Really? Another Lost Valuable Painting Discovered in NYC Apartment

Lighting can strike twice — within the same few blocks. Just two week after the discovery of a lost Jacob Lawrence painting in a New York City apartment, another panel in a 30-panel series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” has been found in a nearby building. A nurse living on the Upper West Side read about the discovery of the Lawrence painting and how the series of paintings were on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right across Central Park. The name Jacob Lawrence, one of the few Black artists of his time to gain recognition in the art world, sounded familiar. She realized it was the name on a small painting — a gift from her mother-in-law — that had hung in her dining room for two decades. A 1996 New York Times profile on Lawrence was taped on its back. The nurse told her 20-year-old son, who found a black-and-white photograph being used as a placeholder for Panel 28. The “location unknown” painting was titled “Immigrants admitted from all countries: 1820 to 1840—115,773” and it was their painting 

 

After three days of unreturned calls to the museum, the nurse and her son went in–person to request someone look at her photos of the painting. Within hours, two co-curators of the Lawrence show and a paintings conservator were making a second trip to an Upper West Side apartment to verify the authenticity of a Lawrence painting that had not been seen publicly since 1960. Unlike the owners of the other recently discovered panel, the nurse who owns Panel 28 said she would consider selling it.  Panel 19 sold for $413,000 in 2018.

What’s on your wall? 

 

 

 

Missing Painting “Found” in NYC Home 

A 30-panel series of paintings, “Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954–56)” by renowned Black artist Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), was put on display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, from January 18 to April 26, 2020. Five paintings in the series were “lost” and represented on the wall with empty spaces. On August 29, the exhibition opened at the The Metropolitan Museum in New York City. An observant visitor remembered a painting she had seen in a neighbor’s living room and thought it could be one of the missing paintings. Turns out it was! The neighbors bought the painting in 1960 at a charity art auction benefitting a music school. The 1956 painting — Lawrence’s Panel 16 — depicts Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising which took place in Massachusetts from 1786 to 1787, a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War. It is now reunited with the rest of the known works for the remainder the exhibition, which will travel on loan to shows in Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, D.C., through next fall. In 2017, one of the panels sold for $413,000. Four of the 30 panels remain missing. 

 

 

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art