Finders, Keepers: Art Found in Trash

The Last Time I Showed Up at Midnight, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2015

Finders, Keepers: Disposable Art

A couple of years ago, I received a cryptic DM asking about a painting I’d made in 2015 called The Last Time I Showed Up at Midnight. The inquirer wanted me to verify that I was the artist, and wondered what I could tell him about the painting, including how much it cost. 

Artists receive numerous messages from scammers with elaborate flattery of their passion, originality, and skill, with requests to show available inventory so they can select the perfect, expensive present as a surprise for their wife to celebrate an upcoming wedding anniversary. This run-up is usually followed by some complicated reasons why they can’t use the regular online shopping cart and checkout with their credit cards. 

This didn’t seem like that, but I wasn’t sure what the man was getting at as he tiptoed delicately around the subject. 

This particular painting was one of my urban expressionist abstract works in the spirit of the city streets, suggesting peeling billboards and layers of orange and lavender with graffiti and texture. It had been exhibited several year’s before at the Steam Whistle Brewing Gallery in Toronto’s entertainment district, and from there it had sold to a new home. I told the gentleman that the work was not available but he persisted in asking about its value. I told him that it sold at the time for $800 Canadian dollars but that similar works today would cost $1400. I wondered where he had seen the painting. It had been reproduced in a glossy magazine but it was local to Toronto and he was writing from New York State. So I asked him where he had seen the painting.

It took some cajoling on my part to get to the bottom of the mystery. The man sent me a snapshot of the painting leaning against his wall. At first he claimed vaguely to have “come across this work.”  Finally, he confessed what it was he had not wanted to tell me. He sheepishly told me he had found the artwork sticking out of a garbage dumpster. He was walking his dog when he saw a painting peeking at him from the refuse. He was intrigued by the unusual colour palette and the energy of the piece. He thought it was “really special” and was afraid to tell me because, naturally, it would be upsetting and offensive to find out someone had thrown my art into the trash.

Of course I was a stranger to the man and he could not know the delight I take in life’s absurdities. “If someone could afford $800 to buy original art and throw it away when they redecorated, I hope they buy a lot more,” I wrote back. “Keep it coming.”

No doubt the man had hoped for something a little more lucrative than a Luzajic, perhaps an abstract expressionist painting from a big name with a big price tag. But he seemed pleased that I did not want the artwork back. “Finders, keepers,” I wrote, telling him to enjoy the find that started his original art collection, and the story that went with it.
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It was another milestone in my trajectory as an artist. I had now joined the ranks, if at the bottom rung, of painters whose work had been a discarded treasure, discovered later and rescued from a thrift store, yard sale, or in the bins awaiting the city dump.

Tres Personajes, by Rufino Tamayo (Mexico) 1970

A parallel story took place in 2003, when New Yorker Elizabeth Gibson was taking her morning walk on the Upper West Side. Sitting beside a dumpster was an intriguing canvas with abstract figures in hazy reds and purples. “I wouldn't say it was beautiful. It was just so powerful. It had like an other-worldly power,” she told Voice of America. “It was just like a mystery, what was it doing in the trash?”

Gibson took the painting home and hung it on her wall. She didn’t see any identifying markers and so her efforts to find out who created the work and how it ended up on the streets of New York were quickly thwarted. But in the years ahead, she felt the work was full of important stories that she needed to dig for. She said the work was “radiating energy” and told her, “Find out about me.” 

Gibson began approaching friends who knew more about art history, watching TV shows about art, and investigating lost and stolen artworks. Finally, four years later, she made a breakthrough on the Antiques Roadshow website, where a segment on their show in the archives featured the work hanging in her living room. It described the lost Rufino Tamayo painting as a “missing masterpiece.”

Rufino Tamayo was a Mexican painter of Zapotec heritage from Oaxaca. He was a tween when his mother died of TB, and moved to Mexico City to work at his aunt’s fruit stand. She enrolled him in the National School of Plastic Arts, where he absorbed Cubist and Fauvist influences while infusing these styles with individualized indigenismo. He went on to work at the Department of Ethnographic Drawings, and then began painting murals alongside “the big three” muralists of Mexico, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Sisqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco.

Tamayo shared Diego Rivera’s interest in the importance of pre-Columbian history, artifacts, and art, and in celebrating and promoting the heritage and contributions of Indigenous people as a vital backbone of Mexicanidad, or Mexican identity. However, he did not fit in with the popular political ideas of his revolutionary circle. He did not believe that art should be in service to the state, and he did not believe the communist revolution was good for Mexico. 

Tamayo felt that artists should be free to express themselves as individuals. Knowing that these beliefs carried considerable risk, he laid low and tried to avoid ruffling feathers, painting murals focused on interesting limited colour palettes, shapes, and themes from Indigenous folklore, rather than the communist propaganda that his peers were creating on behalf of the Revolution. Ultimately, he felt it was best to leave for New York. 

He lived and worked in and out of New York, Mexico, and Paris for the rest of his career. He experimented with naïve, semi-abstract, tonalist, softly cubist works that defy easy categorization, evocative paintings that seem to draw from ancient dreams of Mexico, from storybooks and legends, while still appearing contemporary today. Tamayo’s years in New York increased his visibility and international appreciation of his painting. He mentored other artists, including abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, whose soak technique canvases use similar tones and palettes.

Ultimately, Tamayo returned to Mexico to build the Rufino Tamayo Museo in his hometown of Oaxaca. He is today considered one of the most important artists in Mexican history. 

The painting that Gibson found propped casually beside the dumpster was a 1970 creation by Tamayo, Tres Personajes. It belonged to a collector in Texas. When he and his wife were in the process of moving, the painting disappeared from their storage locker. No one had ever been apprehended for the theft and the trail had long gone cold. 
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Gibson had the artwork authenticated, and then returned the Tamayo to the collector’s widow. The artwork was valued at just over a million dollars. The woman decided to sell the piece on Sotheby’s and granted Gibson a finder’s fee and a cut of the commission. 

Still from Global News segment on Norval Morrisseau artwork found in a recycling bin.

In 2019, artist Frederick Roesner was running errands in British Columbia when he saw the unmistakable Woodland painting style of Norval Morrisseau on a partially unwrapped panel in a recycling bin. He hauled the package home and unwrapped an artwork by Canada’s most beloved First Nations painter. Anishnaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, also known as Copper Thunderbird, was born in northern Ontario. Merging traditional Indigenous themes of shamanic life, folklore, animals, and visionary revelations with the new brightly coloured synthetic acrylic paints on the market, Morrisseau invented the School of Woodland art, an important artistic movement among Native Canadians.

Morrisseau was the son of a Medicine Man and Knowledge Keeper, and a Catholic mother, and he painted a syncretic blend of stories from both traditions. A survivor of the Canadian residential school system, he quit school at the age of ten and worked instead with his elders, fishing, trapping, and picking wild berries. He became very sick when he was 19. In Anishnaabe traditions, giving a new name to a person who is dying can renew their energy and save their lives. Norval was renamed Copper Thunderbird, after his vision of turning into a bird. His spectacular six-part work in bright orange, Man Changing into a Thunderbird, tells the story, and is on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Norval’s groundbreaking work has met with various controversies. His decision to share the stories and imagery from the shamanic beliefs and practices of his lineage with people outside of the First Nations was completely taboo among his people. But Norval believed firmly that unity and reconciliation depended on this opening. 

Indigenous art in general and Norval’s art in particular is incredibly popular with Canadian audiences from all of our diverse backgrounds, so in demand that forgers created a veritable industry copying and selling his paintings as originals. The forgery racket became so entrenched and widespread that even national museums have purchased and displayed the fake works. Ringleader David Voss began the fraud in 1995, hiring young Indigenous artists to copy Morrisseau’s works, producing over 5000 fake Norvals and paying off authenticators to help flood the markets. He was recently convicted and sentenced, receiving only five years in prison for a financial crime that was a much more profound assault on Indigenous culture and Morrisseau’s legacy. 
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At a time when this large-scale hoax was hitting the airwaves, whoever recycled Return to the Homeland, a three-panelled Morrisseau painting, may have assumed they had a fake. But it wasn’t one of the duds. The masterpiece is valued at over a million dollars. Roesner has so far turned down major purchase offers. His goal is to have the work preserved and displayed at the National Gallery of Canada.

Christ Mocked, by Giovanni Cinabue (Florence) 1280

In 2019, during a routine house clearance of an elderly resident in France, a small religious painting that had long been hanging over the kitchen hotplate was moved to the trash. The tenant assumed it was a cheap print that had been there forever. It was time for a change. Thankfully, the cleaners thought twice about the disposal and rescued the work from demise and anonymity. Turned out, the painting was a priceless devotional panel from a diptych by Florentine master Giovanni Cimabue, dating back to 1280 AD. The egg tempera and gold leaf on poplar painting sold at auction for 24 million pounds. The painting was moved to the Louvre.

Detail from undated, untitled Yves Tanguy artwork.

In 2020, a traveller inadvertently left his precious cargo at a Dusseldorf airport. It was a surrealist painting by Yves Tanguy. Frantic, the man contacted the police as soon as he arrived in Tel Aviv.  The police contacted the sanitation company who combed the recycling dumpsters and eventually rescued the work.

Portrait of Dr. Felix Rey, by Vincent Van Gogh (Netherlands) 1889

A portrait of Doctor Felix Rey was painted by Vincent Van Gogh in thanks for treating his injured ear after the artist sliced part of it off in the legendary episode of passion and tragic psychosis. Dr. Rey and his mother received the 1889 portrait with thanks, but they deemed the artwork “hideous” and “ridiculous,” not able to understand Van Gogh’s unusual and still unappreciated genius of style. The good doctor’s mother used the painting to patch up a hole in the backyard chicken coop. 
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Over ten years later, an admirer of the artist came to the house in search of the portrait and found it still protecting the chickens from the elements. He rescued the work and turned it over to some local art dealers.

Portrait, by Samuel van Hoogstraten (Netherlands) c. 1600s

Self Portrait, by Pietro Bellotti (Italy) 1665

While driving down a highway in 2021, a man took a break at a roadside rest stop near Ohrenbach in Germany. He saw two paintings in the dumpster and took them with him. As they appeared to be quite old, he stopped in Cologne to turn them in to the police. Authorities ascertained that one was a 17th century painting of a Dutch boy by master Samuel van Hoogstraten, and the other, dated to 1665, was a self-portrait by Pietro Bellotti. So far, the question of how they ended up in the rest stop trash has not been answered.

Hockey painting by Edward Menges, posted in Dumpster Archeology on Facebook.

In 2017, a dumpster diver was hunting for treasures near St. Louis, Missouri, when he found fourteen paintings by a local artist, Edward Menges. The works included hockey and football paintings and some landscapes. By chance, while the urban explorer was gathering the art for rescue, a woman came with a basket of recycling, and when he asked her if she knew anything about the works, it turned out she was the artist’s widow. An art teacher who loved painting, Menges had struggled with dementia and passed away at the age of 96. He was a prolific painter and his widow didn’t know what to do with all of his remaining work. The discovery led to a moderate revival of interest in the painter’s work, which was known locally in St. Louis.

Knight, Death and the Devil, by Albrecht Dürer (Nuremberg, Holy Roman Empire, modern day Germany) 1513

When Englishman Mat Winter was eleven, he was already interested in antiques and liked to ride his bike to the local Cranbook dump to look for interesting junk. A woman was tossing out a carload of old stuff and he picked up an interesting picture. He added the drawing to his collection at home and it stayed there for more than a decade. When Winter was older, he took a closer look at his belongings and decided the print looked old and real and took it to experts to investigate. Turned out the work was an original print of a 1513 engraving, Knight, Death and the Devil, by Albrecht Durer, a German Renaissance master.

Banks of the River Seine, by Pierre Auguste Renoir (France) 1879

A bargain shopper bought an old painting at a flea market for seven bucks because she wanted to reuse the ornate frame. At home, aiming to trash the landscape, the work looked older than she had first thought and she took it to an auction house to see if she could earn a few bucks. The work turned out to be Banks of the River Seine, by none other than Renoir, a painting that had been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. It was returned to its owner.

Judith Beheading Holofernes, by Caravaggio (Italy) 1607

​A forgotten Caravaggio was discovered in a French attic when the tenant decided to do a major spring cleaning. One of two known versions of Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted in 1607, the work had been missing for centuries. Experts spent several years authenticating the work. They valued the find at 171 million dollars.

Found drawing by Egon Schiele (Austria) before 1918

A shopper looking for housewares at Habitat for Humanity found a crayon sketch of a nude in a stack of old prints. The drawing was by Egon Schiele, the controversial Austrian master who died at the tender age of 28 from the Spanish flu, along with his wife and unborn child.

Original painting by David Bowie (USA) 1997

In North Bay, Ontario, a lucky thrifter picked up a small expressionist-style painting from a donation centre for five bucks.  It was a loose and jejune work in a palette of white, turquoise, and rust, but the buyer felt curious about its subject and more curious that the painter shared a name with David Bowie, the legendary singer and performer. To his surprise, he had purchased an original artwork made by David Bowie in 1997. It was authenticated and sold for more than 100 thousand dollars.

The journey of a painting is often a fascinating layer in the art story. Writers who love art most often look to the subject presented in the work, or to the beliefs and biography of the artist who made the work. But often, the trajectory of the art object itself holds all kinds of secrets and scandals. Art has been forged, stolen, looted, lost, burned, flooded, and attacked. It has ended up with eccentric collectors, passed on to other interesting personalities, fought over, and misplaced. Art has been hung on palace walls, played its part in museum scandals and high stake auctions, assumed to be haunted, traded on the black markets, and yes, retrieved from garbage dumpsters. 

While it’s not likely you’ll be the next one destined to uncover a Jackson Pollock or other million dollar painting at Value Village, it’s possible. You never know what you’ll find.

Lorette C. Luzajic