherine Klenert, Ms. O’Keeffe’s last living sibling, called Mr. Hamilton “nothing but a tramp.” In Roxana Robinson’s biography “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life” (1989), relatives were quoted as calling him a “gigolo,” while the author argued that the relationship was “confused” by “greed.”
Nevertheless, The Washington Post reported in 1987 that “there is no question that it was Hamilton, not relatives, who cared for O’Keeffe in her final years, and that he also gave her life joy and purpose.”
In a 1990 takedown of the biography in The Journal of Art, the critic Barbara Rose wrote, “Juan Hamilton was not Georgia O’Keeffe’s lover, he was the son she never had.”
He was “the only person she totally trusted,” Ms. Rose continued, because he was willing to do for her what she had done for her husband, Mr. Stieglitz: fiercely guard the integrity of an artist’s vision after the artist’s death.
In the end, Mr. Hamilton reached an agreement with her relatives, reverting to an earlier version of the will and granting the family millions of dollars. He received more than two dozen artworks and much of her property. A foundation was established to handle many of the estate’s affairs.
In her essay, Ms. Rose wrote that without Mr. Hamilton’s supervision, Ms. O’Keeffe’s paintings were being turned into calendars: “Everything O’Keeffe feared has come to pass. Her images have been cheapened; her life has turned into a soap opera.”
John Bruce Hamilton was born on Dec. 22, 1945, in Dallas. He was known as Juan because he spent most of his childhood in Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, where his parents, Alan and Claire (Kitzmiller) Hamilton, were Presbyterian missionaries. His father was also a school principal. His mother took Juan to visit local potters, and he started playing with clay.
During his high school years, the family lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Glen Rock, N.J. He earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Hastings College, in Nebraska, and went on to study sculpture at Claremont Graduate University, in California.
After Ms. O’Keeffe’s will was settled, Mr. Hamilton bought a large property in Honolulu and a farm on Maui. His sons went to private school. Yet he lost status in the art world.
“The whole story with Juan was so sensationalized, and it drove people to not take him seriously,” Ms. Hamilton, his wife, said in an interview. “I think he got more and more disillusioned.”
He continued to sell his own work, but increasingly focused on landscaping his farm.
In addition to his wife and sons, he is survived by a sister, Elizabeth Hildreth, and two grandchildren. His first marriage, to Victoria Weber, ended in divorce.
Contrary to claims that he was a fortune hunter, for decades Mr. Hamilton held on to the art and ephemera he had inherited from Ms. O’Keeffe. In 2020, when he decided it was financially necessary, he sold more than 100 items from his collection through Sotheby’s, netting $17.2 million, ARTnews reported.
Still, he refused to part with a painting she had done that had inspired his sculptures, as well as several of Mr. Stieglitz’s prints and drawings Constantin Brancusi that Ms. O’Keeffe had given him.
By the end of his life, Mr. Hamilton had trouble walking. From bed, he often had the same request, his wife said: for her to bring him the old works of art that he and Ms. O’Keeffe had loved so many decades before.
