Based on recent headlines, you might think that trash bin diving is a very profitable business in the art market. Heidi Markow has a March story in Pennsylvania where he bought paintings by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir for $12 in a real estate sale. A month ago, a man in Hudson, New York actually got stuck in a trash bin to retrieve 18th-century paintings by British artist George Romney. Not so lucky was the person who spent $50 for a painting at a garage sale in Minnesota that data science art research firm LMI Group said was a lost Van Gogh (the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam put the kibosh on that one), but the 31-inch tall headless and armless marble status found by a man in a black plastic trash bag in a suburb of Thessaloniki turned out to be a 2,000-year-old Greek artwork. Just a few days ago, a three-year-old picked up a stone during a hiking outing near Jerusalem, but it was actually a 3,800-year-old amulet.
That’s this year! In 2024, the litter of an Italian garbage dealer discovered Pablo Picasso’s rolling canvas worth $6.6 million in an abandoned basement on Capri. The carvings by Northern Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer were found in a landfill in England and were sold at auction for £33,390 ($43,000).
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From portraits of Rembrandt found in the attic of a house in Camden, Maine to a Mayan vase charged for $3.99 from customs shelves at a thrift store in Maryland, portraits of Rembrandt found in a vase of Rembrandt, discarded or abandoned art and antiquities, a wide range of discarded or abandoned works of art and antiquities. Then there was JMW Turner Watercolor selling several other paintings for £100 at the England auction, John Constable paintings hidden in cabinet grooves in Ash, Kent, England. In each case, the owners don’t know what they have, but eventually someone figured it out that it was the sale of these items for tens of thousands, thousands, or even millions of dollars, which made these headlines so compelling.
Maybe you want to know if you’re going to be next. Let’s not be taken away. Teri Horton’s $5 thrift store found it wasn’t actually $50,000,000 Jackson Pollock.
Marcus Gray, head of the film division at Rosebery auction house, told Observer that garbage bin divers and flea market enthusiasts came forward, but those hopes “seldom appear.” “Just this morning, we had to let the client know that their painting was not used by JMW Turner. It was engraved with the ‘Turner’ on the back, not the artist’s signature.”
Breaking news is not limited to auctioneers. “The day after they met me, I was a lot of people called the gallery Antique road show,” Debra Force, a regular expert on the long-running PBS program in Manhattan, told Observers. “They can’t read the signature or they just wish the people they have were famous. Often, what they have is breeding prints, which they mistake for painting. They almost want to appeal to everything you can write it out immediately because it has no value. ”
Few of a troubled discovery will be real, such as the William Merritt Chase painting found at a flea market in Kentucky last year. The buyer who paid several thousand dollars for this, confirmed the authenticity of the artwork by researchers preparing the artist’s catalog Raisonné, a list of notes for all known works by a particular artist, and Force said, “The work seems to be correct.” Since Finder shopped it to numerous dealers and later settled in several auction houses, and the painting company freighted its goods to several auction houses, because Finder was not eventually sold, because Finder’s high selling price was too high, Force did not get the shipment of the painting. It’s too easy to be taken away.
How art experts deal with potentially valuable discoveries
People who want to show their experts Antique road show The video tape is long, the phone and email auctions about lost masterpieces and the large number of calls and dealers received by dealers. Nicholas Hall, a dealer of paintings from an old master in New York City, said without ironically: “In fact, what they want is the real opposite. People think they have Leonardo or Caravaggio, which is actually a landfill.”
But, he admits, some people find it really true—maybe the three or four inquiries he receives in a year are targeting valuable objects. But these are not headlines, but just art sold “maybe tens of thousands of dollars, almost more than that.” The rough diamonds occasionally have diamonds, such as the statue of Terra Cotta, which was mistaken for a 19th-century object and bought at the Portobello Road Antiques flea market in London for $100, and turned out to be the work of 15th-century Italian sculptor Verrocchio. The statue was entrusted to him and eventually sold for more than $1 million. “That was a big award.”
In some cases, the artwork is real, but not worth it. Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the London-based Art Loss Register, who maintained a database of lost, stolen and plundered art, told Observer that six paintings by the Yorkshire Dalles artist were discovered by a soldier who demolished a construction worker in London who broke a London hotel that broke during the pandemic. North borrowed paintings to hold a pandemic exhibition at the hotel, but they were not retrieved until the buildings were demolished. “The new hotel owner instructed the workers to deal with the paintings, and most of them skipped,” Radcliffe said. But one of the workers, himself an amateur artist, occupied them and reported them to the registry of art losses, and they were then sent back to the artist.
In the rarest cases, auction houses may not know what they have. Kevin Rhines, a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, regularly sells at local auction houses in neighboring towns. He called “Margaret” a print for the auctioneer for $100, turned out to be French surrealist artist René Magritte, and his evaluation of the work shortly after the sale listed its value of $5,000.
However, finding cheap art and flip it over for quite a lot of money is usually not easy and may not be cheap. If the object is stolen, robbed or illegally exported to a country, it may have no money when it learns the item through public sale. Occasionally, the Finders fee for up to 10% of the object’s value has been paid, but the person who acquires the item will usually hand it over. “You might get medals, or there might be celebrations, but the cost for discoverers is very little,” said Mari-Claudia Jiménez, Sotheby’s head of global business development, now a private practice art attorney in New York City. She worked for a law firm representing the Turkish government, which demanded the illegal withdrawal of artifacts from the country.
What to do if you think you have lost your masterpiece
For garbage dumpsters or flea market devotees who think they are valuable, there is a process to determine whether the artwork is legal. Dealers and auction houses encourage people to take photos of items they find and send them these images. Christie and Sotheby’s have dedicated online portals where images of objects may be submitted for staff to submit and they will follow up if something is interesting. Private dealers and galleries often welcome such inquiries, provided that the inquirer uses the appropriate channels. “I don’t like people bringing things to my gallery. It’s so invasive,” Force clarified. “Start with email.” If an object looks interesting, she will respond by asking for other information – where the person finds it and whether they know it.
Two other possible information about the work of a particular artist is the above catalog Raisonné (which is more applicable to well-known artists and the verification committees for well-known artists and the verification committees for well-known artists. The latter is more in Europe than in the United States, because foreign committees can speak out without legal influence, while legal influence among American scholars who have closed a university, specializing in the relevant art or antiquities field may also be able to provide guidance.
“Different artists have different methods of identity verification,” Gray said. “For example, Banksy’s works can only be verified by controlling pests. The works of famous artists in the 20th century need to be presented to experts or committees for certification. However, many artists in the middle market do not have a formal identity verification process, and attribution will depend on the expertise of auction house professionals and scholars.”
There are also organizations that conduct scientific analysis of artworks, involving testing of uncertain sources – most notably one of the McCrone Institute in Chicago, which evaluates paintings, canvases, and other painting elements to determine their age and where to create them. When the flea market clears archives holding potentially valuable objects that create background information for dealers or auction house experts, people in trade are more likely to be more interested in the object.
Distributors and auction house experts are not always experts in a particular field of artists, but they know who the experts are and where they will contact these experts when they think it might be attribution, and even conduct first-hand inspections of their artwork with them. Expertise like scientific analysis is not free either, and a dealer or auction house may absorb shipping costs and expert time, but usually only if the person who discovers the artwork agrees that the dealer or auction house has the right to sell the work (that costs can then be packaged in an agreed committee).
Another expensive element of garbage to garbage discovery is cleaning, Hall added. “No expert can see a painting through dirty varnish, so cleaning is another cost,” again negotiated with potential cargo. “Building authenticity takes time and money.” So search for flea markets and Salvation Army shelves or dive into all the landfills you want, but don’t expect miracles.
