And a visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

O n Saturday, I walked in the footsteps of Bishop Jean Latour and his vicar, Joseph Vaillant, the two missionary priests, each a stargazer in his own way, depicted in Willa Cather’s 1927 novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather thought it was her best novel, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for it in the days when a Pulitzer meant an originality that thrills, not political conformance that bores and depresses. Cather’s priests are based on two real priests who died in the late 1880s — Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, his vicar and, later, the first bishop of Colorado. With an intensity that had to be divinely inspired, she researched their lives and their ambiance in New Mexico from the 1850s to their deaths.

Today, I’ll write about the difference between the Santa Fe that her priests knew and the Santa Fe of Cather’s era and of our own. Cather’s first trip to New Mexico was in 1912, just a generation after the deaths of Lamy and Machebeuf. Though so little removed in time, her Santa Fe was different from theirs. Theirs was an old Santa Fe, just feeling its American oats but still rooted in Spanish and Mexican culture. New Mexico was home to two dozen Native tribes, some controlling vast parts of the Southwest. In the 1850s and ’60s, Santa Fe, though the Camino Real ran through it, looked more ratty than royal. Old Pueblo-style buildings, with thick, adobe walls and ceilings beamed with logs, many a hundred years or more in age, gave the town an air of poky decrepitude.

Lamy’s — and Latour’s — Romanesque Revival cathedral, Santa Fe’s marquee building, opened in 1886 and was a huge change. It looked nothing like the old Palace of the Governors, the low-slung, adobe center for civic life under Spanish, Mexican, and territorial rule and, built around 1610, the oldest government building in America. The cathedral looked French, and grandly so.

A far bigger change came with a train whistle and lots of chug, chug, chug. “On the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” isn’t just an Oscar-winner of a song. On February 9, 1880, the train that bred Harry Warren’s and Johnny Mercer’s catchy tune came to Santa Fe. A gringo-infused boom followed as well as a citywide architectural rebrand.

By the early 1880s, what Cather described in her book as “a period of incongruous American building” in Santa Fe had started, with a frenzy. Flimsy wooden buildings soon filled half of the Santa Fe Plaza, with double porches, Victorian scrollwork, gingerbread trim, and banisters painted white. In 1879, a French Second Empire–style home for St. Michael’s College, complete with a mansard roof, might have made the Archangel himself consider sending bolts of lightning to destroy it, so much does it rebuke his namesake, Pueblo-style, 1600s-era chapel next to it. A new capitol building finished in 1900 was neoclassical, with a dome, cupola, and portico. The new jail was Tudor Revival, hinting at the Tower of London. These new buildings reminded Latour, grimly, of Sandusky in Ohio, where he had served as a priest for years after he first came to America. Ohio, he felt, seemed to have found him and followed him. He feared the annihilation of old Santa Fe, its modest adobe homes and shops, and its intimate scale.

A few years after both Latour and Lamy went to Heaven, the City Beautiful movement came to Santa Fe, with a twist. In most cities, beautification meant Beaux-Arts style, new boulevards, expansive new parks, new monuments and fountains, and slum removal. Santa Fe didn’t look forward so much as inward and to its Spanish and Native heritage. It doubled down on Santa Fe vernacular, which meant Pueblo style. The locals called it the City Different movement.

Gingerbread trim, turrets, spindles, gables, and wraparound porches, among much other folderol, were stripped from most of the new, Back East–inspired buildings. Many were finished in adobe, at least on the outside. The crumbling Palace of the Governors, when renovated around 1910, lost its Victorian embellishments and kept its scale, with no carbuncles added to it. An archaeologist supervised the redo, something new in America. When Cather started working on Death Comes for the Archbishop in the mid-1920s, she stayed at the new La Fonda on the Plaza hotel, built in 1922. An inn has occupied the site since 1610. It’s high-end Pueblo Revival, the brick and concrete hidden by an adobe façade, rounded corners, walls that look thick and hand-finished, wood roof beams that serve no structural purpose, hand-carved corbels, and terra-cotta floors that look earthen. Then, locals called it the New Old Santa Fe style. Today, the Catron Block, a commercial building from 1880 that occupies one side of the Santa Fe Plaza, is still more or less Victorian and does intrude on the ambiance.

Last week, I wrote about the De Vargas Street House, built in the late 1600s, we now think, but for many years thought to be the oldest house in America and to date from 1610. The La Fonda is the De Vargas Street House writ large and made modern. Santa Fe’s old road networks — not only its winding streets but its historic Camino Real, Pecos Trail, and Santa Fe Trail — weren’t trashed. They still govern the topography.

Today, Pueblo Revival is the ubiquitous style. Even the Freemasons, when building their Scottish Rite Temple in 1912, got into the game. It was originally planned to be Neoclassical, but the town elders rejected the plan, which was redone in Moorish Revival, drawing from the Alhambra in Granada. Designed by Los Angeles architects, it unites Spanish and Moorish styles much as New Mexico mixed Spanish, Mexican, and Native looks. Its pink stucco exterior jars but still drew me in to see its High Honky Tonk auditorium — the Freemasons knew how to have a good time — and its little museum. Tina Fey’s movie, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, was, in part, filmed there.

With the railroad came tourists, often rich ones and sometimes rich tubercular ones drawn by the dry air and lots of sun. Not long after Archbishop Lamy died, in 1889, Santa Fe’s Roman Catholic authorities sold his house and land to two of Joseph Pulitzer’s daughters. More consequential was Buffalo heiress Mable Dodge’s move from New York to Taos in 1917. Before too long, she ditched her Dodge husband and married Tony Lujan, a Tiwa Indian from Taos Pueblo on whom Cather based one of Bishop Latour’s key Native guides.

The artist colony of the new Mrs. Luhan — she changed the spelling to “Luhan” to ensure that people pronounced it correctly — drew Marsden Hartley, Ansel Adams, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cather, and many others. Robert Henri spent a few summers in Santa Fe starting in 1916. He persuaded George Bellows and John Sloan to visit. Sloan spent 30 summers in Santa Fe. They helped to foment Santa Fe’s thriving arts scene, whether in art dealers, museums, or the superb opera company. I’ll write more about these in a couple of weeks but will tempt readers by a look at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

I was very curious to visit the small museum. Curious, mostly, because I wonder why O’Keeffe (1887–1986), a very good but by no means profound or boundless artist, needs a museum. She is among the many artists who had her moments but also had her limits. Her fame — and renown — rests in part on gender, in part on her place in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, once her husband, in part on her longevity, in part on her exoticism, living in New Mexico and having a handsome, rugged poker face, in part on her Blackglama mink “What Becomes a Legend Most” magazine ads, and in part on her art.

That’s a lot of periphery, or call it fluff, before we get to her art. Her flower paintings don’t do much for me, and neither do her desert-animal skulls. I think many of these things are slick and silky and too Art Deco. Feminist art historians insist they’re crypto-vulvas, which immediately puts a big tax on my engagement. Her New Mexico landscapes, abstract sunrise and sunset watercolors, and seascapes are wonderful. Often, she takes mundane objects — an ocean wave, a bit of driftwood, a leaf, or even a tiny flower — and balloons them in size. Mundane, even inconsequential though they might be, they’re God’s creations. That’s very American.

Still, O’Keeffe is, in my opinion, a vastly overexposed artist. I’ve seen half a dozen O’Keeffe shows in the past few years and skipped even more. She was a woman artist, and in our day shows about women are a top priority. Her flower paintings are easy on the eyes. The O’Keeffe Museum owns lots of art by O’Keeffe. I think directors and curators see it as an ATM for loans.

I won’t write much about the O’Keeffe Museum since it’s building a huge, new museum in back of its current, small Santa Fe home. It’s in process. The current layout is mostly chronological and based on art and artifacts that O’Keeffe owned when she died in Santa Fe. There’s a gallery of early work, which feels Victorian, at the end of which is her Pink Tulip, from 1925, which the museum just acquired. It’s not early but good to see since it tells us that the museum collection isn’t stagnant. The picture is small and unnervingly vertical. It’s not a bad format for her. There’s a gallery for her early abstract fruit paintings, a temporary-exhibition gallery, a picture here and there from her lesser-known phases such as her cloud scenes, depicting the view from an airplane flying above the clouds — these aren’t very good – and her Lake George work, which is very good. There’s a stirring gallery of New Mexico art.

There’s also a gallery on her clothes — her signature black-and-white palette with no ornamentation — and a gallery on her technique. My sense is that most visitors go once. Most of O’Keeffe’s best work is in museums. Hers isn’t a case of a little goes a long way. Work such as Black Cross with Stars and Blue, from 1929, can command a gallery, but I don’t think she has the heft to command an entire museum.

Why is the museum in Santa Fe? It should be in Abiquiú. O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico in 1929 and moved permanently to Abiquiú, about 50 miles from Santa Fe, in 1949. The museum owns her compound there, which is open to the public, but, 50 miles from Santa Fe, it isn’t much visited. That’s too bad.

Abiquiú, I suspect, is essential to appreciating O’Keeffe’s art and life. It seems like an obstreperous place, lonely, with colorful canyons and hills but severe, too, and with a history of Pueblo, Apache, Navajo, Ute, and Comanche conflict, adding Spanish and, later, American conquest in the mix. Padre Martinez, one of Cather’s most arresting characters, is from Abiquiú, a place she describes as “surrounded by canyons so deep and ranges so rugged that it was practically cut off from intercourse with the outside world.” Its people were somber and fierce and singular. Martinez has mistresses and children. He tells Latour, “Our religion grew out of the soil, and has its own roots. We pay a filial respect to the person of the Holy Father, but Rome has no authority here.” For Martinez, Rome’s rules — celibacy, for one — are frivolous and inapt.

I left the O’Keeffe Museum with my curiosity sated but my puzzlement inflated. It feels like a for-profit place. It doesn’t do annual reports and hasn’t produced a collection handbook. The website is primitive, though it markets the shop well. Its exhibition program over the past ten years, mostly all O’Keeffe, all the time, seems both easy and weak. The exhibition on view, A Circle That Nothing Can Break, treating the circle as her subject, raises a question: What did she actually paint? By the early 1970s, O’Keeffe’s eyesight was mostly shot from macular degeneration. A lot of the late work in the show is a collaboration with her studio assistant.

The new building will have lots more gallery space, classrooms, new back-of-house space, a community green space, and a lobby big enough for events. It’s estimated to cost $75 million. The expanded building will also have a new emphasis on O’Keeffe as a New Mexican artist. That’s good. Since landscape was so big a part of her work, wouldn’t it best to put the museum, her house, and the landscape together? Putting the three together would give the museum more substance and O’Keeffe essential context. Yes, this would cut the numbers of fee-paying visitors. It’s $22 per person to enter, and the museum needs tourist bucks.

Many of its challenges are typical of single-artist museums. The best ones — Joaquín Sorolla’s house in Madrid, Chesterwood in Massachusetts, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem in the Netherlands, and Gustave Moreau’s house in Paris, for instance — are homes and studios packed with the artist’s work or, in the case of Hals’s museum, that specialize in the artist but serve as the local museum with lots of art by the artist’s contemporaries, too. Part of the content of the Thomas Cole museum in Catskill, N.Y., and Olana, Frederic Church’s house in nearby Hudson, N.Y., is the splendid Catskills hills, valleys, and rivers that inspired the artists.

What I’ve written might seem bitchy. I like the director, a longtime professional acquaintance as he was one of the American art curators who followed me at the Clark. The new building won’t open until 2028 but, God willing, I’ll review it when it’s finally done.