For about 40 years, a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape sat in its original wooden box behind the coats in a closet in an East Village apartment. Its owner rarely mentioned it. Then, earlier this year, while a niece was helping her sort through her things, she said, almost in passing, that there was an O’Keeffe in the closet.
There was. Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I, painted in 1930, is now on view at Christie’s at Rockefeller Center and will be offered in the auction house’s 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, with an expected price of around $3 million.
A $3,800 graduation present
The painting’s story begins in 1963, when the owner’s mother bought it for $3,800 from the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan, the dealer that handled O’Keeffe’s work at the time, and gave it to her daughter as a graduation gift. The original bill of sale survives.
The owner, described by those close to her as an accomplished and intensely private woman, hung it in her apartment for two decades. In the mid-1980s she took it down, reportedly after a guest at one of her bridge games showed a little too much interest in it, packed it back into its box and put it away. It stayed there. The family has asked not to be named, and the owner died not long after the painting was rediscovered.
For art historians, the work had effectively vanished. O’Keeffe’s catalogue raisonné lists it as “unlocated,” known only from a photograph taken in 1931 when it was shown in a New York gallery. Christie’s confirmed the attribution through that photograph, the 1963 receipt and the painting itself.
Tylee Abbott, the Christie’s specialist leading the sale, called it “a once-in-a-lifetime moment.”
Why Abiquiu matters
The picture comes from the very start of O’Keeffe’s love affair with northern New Mexico. She first spent a summer there in 1929 and returned year after year, buying a house in Abiquiu in 1945 and moving to New Mexico permanently in 1949, three years after the death of her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
The landscapes she painted around Abiquiu, with their rolling, rose-and-ochre hills and the flat-topped Cerro Pedernal on the horizon, became some of the defining images of her career, as recognisable as her flowers. A 1930 view puts this canvas among the earliest of them.
What it might fetch
At around $3 million, the painting is priced well below O’Keeffe’s top results. Her auction record remains Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932), which sold at Sotheby’s in 2014 for $44.4 million. Her New Mexico landscapes generally sell for far less than the large flower paintings, but early works that are fresh to the market, with a clean story behind them, tend to draw strong bidding.
The sale comes in the busiest week of the year for New York’s auction houses, when Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips hold their marquee evening sales. On a night of much bigger names and much bigger estimates, a modest landscape that spent four decades behind the winter coats may yet be the lot people remember.
The painting is on public view, free of charge, at Christie’s, 20 Rockefeller Center, until November 17.