An Upper East Side woman who found a stolen masterpiece painting in a pile of garbage four years ago was stunned to see it sell for more than $1 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
But Elizabeth Gibson won’t be seeing much of that money, since the original owner decided to give her a measly $15,000 reward.
“I basically gave her a million dollars,” she said.
Gibson found the painting – “Tres Personajes,” by Mexican abstract artist Rufino Tamayo – in 2003 as she was passing a Dumpster near her home.
She immediately could tell it was no ordinary trash.
“I took it because it has a supernatural power,” she said yesterday. “There was a mystery to it from the moment I saw it to when the hammer went down.”
After she took it home, she struggled to find out who created the work and who owned it.
After four years of probing the painting’s origins – including fruitless contact with lawyers, insurance adjusters and art experts – Gibson finally found her way to the Web site for the PBS program “Antiques Roadshow.” There, she discovered that the splotchy red, purple and yellow picture was stolen in 1989.
Gibson later took the painting to the Sotheby’s auction house, which discovered the owner was a Houston woman – and that the painting was stolen from storage.
The owner’s husband coincidentally bought it from a Sotheby’s auction in 1977.
Back then, it sold for $55,000 – and when it vanished, the woman put up a $15,000 reward.
Gibson said that when she got the painting back to the woman through contacts at Sotheby’s, she hoped the owner would up the reward a bit, considering two decades of inflation and the fact that experts expected it to sell for between $750,000 and $1 million.
But the woman – who has not been identified – wouldn’t budge, Gibson said.
“People tried to get her to give me more,” she said. “But she wasn’t interested.”
The painting beat expectations and sold for $1,049,000 in the Latin American art auction Tuesday.
The owner wouldn’t give her a percentage of the sale. Gibson said that Sotheby’s felt so bad for her after all her work that it gave her an undisclosed percentage of the sale commission.
Nevertheless, Gibson said she had no regrets.
“In the end I feel very blessed,” she said. “This is the best Thanksgiving ever.” With Post Wire Services