Painting bought at estate sale for $30 sells for $1.35 million at auction

This was an estate sale find that was totally surreal.

An oil painting by surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, bought for $30 after it was discovered in a “dark corner” of a Michigan home in July, sold for $1.35 million in an auction, CNN reported.

Freeman’s Auction’s, which put the 1951 painting up for sale this month, identified the work as Abercrombie’s “Alderman Merriam’s Shells,” which had not been seen in public for almost 75 years.

The painting sold for $1,352,600 -- including the buyer’s premium -- in Freeman’s Post-War & Contemporary Art sale.

According to a news release from the auction house, the collector who made the discovery arrived late to the “already picked-over” estate sale. The longtime hunter of record albums and mid-20th century furniture found the painting of shells “tucked in a dark corner of a hallway leading to the garage.”

Intrigued after seeing an Abercrombie signature on the work, the collector shelled out $30 and decided to see if the painting was the real thing.

It was.

The new owner decided to skip a planned family vacation and visited the Milwaukee Art Museum, which houses an acclaimed retrospective on Abercrombie’s art. The collector discovered a reproduction of a Sept. 14, 1952, Chicago Tribune review of Abercrombie’s exhibition that included the painting bought at the estate sale, the auction house wrote.

The find was later authenticated by leading Abercrombie scholar Susan Weininger, an art history professor at Roosevelt University, Freeman’s said.

Completed in 1951, the painting depicts a collection of 10 seashells, CNN reported. Over the next two years, it was displayed at six of the painter’s solo exhibitions, then priced between $50 and $150.

The shells belonged to Robert Merriam, alderman of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Abercrombie lived and worked, according to Freeman’s.

In early 1952, Abercrombie gave the painting to Dr. John Reynolds of Kalamazoo, Michigan, in exchange for medical services, Freeman’s said. The work remained in Reynolds’ collection for the rest of his life and was passed down through his estate.

Abercrombie died in 1977.

The painting was subsequently cleaned by art restorer Julian Baumgartner, CNN reported.

Bids for the painting opened at $80,000, according to People.

In a video documenting his cleaning process, Baumgartner said the painting was in “perfect condition,” despite grime and clouded varnish on its surface.

“It was drab, missing its life, but now cleaned, retouched, and revarnished, it’s alive and radiant,” he said.

“The painting’s rediscovery reads like something out of Abercrombie’s own enigmatic canvases,” Freeman’s wrote in its news release.

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