Georgia O'Keeffe Painting Found in Closet After 40 Years Heads to Christie's

A Georgia O'Keeffe painting that spent nearly 40 years hidden in a New York apartment closet will appear at Christie's 20th Century Evening Sale in two weeks, carrying an estimate of $2 million to $3 million. The work, Near Abiquiu, New Mexico I (1930), resurfaced only weeks ago.

The New York Post first reported the discovery. A 65-year-old Rhode Island woman, identified by the paper only as Betsy, found the painting while helping her elderly aunt clear an East Village apartment. It sat at the back of a closet, beneath a row of fur coats.

"I thought, wow, that's pretty wild," Betsy 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."

How did the painting end up in a closet?

The trail begins in 1963. The aunt, a former Foreign Services worker who has since died, received the painting as a graduation gift from her mother. The mother had bought it from The Downtown Gallery on 51st Street for $3,800.

The work hung in the apartment until the 1980s. Then the aunt noticed a guest, in Betsy's words, "eyeing it a bit too closely." She took it down and hid it away.

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

The aunt mentioned the painting off-handedly in 2022, as the family prepared the home for health aides, saying there was an O'Keeffe in the closet. Betsy did not actually find the work until a few weeks ago, when her aunt entered hospice care at age 98.

What does the sale change for the painting?

The rediscovery returns a documented O'Keeffe to the market and to scholarship after four decades out of public view. In a lot essay, Christie's described the canvas 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 companion paintings belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The other sits in an unnamed private collection.

After the find, the painting became what Betsy called an oddity in her own home, hung up "for chuckles" before the sale decision. "The men in the family who've seen this have commented, there seems to be a number of 'vaginas' in the picture," she told the Post.

A portion of the auction proceeds will go to an unnamed education institution. The remainder will support Betsy and her family, she said, "for things like paying off the mortgage."

The sale in two weeks will set the market's verdict on a work last priced at $3,800 — and reunite, at least on the block, the first panel of a Lobo Peak series whose siblings hang at MoMA and in private hands.