The best art found in attics, basements, garages
They’re all ranked (in not entirely scientific fashion).
But for fortuitous discovery, we might know little of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Rosetta Stone, Lascaux drawings, Venus de Milo, and penicillin. Aficionados of Antiques Roadshow know that treasure may hide in plain sight—if it isn’t a hoax or dud. In operatic fashion, treasures surface in prosaic domestic settings, such as attics, cellars, and garages.
Fiction writers and psychologists have variously treated hidden household spaces as places of internment for mad relatives, the domain of the subconscious, and symbolic of the mind. To one researcher, they represent both time and assertion of self-identity, while Sherlock Holmes advocated for a clean attic/mind. But it’s precisely the romantic, slovenly nature—ideally blocked symbolically by cobwebs—of these spaces that draws us to discoveries therein.
There’s something about the rags-to-riches unlikeliness of it all, such as turning 720,965 percent profit on a Chinese bowl purchased at a Connecticut yard sale.
In the past six months, two Jacob Lawrence canvases have been rediscovered, both within a mile radius of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The latter finding, in early March, represents “a tale stranger than fiction,” wrote Brian Boucher for artnet. A Ukrainian nurse, who told the New York Times she passed the painting a thousand times daily, contacted the Met. Having been ignored, she hauled it to the Met and finally got curatorial attention.
“Do you, dear reader, perhaps reading this while in lockdown on the Upper West Side, have a painting on your wall that you’re taking a second (or a third) look at?” Boucher concluded. If that looks, smells, and sounds like winning the lottery, don’t let that fool you. It is very much as unlikely as winning the lottery. But lottery winners exist, however few and far between, and so do finders of lost or forgotten artistic treasures.
You can read more in my May 3, 2021 artnet article “7 of the Greatest Long-Lost Art Historical Masterpieces That Were Found in Attics and Basements—Ranked.”
Menachem, you have done it again! The artnet essay is a brilliant excursus on the intersections between artistic creativity, fickle commerce, prudery and aesthetic myopia. What this piece teaches is that we all must be encouraged to look and think critically and yet innocently.
Rip the commonplace out of its routine category to see anew! Bravo!