Georgia O'Keeffe died on 6 March 1986 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of 98. The Washington Post reported that she died at St. Vincent Hospital and that the cause of death was not reported. She was nearly blind and increasingly frail, in a city she had moved to only two years earlier.
For decades she had lived and painted in the New Mexico desert, at Ghost Ranch and in the village of Abiquiu, among the bones, hills and flat-topped mountains that fill her canvases.
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Her death itself was quiet. What came after was not. She was 98 and could barely see, and the man who had looked after her for the last thirteen years was the executor of her will and its main beneficiary.
In the months that followed, her family contested that will. Her niece challenged it as a whole. Two institutions named in her will of 1979 had already been struck out of it, by a change signed in her late nineties.
A year of argument ended in July 1987 with a settlement. The woman who spent her life keeping control of her own work left the last word on it to lawyers.
What You'll Discover
What went dark first.
Who she let into her house.
Why she left her house.
What her will gave away.
Where her ashes lie.