Cue Alice Walton

One day after a settlement proposed by Fisk University in Nashville and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe was shot down, the latter dropped its lawsuit against the former.

Alice Walton has had her fair share of opposition and bad publicity in building a collection of American art for her Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, but she may be catching a break here, as the O'Keeffe Museum's decision makes her offer to acquire a 50 percent share in Fisk's Alfred Stieglitz Collection for $30 million more viable.

The university and the museum have been going back and forth since Fisk decided that it wanted to sell two of the pieces in the collection, a gift of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, whose estate the museum represents. The museum objected, arguing that O'Keeffe had made the donation with the intent that it remain in tact at the university as a teaching resource. The settlement dismissed on Monday stipulated that one of the pieces in the collection, O'Keeffe's Radiator Building — Night, New York, go to the museum in return for $7.5 million and the right to display it at the university for four months every four year and that Fisk could sell a piece by Marsden Hartley. Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle's decision not to approve the settlement, in part because she believed Walton's rival bid was a better way to resolve Fisk's financial problems while ensuring that the Stieglitz Collection remained in Nashville for a substantial amount of time, tossed the two parties back in court. But the museum has apparently chosen to forgo that route of its own accord.

The university's president, Hazel O'Leary, told Jonathan Marx of the Tennessean that she expected to hear from Crystal Bridges "in the next day or two."

Donn Zaretsky on the development here, and Lee Rosenbaum here.