Modern Art History

The painting of a Parisian street scene left…along with the daily donations of pots, pans, old clock radios and other items turned out to be a work by Edouard-Leon Cortes.

The painting was sold recently for $40,600 at an auction.

(Click here for the full article.) And then there was Elizabeth Gibson, who spotted Rufino Tamayo’s Tres Personajes out by a Manhattan trash dumpster. She’d seen it and thought the colors were striking and it would look nice on her apartment wall, where she hung it for a few years until a friend noted that the work might be genuinely valuable. It was indeed genuine and valuable, having been stolen from a collector, and it sold for $1,049,000 last November at Sotheby’s.

I like looking at thrift store art, especially the oils and watercolors that somebody maybe did in a class years ago. There are lots of basic floral still-lifes and bowls of fruit and green meadows -- and in certain cases you can see why the pursuit of painting was quickly abandoned -- but sometimes the works are quite interesting and have a unique style. And there’s always that gambler’s chance that the painting of a great artist actually made it to your local thrift store, or that it’s the work of some genius who lived in obscurity and had to sell his art just to buy coffee and cigarettes, but now he/she is suddenly big news at auctions. So take a chance on that unusually interesting painting propped up next to the used tea kettles and badminton sets, because you just never know….