BENTONVILLE, Ark. (AP) - The Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the heart of a legal dispute between the Tennessee attorney general and Fisk University is a treasure trove of works for students of art and American art history, those familiar with it say.

The fate of the 101-piece collection that Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has been trying for years to buy in a half-share arrangement with Tennessee's Fisk University is still in the hands of the courts, despite yet another high court ruling on Nov. 30.

In it, the Tennessee Court of Appeals issued a mixed ruling upholding the sharing deal, but overturning a lower court decision requiring Fisk to set aside two-thirds of Crystal Bridges' planned $30 million payment in an endowment dedicated to maintaining the collection.

The appeals court also sent the case back to the trial court to work out the details, and the attorney general is weighing an appeal.

Should Crystal B ridges in Bentonville ever acquire it, the Stieglitz collection would add depth to works by artists or kinds of art that are already part of its permanent collection, a museum curator said recently.

That includes filling gaps in the museum's collection and adding works by non-Americans that help tell the story of American art history and the Modernist movement during the first part of the 20th century, said Chris Crosman, curator of collections for Crystal Bridges.

"If it comes to pass, these works will be here only every two years - and not all of them will be on view all the time - but it's a way of bringing art to Northwest Arkansas that otherwise might not be here," Crosman said.

Upon her death in 1986, the American artist Georgia O'Keeffe bequeathed her late husband Stieglitz's art collection to Fisk, a historically black university, with a no sale proviso that the works not be broken up. Her wishes also stated that the collection be used to promote the study of art.

Stieglitz, the collection's namesake, was a key figure in the Modernist art movement in America around the turn of the 20th century, said Crosman and Mike Peven, a University of Arkansas art professor.

Stieglitz and O'Keeffe - his protege and later mistress and second wife - became a power celebrity couple of sorts on the New York art scene, she a burgeoning young American artist some 23 years his junior.

Stieglitz, a New Yorker, was an artist whose personal work focused on photography and a curator, gallery owner and collector.

His Manhattan gallery, 291, operated from 1905-1917 and was the first American venue to regularly showcase Modern art, according to The Oxford Dictionary of American Art and American Artists, predating the city's Museum of Modern Art, which would not open until 1929.

"One of the most important figures in Modern art, Stieglitz introduced the work of Picasso, Rodin, Matisse and Cezanne to this gallery," Peven said.

In the last years of 291, he moved from showing European Modernists to showing mostly American Modernists and stuck with this American focus at his later galleries between 1925 and the mid-1940s.

Stieglitz had achieved global recognition for his photography in the 1880s. He headed a movement to persuade museums to accept photography as an art form, despite its mechanical origins.

"He showed photography in his galleries on an equal footing with so-called fine art, with paintings and sculptures and printmaking," said Peven, who uses Stieglitz's photos when teaching his photography/art classes.

"He was ... the most highly recognized photographic artist of his time, and that's literally worldwide," he said. "He also published one of the most important magazines, called Camerawork, between 1903 and 1917."

Stieglitz constantly experimented with techniques and processes, including a method known as photogravure that he used to publish his magazin e.

"In the 1890s, he worked with a 4-by-5 camera and showed people how quickly they could make photographs," Peven said.

"When told he couldn't make photographs with artificial light, he said: Oh yeah? - and went out and made photographs with artificial light," Peven said. "He would go out in the middle of the night in the middle of winter to make pictures, not only to show that you could do it, but to make interesting pictures. Interesting, significant pictures."

The Stieglitz collection covers four works from the personal collection of O'Keeffe and 97 from Stieglitz's estate, including 19 of his photographs.

"The Terminal is an excellent example of his early work, but the most outstanding is The Steerage," Peven said of Stieglitz's vignettes of New York City life.

"The Terminal shows a horse-drawn carriage, and it's taken in the snow," he said. "There's steam coming off the horses, because they're warm and it's cold outside."

"The Steerag e depicts a view into the lower-class deck of an ocean liner.

"To sum it up, it's Cubist," Peven said of Steerage. "When Picasso saw it for the first time, he turned to Stieglitz and said, 'You invented Cubism, not me.'"

Fisk's Stieglitz holdings include Pablo Picasso's 1904 oil-on-canvas Tete de femme, as well as prints Stieglitz kept of his Steerage, Terminal, The Hand of Man, Self Portrait at '291' and 1931's Georgia O'Keeffe.

Stieglitz was the subject of at least one work in his collection, Florine Stettheimer's 1928 oil painting Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz.

Crystal Bridges has no other works by Stettheimer, Crosman said, adding that she was a less well-known artist who was part of Stieglitz's circle.

But other artists covered in the Stieglitz collection would supplement artists Crystal Bridges already has, Crosman said, including O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe's Radiator Building - Night, New York and Flying Backbone are part of Fisk's Stieglitz collection.

Crystal Bridges is displaying three O'Keeffes: Mask with Golden Apple, oil-on canvas, 1923; Small Purple Hills, oil-on-board, 1934; and her watercolor Evening Star No. 2.

All three are promised gifts to Crystal Bridges from the personal collection of its founder, Alice Walton, Crosman said. The watercolor is an example of works on paper that can't be displayed for long periods of time because of light sensitivity, which is the case with a number of works from Fisk's collection.

Of Mask with Golden Apple, Crosman said: "That was in a way kind of an homage to Alfred Stieglitz - maybe not consciously. ... The space is very shallow. It's almost as if you're looking through the lens of a camera."

O'Keeffe alternated between paintings that depicted some degree of realism to the abstract and was known for her flowers, landscapes and animal skulls bleached white from desert suns.

"She was most famous as an artist who explored abstraction in v arious ways," he said.

Her scenes ranged from views of New York City to the New Mexico desert, where she spent the latter part of her life after Stieglitz's death in 1946.

"Radiator Building is one of her most important works," Crosman said.

In it, O'Keeffe pays tribute to Stieglitz in more ways than one, including changing the electric sign of a New York building that said "Scientific American" to read "Stieglitz."

"The building itself is kind of a phallic symbol, and relates to their relationship," he said.

Of O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, Crosman said: "Each had a love-hate relationship with the city."

Stieglitz loved to take O'Keeffe to a family getaway at upstate New York's Lake George, a place that inspired her works and his, including the many photographs he took of O'Keeffe - some of them nudes.

O'Keeffe was more adventurous and loved to travel farther, escaping to New Mexico on solo vacations.

"She did actually abandon New Yo rk City, to the desert," Crosman said.

After her husband's death, O'Keeffe moved there permanently, where she bought a hacienda ranch and lived out the remainder of her years. She lived from 1887-1986.

If Crystal Bridges is allowed to share the Stieglitz collection, it could exhibit 11 Marsden Hartley works in addition to the four or five it already has in its permanent collection, Crosman said.

"There is a great early Marsden Hartley that is very abstract," he said. "It is earlier than any of the other Hartleys we already have."

Other works in the Fisk collection include Alfred Maurer's oil-on-panel Girl in Red Dress and Diego Rivera's 1915 oil-on-canvas Le Sucrier et les Bougies.

It also would provide Arkansas art lovers access to two color lithographs on paper each by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cezanne, and three lithographs on paper by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.