Anne Burnett Windfohr Marion, a prominent Texas rancher, oil heiress and patron of the arts who aided observed the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., died on Feb. 11 in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 81.
The trigger was lung most cancers, explained Neils Agather, a loved ones agent.
Mrs. Marion represented the fourth generation of a renowned Texas ranching family members that the moment owned extra than a 3rd of a million acres now the holdings quantity to about 275,000 acres. Its 6666 Ranch, recognized as the Four Sixes, has extensive been a person of the largest in Texas and considerably celebrated for its Black Angus cattle, quarter horses and oil. In the 1960s and ’70s, its exclusive red and white barn offered the backdrop for Marlboro cigarette ads.
Even though the spouse and children fortune was started on ranching and cattle, it was the discovery of oil, in 1921 and then in 1969, that created the riches that built it doable for Mrs. Marion to grow to be a significant benefactor of the arts and culture in Fort Really worth and further than.
Former President George W. Bush, in a statement, named her “a legitimate Texan, a great patron of the arts, a generous member of our community and a human being of magnificence and strength.”
Mrs. Marion, a previous trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and her partner, John L. Marion, the previous chairman and chief auctioneer of Sotheby’s North America, established the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe in 1997.
“I’ve generally loved her perform,” Mrs. Marion reported of O’Keeffe when the museum opened. She claimed her mom owned two O’Keeffe paintings, and she herself subsequently obtained other individuals.
Fairly than donate people paintings to a general public museum in Santa Fe, which was sorely missing in the artist’s holdings, Mrs. Marion preferred to make a non-public museum. She presented $10 million in seed cash and in two years established the museum with substantial support from other Texas donors, several of whom lived portion time in Santa Fe.
Below her course, the O’Keeffe museum grew to include things like the artist’s two historic households and studios in northern New Mexico, at Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch. Mrs. Marion was chairwoman of the board of trustees right until 2016.
Anne Burnett Corridor was born on Nov. 10, 1938, in Fort Really worth. Her father, James Goodwin Hall, was a stockbroker, pilot and horse breeder. Her mom, Anne Valliant (Burnett) Hall, was a rancher and horse breeder.
Her parents divorced when Anne was younger, and her mom married Robert Windfohr, who adopted the boy or girl she then became Anne Burnett Windfohr.
She grew up in Fort Worthy of and in Guthrie, in northern Texas, wherever the 4 Sixes ranch is headquartered. Her terrific-grandfather Captain Samuel Burk Burnett launched the ranch in 1868. It attained renown in the 1940s for breeding environment-class American quarter horses, a breed recognized for outrunning other breeds in races of up to a quarter mile. The ranch was house to the two-time earth winner “Dash for Funds.” The horse was retired in 1977 and put in nearly 20 decades at stud at the 4 Sixes, siring hundreds of potential winners.
Captain Burnett, who died in 1922, willed the bulk of his estate to his granddaughter in a trusteeship for his however-unborn wonderful-grandchild, who would turn out to be Anne Marion. When her mother died in 1980, Mrs. Marion inherited the ranch holdings.
The ranch’s cowboys taught Anne to journey and rope. When she owned the ranch, she was a person of the initial in the ranching industry to present staff members with overall health coverage and retirement programs.
“The most essential factor that at any time occurred to me was developing up on that ranch,” Mrs. Marion explained in an on the net loved ones background. “It retained my ft on the floor more than just about anything else.”
Mrs. Marion was educated at Skip Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., and Briarcliff Junior Higher education in Westchester County, N.Y. She briefly attended the College of Texas at Austin and the College of Geneva in Switzerland, wherever she studied artwork historical past.
Like her mom, she married 4 instances. The 1st 3 marriages finished in divorce. She married Mr. Marion in New York in 1988.
He survives her, as do her daughter, Anne Windfohr Grimes 4 stepchildren, Debbie Marion Murray, Therese Marion, Michelle Marion and John Marion Jr. a granddaughter and 7 action-grandchildren.
Of the a lot of boards on which Mrs. Marion served, she experienced a smooth place for her posture on the Board of Regents of Texas Tech College. She claimed it had permitted her to continue to be included with pupils who grew up on ranches and needed to make ranching their occupation, just as she experienced.