by Elizabeth Cook-Romero
Daily Lobo
Less than two years ago, curators at the UNM Art Museum were surprised by a phone call informing them that Jacqueline Paley Wolber, a Denver sculptor, had left two Georgia O'Keeffe paintings and an endowment to the museum.
Nobody could remember ever meeting with or speaking to Wolber.
This doesn't happen often and competition among museums for donations can get intense. Books have been written about the intrigue and secret negotiations some curators have engaged in.
"We don't even know if she was ever in this museum," said interim Director Linda Bahm.
Wolber, who exhibited under the name Jackie Greber, sometimes traveled to Albuquerque to visit her friend Charles Maddox, a sculptor and UNM professor. Their friendship developed in the '60s when Wolber was a pioneer in the Los Angeles feminist art scene.
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This is the last week the two paintings from the Wolber estate, along with the four O'Keeffes the museum owned before the endowment, will be displayed together.
"We don't often have them all out at once," Bahm said. "They're often on loan. I have no idea when they will be together again."
The smaller of the two paintings from the Wolber estate, "Shell 1," is an understated little gem. The dark open mussel shell depicted in this small canvas can also be read as a black heart. Dark gray shadows blend into a creamy white background. In the upper left corner, soft pink seaweed branches pulsate with a subtle life force.
This is classic O'Keeffe - nature observed intensely, then simplified and turned into pure sensuality.
"Portrait of a Day-3rd Day" may come as a surprise to those who are used to thinking of O'Keeffe as a lyrical painter. The cool grays and acid greens of this canvas are strangely off-putting. Only the reddish browns of a small cut branch relieve the cold, but they do so by suggesting a bloody wound.
When the backing of "Portrait of a Day" was removed, an abstraction painted in oils was discovered on the reverse. A photograph of the reverse painting is included in the exhibition.
The backing, framed and hung, carries stickers from the many places it visited before being acquired by Wolber. Among them are the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum and the Pasadena Art Museum. It also carries a five-pointed star with the initials 3 OK 2 - O'Keeffe's seal of approval.
Nobody knows if Wolber bought the paintings directly from O'Keeffe after the two women became friends in 1964. Nobody knows how Wolber came to know about the UNM Art Museum.
Curators at the museum believe that behind this gift is a story of friendship among three artists: Jacqueline Paley Wolber, Charles Maddox and Georgia O'Keeffe.
About a year and a half after Wolber died, a currier carried the painting of the sea shell from Denver to Albuquerque. It arrived around Valentine's Day; a homage to friendship.
The O'Keeffes will be at UNM Art Museum until Aug. 31. Admission is free.
