Georgia O’Keeffe work that was hidden in closet to go under the hammer

A Georgia O’Keeffe painting that was hidden in a closet for about 40 years is to be sold at auction.

The painting was buried behind coats and boxes in the closet of a Manhattan apartment and few, if anyone, knew about the treasure until the woman in her 90s who lived there nonchalantly told her niece one day, “oh by the way, there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe in the closet”.

The painting, an early example from a time when O’Keeffe became enamoured with the American South West, depicts a classic New Mexico landscape with rolling hills in earth tones.

Christie’s estimates its value at 3.0 to 5.0 million dollars (£2.3 to 3.8 million). It is set to go up for auction on Tuesday.

The auction house says the painting from 1930 was likely the first in a series of three. The second is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The other, for many years, was in the collection of the Rockefeller family.

Up until now, the whereabouts of the first one had largely been a mystery.

In 1963, a New York art gallery sold the painting for 3,800 dollars (£2,900) to a woman who gave it to her daughter.

“Before that it was only known through photography that had been taken in 1931,” Abbott said.

O’Keeffe, who died in 1986 at age 98, is often called the Mother of American modernism. She was a pioneer with her own style of abstract art, most known for paintings of flowers and south-western landscapes.

The daughter of the woman who purchased the painting in 1963 kept it at her apartment in New York’s East Village, the auction house said. The family has asked the auction house not to release their identities.

The family believes she received the painting as a graduation gift from her mother after earning a master’s degree in the 1960s. For many years, she displayed it until the 1980s when she noticed a guest looking at it a little too closely.

She boxed it back into the original packing crate and put it in the back of a closet, said her niece, who spent the last few years caring for her and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Around 2022, the woman first mentioned to her niece that the painting was in the closet. It stayed there until this year when they were cleaning out the apartment and getting her affairs in order.