Painting Found in Trash Sells for One Million Dollars
March 20, 2008
NEW YORK (AFP) — A painting found in a pile of trash
on a New York street sold at Sotheby's auction house
late Tuesday for a million dollars, nearly 20 years
after it was stolen from a warehouse in Texas.
"Tres personajes" ("Three People") a 1970 work by Rufino Tamayo, one of Mexico's best known artists, was bagged by a telephone bidder for 1.049,000 dollars.
It had been saved from the garbage by Elizabeth Gibson, who spotted the work while out walking one morning in 2003.
"It was a Saturday morning. I went out for a coffee at 7:00 am. I saw it on the sidewalk among black plastic garbage bags," she told AFP ahead of the sale.
The sale came amid a week of Latin American art auctions in New York expected to fetch around 50 million dollars and as the city's first contemporary Latin American art fair wrapped up after selling some 300 works
The city's Museum of Modern Art is also due this week to unveil an exhibition of its most recent Latin American acquisitions.
"Tres personajes" ("Three People") a 1970 work by Rufino Tamayo, one of Mexico's best known artists, was bagged by a telephone bidder for 1.049,000 dollars.
It had been saved from the garbage by Elizabeth Gibson, who spotted the work while out walking one morning in 2003.
"It was a Saturday morning. I went out for a coffee at 7:00 am. I saw it on the sidewalk among black plastic garbage bags," she told AFP ahead of the sale.
The sale came amid a week of Latin American art auctions in New York expected to fetch around 50 million dollars and as the city's first contemporary Latin American art fair wrapped up after selling some 300 works
The city's Museum of Modern Art is also due this week to unveil an exhibition of its most recent Latin American acquisitions.
