NEW YORK — A Georgia O’Keeffe painting that spent decades hidden behind coats and boxes in a Manhattan apartment closet goes up for auction Tuesday, and Christie’s estimates it could sell for $3 million to $5 million, the Associated Press reported.
The 1930 painting shows Lobo Peak near Taos, New Mexico, with rolling hills in earth tones. Christie’s says it was likely the first in a series of three. The second is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the third spent years in the Rockefeller family’s collection. Until now, the first one’s whereabouts were largely a mystery.
“It’s particularly important because of its early date and its representation of the inception point of O’Keeffe’s time in the American Southwest,” said Tylee Abbott, Christie’s director of American art.
A New York gallery sold the work for $3,800 in 1963 to a woman who gave it to her daughter, the auction house said. The daughter, who lived into her late 90s, displayed it until the mid-1980s, when she noticed a guest studying it too closely. She packed it back in its original crate and tucked it in a closet.
Around 2022, she casually told her niece, “oh by the way, there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe in the closet.” It stayed there until the family cleaned out the apartment this year. The family asked not to be identified.
The painting bears O’Keeffe’s signature mark on the back: a star with “OK” in the middle. O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at 98, is known for her flowers and Southwestern landscapes painted near her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
Sources: Associated Press via KTAR News. Thee Arizona Times uses AI-assisted reporting reviewed against the sources listed.
Photo: Irving Rusinow / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
