Georgia O’Keeffe Painting Found in Closet After 40 Years Heads to Christie’s With $ 3 M. Est.

When Christie’s holds its 20th Century Evening Sale in two weeks, one painting will hit the block with a curious story. The Georgia O’Keeffe painting Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I (1930) only recently resurfaced after nearly 40 years out of the public eye.

Per the New York Post, the painting was found by a Rhode Island woman when she was helping her elderly aunt clear her East Village apartment. According to the 65-year-old woman, who the Post names only by her middle name, Betsy, she found the painting at the back of a closet under a row of fur coats.

“I thought, wow, that’s that’s pretty wild,” she told the Post. “I wondered, ‘Is there any way I can keep this?’ … But once we started exploring what the value of the piece was, I realized that it’s worth more than my house.”

According to the woman, her aunt told her in 2022 off-handedly that there was an O’Keeffe painting in the closet as they prepped the house for home health aides. However, Betsy didn’t actually find the work until a few weeks ago when her aunt was put into hospice at age 98.

The aunt, who has since died, was once a Foreign Services worker. She recieved the painting as a graduation gift from her mother in 1963, when she purchased it from The Downtown Gallery on 51st Street for $3,800. As Betsy tells it, the painting hung in the apartment until the 1980s, when she noticed a guest “eyeing it a bit too closely.”

“I think she was fully aware of its value … she recognized that it was an expression of her financial position,” Betsy said.

The painting has since become a bit of an oddity for Betsy and her family, who says she hung it up “for chuckles.” “The men in the family who’ve seen this have commented, there seems to be a number of ‘vaginas’ in the picture,” she said

The painting carries a $2 million to $3 million estimate, and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to an unnamed educaiton institution. The rest will go towards Betsy and her family “for things like paying off the mortgage.” Fair enough.

In a lot essay, Christie’s described the painting as an “important early work” that is “likely the first iteration in a series of three works depicting Lobo Peak, north of Taos Pueblo.” One of the other such works is in the collection of MoMA, while the other is in an unamed private collection.