Tony Vaccaro/Getty Images
American artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986) poses outdoors beside an easel with a canvas from her series, 'Pelvis Series Red With Yellow,' Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1960
Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most notable and prolific American artists of the 20st century, and her paintings have routinely sold for millions of dollars. That will likely be the case with one that’s about to hit the auction block, which was discovered by the niece of a woman who kept it stashed in her closet in an apartment in New York City since the 1980s.
With apologies to Mary Cassatt, it’s hard to think of a single female painter hailing from the United States who’s held in higher regard than Georgia O’Keeffe, who was born in Wisconsin but made a name for herself with the modernist works that were largely inspired by the landscape of New Mexico, where she primarily resided from the 1930s until her death at the age of 98 in 1986.
O’Keeffe produced more than 2,000 pieces of work during her lifetime, and her paintings can be found hanging alongside those of other celebrated artists in notable galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and other notable institutions in the United States and beyond.
There are also plenty of wealthy collectors who added her paintings to a private collection, none of whom have paid more for one than Walmart heiress Alice Walton, who dropped $44,405,000 to acquire Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1Â in 2014 (it’s currently on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the museum she opened in Arkansas 15 years ago).
However, you may “only” need a few million to acquire a piece that’s about to go up for auction after it was rediscovered in a closet in the city where O’Keeffe spent over a decade honing her craft.
A Georgia O’Keeffe painting is expected to sell for at least $3 million after it was found in a closet where it sat for 40 years
O’Keeffe studied at a number of art schools around the country before heading to New York City in 1918 after finding a patron in Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer whom she ended up marrying six years later.
According to Gothamist, the Big Apple was also the home of an unnamed woman described as a “world-ranked bridge-master, Foreign Service member, and multilinguist” who received O’Keeffe’s Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I from her mother as a graduation gift after earning her master’s degree in 1963.
She displayed the painting in her apartment in the East Village until she spotted someone “eyeing it a bit too closely” while hosting a bridge game midway through the 1980s and subsequently opted to place it back in the box it came in before stowing it in her closet.
It remained there until somewhat recently, as the owner’s niece was helping her organize the apartment shortly before her death when her aunt dropped what had to be a fairly unexpected line, saying, “Oh, by the way, there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe in the closet.”
The niece subsequently contacted Christie’s about the find, which was painted on a canvas that’s 10 inches wide and 24 inches high and was purchased for $3,800 in the 1960s.
It is expected to fetch much, much more at an auction that will commence on November 17th, as the estimated winning bid is predicted to be somewhere between $3 million and $5 million.