Georgia O'Keeffe's Lost Painting Spent 40 Years in a Closet — Now It's Headed to Christie's

The sentence that brought the painting back was as casual as a thing can be. "Oh, by the way, there's a Georgia O'Keeffe in the closet." Christie's opened its announcement of the sale with those words — spoken recently by the painting's owner to a relative in her East Village apartment, as her niece helped her go through her belongings and get her affairs in order. Behind dozens of coats in the front closet sat an old wooden box. Inside it, in its original gallery packing, was Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I — painted in 1930, and known to the art world for ninety-five years only from a black-and-white photograph taken in 1931.

The canvas is small and wide — 10 by 24 inches of New Mexico: golden slopes rolling under a pale sky, the artist's "OK" signature on the original backboard. It depicts Lobo Peak, north of Taos Pueblo, the landscape O'Keeffe first saw in 1929 and then painted for the rest of her life. Christie's is offering it in the 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, the highlight sale of its Marquee Week in New York. Before it sells, it hangs in public for the first time in at least three decades: the exhibition at 20 Rockefeller Center is free, and runs from November 7 through the day of the sale.

The owner, whose family asked Christie's for anonymity, lived the kind of life that makes a closet like that plausible. Her family described her to Christie's as worldly and fiercely independent — a Foreign Service career, fluency in at least four languages, the highest score on the Civil Service Exam at the time she took it, and a sideline as a world-ranked bridge master. The painting came to her as a graduation gift when she earned her master's degree in the 1960s: her mother bought it for her on April 15, 1963, at the Downtown Gallery on 51st Street — O'Keeffe's dealer in Manhattan — for $3,800.

She hung it in the apartment for about twenty years. Then, in the mid-1980s, a guest at a bridge game eyed it a bit too closely, and her family told Christie's she got nervous. She put the painting back in its original box and stored it in the closet, where it sat unknown to the rest of her family. Scholarship knew it the whole time, barely: it appears only in an appendix of O'Keeffe's catalogue raisonné, because its existence was known solely through that 1931 photograph. The owner passed away shortly after revealing it to her niece this year; her niece emailed photographs of the work to Christie's, and the house's specialists confirmed what the closet had been holding.

"Rediscoveries are rare in the well-established market for academically researched and highly revered historic American artists," Tylee Abbott, Christie's senior specialist and international director of American art, said in the house's announcement. "To uncover a seminal work, representative of this 20th century master's deep personal engagement with the landscape, a pillar of her career, which is exquisitely rendered and well preserved, is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and absolutely thrilling." Abbott called it "a wonderful painting, a remarkable story."

O'Keeffe painted the Lobo Peak motif three times, and this canvas is likely the first of the three. The second hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — it came to the Met in 1963 as a gift of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, the collection of her husband and dealer. The third is in a private collection and was formerly in the collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller; it sold at Christie's Rockefeller sale in 2018 for $8,412,500. She was transfixed by the view long before she managed to paint it. "This is the Lobo Mountain," she wrote to Stieglitz. "I want to paint this mountain — wanted to every year — but it is quite impossible."

The money is where the two published estimates need care, because they are not the same number. Christie's carries the estimate "in the region of $3 million." ARTnews and Robb Report carry the range at $2 million to $3 million. Either way, it is a long road from a $3,800 graduation gift. O'Keeffe's auction record stands at $44.4 million, per Artnet. Part of the proceeds will go to an educational institution, the New York Post reported, with some of the money helping the family with expenses.

For now, the painting that hid behind the coats is doing the opposite of hiding. It is on view, free, at Rockefeller Center through November 17 — the first time the public has been able to stand in front of it in at least thirty years. Then it crosses the block, and the closet story ends with a hammer.