Among the many people who attended the opening of Masterworks' Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at City Hall last week, was Barbara Buhler Lynes.

As she is one of the world's leading experts on the American artist, currently engaged in writing the Catalogue Raisonne m, her presence here was another artistic feather in the cap for the exhibition's organisers.

Said curator Mrs. Elise Outerbridge, "We had been talking with Barbara Lynes all summer and she has been a fount of information for us in staging this show. I believe it was because of her that we got the support of the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation. She didn't know very much about O'Keeffe's Bermuda period, so it was important for her to come down here and inspect the work she did down here.'' Pointing out that the importance of the show lay in the fact that this is the first time that O'Keeffe's Bermuda drawings have been shown all together, Mrs.

Outerbridge revealed that Ms Lynes' visit here was not only to endorse Masterworks' efforts -- "nice as that was! She also photographed every picture and checked all the provenances before the show opened, for her Catalogue.'' Barbara Lynes is the Professor Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, but has been given leave to complete the enormous project of the O'Keeffe Catalogue.

Sponsored jointly by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation in New Mexico, the Catalogue Raisonne m is expected to be a four- to six-year project for Ms Lynes.

"I began in 1992 when I went to O'Keeffe's home in New Mexico for five months. I reviewed all her archival stuff -- she had drawers and drawers of letters, etc. so we went through all of that. I've been trying to programme my work so that I can do research in all the places where she spent time -- Wisconsin, where she was born, Virginia, Texas, as well as New Mexico -- and now, Bermuda.'' Ms Lynes, who has already written two books on the famous American artist, commented, "I really felt that a lot was being written about O'Keeffe without knowing her work, so I was very interested to hear that this exhibition was going on down here. It's wonderful to see all her drawings together.'' She noted that this was the first time that her Bermuda charcoal drawings had been shown together in public since Alfred Stieglitz (O'Keeffe's art impresario husband who owned New York's most avant garde gallery) exhibited them in 1935 -- the year after she was last in Bermuda.

"He only exhibited the charcoal drawings, as O'Keeffe very rarely showed her pencil works. The banyan is an interesting objective in terms of its angles and complex structure. And the bananas are very exotic! Both are actually very unusual, so it makes sense that she was very drawn to those things while she was here.'' Georgia O'Keeffe, born in 1887 was, in the early 1920s, already a famous figure on the American art scene. By the 1930s, when she made two visits to Bermuda for therapeutic purposes, the bold colours and sometimes sexually suggestive detail of her closely observed flowers, had made her an icon of the modernist world. As a woman whose independent lifestyle was more akin to that of left-bank Paris than puritan America, she also became the darling of the feminist movement. The love of solitude which would lead her to make a separate home for herself in New Mexico and where she would live until she died at the age of 99, also helped make her a cult figure: the more she isolated, the more she intrigued her public.

Said Ms Lynes, "She valued solitude above everything else, especially when she was working. She liked to have people around her, as long as she could paint alone. When she came to Bermuda in 1933 and 34, she was trying to recuperate from a nervous collapse. It's interesting that she came here at the suggestion of a friend, to be somewhere where there was warmth and sunshine -- she was always nourished by the sun. Stieglitz had been involved with another woman and there had been this enormous row over the mural she was supposed to have done for the Radio City Music Hall. He had disapproved of her taking on the project in the first place and then she found they hadn't prepared the ceiling as she had wanted so the whole thing fell apart, so things had not been going well for her at that time. When she came back to Bermuda the second time, she was still not completely well.'' Ms Lynes said that because O'Keeffe became such a cult figure, she had become very wary about giving out information. "When the first biography was written, she refused to be interviewed, so part of the inaccuracies that have arisen about her life and work stem from this reluctance on her part. Now, we're trying to sort out the inconsistencies in the various biographies. She died in 1986 and most of her documents and correspondence are now in the Beinecke Library at Yale, so that helps a bit. But it's a bit like working on a big jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are the same colour!'' Despite that, Barbara Lynes has rescued about 24 lost works that were languishing in private collections, since she began her mammoth project. When the Catalogue Raisonne m is finally published in three volumes, hopefully in 1997 or 1998, there will be some 2,000 colour reproductions, in chronological order, of every O'Keeffe work -- including the drawings of her "Bermuda Period.'' O'KEEFFE'S CATALOGUE -- Ms Barbara Buhler Lynes, who is compiling the Catalogue Raisonne m on the works of Georgia O'Keeffe travelled to Bermuda for the opening of Masterworks' exhibition of O'Keeffe's Bermuda artworks.