Georgia O'Keeffe's intimate relationship with Juan Hamilton, 58 years her junior, was an art world scandal. As London's Tate Modern museum prepares to mount a new O'Keeffe retrospective, Hamilton talks about their bond. Juan Hamilton was a broke 27-year-old when he first walked into Georgia O'Keeffe's secluded studio in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, hoping she might give him a job. It was 1973, and O'Keeffe—whose vibrant, impeccably distilled creations remain a cornerstone of American modernism—had long been renowned for her large-scale paintings of curvaceous, brilliantly colored flowers and blue-skied desert landscapes. At 85, she still had her feline beauty (famously captured by her late husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who caused a furor when he exhibited dozens of nude portraits of her in 1921—while he was still married to another woman), but her vision was suffering from macular degeneration. "It was a powerful experience, seeing her that first time," recalls Hamilton, who had moved to New Mexico from Vermont just months earlier, fleeing a painful divorce and looking for a fresh start. "Right behind her, there was this large, broken Indian pot with a skull inside, a human skull. I remember thinking, Gosh, that's just how I feel—like a bare skull and a broken pot." O'Keeffe, however, was in no mood for unannounced visitors. Hamilton had accompanied his friend Ray McCall to fix the plumbing at O'Keeffe's adobe home, and the reclusive artist was annoyed when two men came instead of one. "After we left she called Ray and said, 'Don't you ever bring anybody else here again without asking me first,' " says Hamilton, now 70. "So I thought, Well, so much for getting to know her." O'Keeffe ultimately did give Hamilton a job, and then some: He now lives in Abiquiú, the site of her second home, tucked among chalky-white cliffs and windswept cottonwood trees about 15 miles south of Ghost Ranch. She bequeathed both houses to him, along with the better part of her $70 million estate, when she died at age 98 in 1986—prompting lawsuits from her surviving family members, some of whom believed that Hamilton had conned his way into her will (and, according to some accusations, into her bed). "Rumors abounded that Georgia and I were secretly married, but Georgia just thought that was funny as could be—she loved it," Hamilton tells me over the phone. Soft-spoken and wary of press, he hasn't given an interview in more than a decade; he agreed to speak in light of a major upcoming O'Keeffe retrospective, which will open at Tate Modern in London this summer. "Georgia said, 'All the men artists can have young women, but people think it's shocking that I might have a young man in my life,' " he continues. "Of course, she'd gotten over the sensitivity—you wouldn't believe the things that were said about her and Stieglitz. He was 23 years older than her, and still married to his first wife when they began their affair. Imagine such behavior! Photographing her nude, and so forth. I'd get upset about what people said, but she'd just say, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, Juan, what do you care what they think? Just focus on your work.' " Continued at http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a14033/georgia-okeeffe-0316/