The New Mexico museum had previously blocked the school's attempt to sell two of the collection's most prominent paintings, O'Keeffe's own 1927 oil painting "Radiator Building Night, New York" and Marsden Hartley's "Painting No. 3."
Lyle later rejected a proposed settlement between Fisk and the O'Keeffe museum that would have sent "Radiator Building" to New Mexico for $7.5 million and allowed the school to sell the Hartley painting on the open market.
Experts estimate that the two paintings could fetch more than $45 million on the open market.
O'Keeffe in 1949 divided the bulk of her late husband Alfred Stieglitz's nearly 1,000-piece collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and photos among six institutions. The artworks given to Fisk also included works by Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, George Grosz, Arthur Dove and John Marin.
On the Net:
http://www.fisk.edu/
http://www.okeeffemuseum.org/
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