Most of us have a closet we are afraid to open. For one Manhattan family, the thing hiding behind the winter coats turned out to be a long-lost Georgia O'Keeffe. The painting spent about four decades boxed up beneath a row of fur coats in an East Village apartment. It now heads to auction at Christie's in New York with an estimate of up to $3 million, or roughly Rs 28 crore.
The work is Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I, painted in 1930. It is a landscape of just 10 by 24 inches, a slim, wide canvas that fits easily into a box, and a closet. The painting is not an unknown. A 1931 photograph of it appears in O'Keeffe's catalogue raisonné, the scholarly record of her work. That is why it counted as lost rather than undiscovered: collectors knew it existed but not where it had gone.
The painting's owner, an elderly woman, once kept it on display at home. That lasted until the 1980s, when a guest reportedly lingered over it a little too attentively. She boxed it up, tucked it in the closet behind her coats and left it there.
It stayed hidden until she mentioned it to her niece, almost in passing, that there was an O'Keeffe in the closet. The niece, who lives in Rhode Island, went looking and found it in its original box.
Christie's will offer the painting at its 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17. Before the sale, it goes on public view for the first time since its rediscovery.
O'Keeffe is one of the strongest names in the market. A white Jimson weed flower painting of hers set a record for a female artist at auction when it sold for $44.4 million. A $3 million estimate for a small landscape is modest by those standards, and a find with a story like this one tends to draw attention. The final price will be known after the November 17 sale.
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