Discoveries

Everyone loves discoveries, preferably one’s own, but we can also enjoy the luck of others in the hopes that the same will happen to us. I don’t like to gamble, but a discovery is different, you were not looking to win, it just happened. What are usually called “discoveries” in the art world are misattributed works or rather works that some scholar in a specific field has researched and declares, to be by a famous artist and therefore worth further attention. More adventurous and fun is the serendipitous discovery which does not just rely on expertise but is an unexpected find.

A story that I just read, reported by Sarah Gascone on Artnet about Sally Robinson from Missouri who was interested in photo documentation of indigenous peoples. As she started to collect photos for her research, she fell in love with many of the black & white prints of Native Americans. In the process she bought photos from the granddaughter of a Santa Fe Railway advertising department employee who worked there in the 1940’s. The prints were unsigned, but she began her research and came to believe the prints were by the famed photographer, Ansel Adams. She consulted Adam’s grandson, Mathew Adams, at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite, California, who confirmed that Adams had done commercial work for the Santa Fe Railway. She believes she discovered 50 original lost prints Ansel Adams shot for the Santa Fe Railway. But their authenticity has still not been confirmed!

Another Ansel Adams saga was traced by Alan Duke for CNN in 2010. Ten years earlier Rick Norsigian bought 2 old boxes of glass negatives in a garage sale while looking for antiques. Norsigian had worked at Yosemite and recognized the scenes. He just put them under his pool table where they languished for a couple of years. Eventually he realized that some of the images were very similar to others by Ansel Adams. They were all taken in Yosemite early in Adams’ career, between 1919 and the early 1930’s. In 1937 a fire in his dark room destroyed 5,000 of his plates. Norsigian spent years researching his treasure trove and believed that Adams used the surviving plates to demonstrate stages of photography and what fire damage can do and how to improve your work when he was teaching. Experts, not only in photography but also in forensics, weather, and even an FBI agent, testified to their age and similarity to Adam’s work. He planned to tour the plates to universities and museums and had begun selling prints from the negatives when the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust sued. In the resulting settlement,   he was allowed to continue selling the prints but could not use Adams’ name or likeness. The disclaimer of authenticity that was required does mention the artist’s name!

An example of Adams’ Yosemite series

In another article for Artnet Eileen Kinsella reported another discovery, this one with a known result. When he was 11 years old, Mat Winter found an old engraving in the back of a car at a rubbish dump. He just loved the intricate detail. When he asked the owner whether he could take it she readily agreed. Even though the image was the famed Knight, Death and the Devil and was signed by Albrecht Durer and dated 1513, he doubted it had value until years later when he showed it to experts who recognized it as an original Durer engraving. Eventually, the work brought $44,800 at auction. See how important an art history education is😊?

Knight Death and the Devil with its now older savior

I have kept an article, again from Artnet that has been sitting on my desk for over a year about a teacher in Israel who took her first-grade students to Tel Azekah a site that has been said is where David met Goliath. Picking up a piece of pottery she told her students that there were ancient objects on the ground. She noticed one of her students lagging behind to show a friend something she had found. Studying it herself the teacher saw that it had the incised marks of a scarab. In Israel found antiquities are considered as belonging to the State so the child agreed to give it up and the teacher got in touch with the Antiquities Authority. Determining that it was a scarab seal 3,500 years old that demonstrated Egyptian presence in ancient times, the education director of the Authority presented the child with a certificate of appreciation. (image Scarab)

There are more reports on archeological discoveries, and it is interesting how some discoveries take a long time to come to light… like 60 years! According to a Miami Herald article by Aspen Pflughoeft dated March 11, 2024, two Norwegian brothers, one being 7 years old, went treasure hunting back in 1964. Crawling in the dirt under their local church on an island 250 miles northwest of Oslo where they found some silver coins. They did not think other than that their discovery was cool and stashed them in their treasure box. When they finally showed them to archeologists this year the coins were identified as 600-700 years old and rare. The final disposition of their discovery has not been determined.

While I was writing this, yet another discovery appeared on my screen: a possible Picasso double portrait of himself and his mistress Dora Maar. The father of the present owner found it in the cellar of a villa on the island of Capri which Picasso had in fact visited in the 1930’s. Authentication studies have begun to determine if the picture that hung for decades in this Capri family home is original.

As they say, Seek and ye shall find … possibly!