Wal-Mart Radiator

Walton’s proposal also involves a sale and thus requires Lyle to concur with a modification of the conditions O’Keeffe imposed. But in this scenario, the Stieglitz Collection remains intact and thus closer to O’Keeffe’s vision. The artist personally assembled the pieces in the collection and stipulated that they be exhibited together so that anyone who walked through the gallery door could see modern art as Stieglitz did. Whether O’Keeffe would care if the door is in Nashville or Bentonville is anybody’s guess.

Walton has ambitious plans for her Crystal Bridges Museum. She has retained noted architect Moshe Safdie to design the 100,000-square-foot building, scheduled to open in 2009. The 100-acre site, which will feature outdoor performance space, a sculpture garden and hiking trails, is in the small town in northwest Arkansas where Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton got his start in retail. And she is scrambling to assemble a collection of American art from the colonial to the modern era to display in the structure. This is no easy task when so many works by American masters are already within museum walls.

Last year, Walton partnered with the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., in an attempt to purchase “The Gross Clinic” by Thomas Eakins for $68 million from Thomas Jefferson University, a medical and health science school in Philadelphia. The sale did not go through when the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts raised matching funds to keep the masterwork of 19th century American realism in the City of Brotherly Love. Walton had to settle for a smaller and lesser known Eakins from Thomas Jefferson University as a consolation prize.

In securing the Stieglitz Collection for Crystal Bridges, Walton would increase her museum’s holdings—if only half-time—exponentially. The 101 works, which would be impossible to assemble for such a sum on the open market, serve as a primer of American modernism and would be a major asset to the most hallowed of art halls. But the Stieglitz Collection isn’t on the open market; it’s tied up in court. And in what form the collection emerges from this legal gumbo is still to be determined.