Famed Painting Missing For 60 Years Found In UWS Apartment

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — It is not every day that a valuable and decades-long missing piece of art gets found hanging on the wall of an elderly couple's apartment on the Upper West Side.

But that's exactly what happened with a 60-year missing painted panel by the renowned American modernist Jacob Lawrence.

And now that panel is sitting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met recently found one of five missing pieces of a 30-panel work by Jacob Lawrence in the Upper West Side home, according to The New York Times.

Lawrence is considered an icon in the modern art world. The Met is showing an exhibition of the Black artist's work titled "Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle" that includes the panels.

The story of how one of the missing panels was found starts with a recent visitor to that exhibition and ends with an Upper West Side apartment.

The work depicts Shays' Rebellion, which was an uprising of struggling farmers in western Massachusetts led by a Revolutionary War veteran.

The specific panel is titled, "There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. — Washington, 26 December 1786." It had not been seen publicly since 1960 and was thought to be lost for good.

However, on a recent trip to the Met, a visitor thought she recognized the artwork from her neighbors' apartment collection on the Upper West Side, according to The New York Times.

She rushed home and encouraged the owners to contact the museum.

The neighbors had bought the painted panel for a small sum at a friend's Christmas charity art auction in 1960, according to The New York Times.

The longtime owners are elderly and asked both the Met and the Times not to be identified.

They had only realized the panel was part of a larger series after they read a story earlier in 2020 about an exhibition of Lawrence's work premiering at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, according to the Times.

Upon hearing about the Met exhibition, the couple contacted an art adviser on how best to get the painted panel to the famed museum.

The panel was reunited with the rest of the 25 panels Wednesday, where it will remain for the remaining two weeks of the exhibition.

"I felt I owed it both to the artist and the Met to allow them to show the painting," one of the painting's owners told the Times. The panel had hung in the couple's living room for 60 years untouched, she added in her interview with the Times.

Met officials were understandably enthused about locating one of the five missing panels.

“It was our fervent hope that the missing panels would somehow surface during the run of American Struggle in New York, the city where Lawrence spent most of his life and where the series was last seen publicly,” Randall Griffey, curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Sylvia Yount, the Lawrence A. Fleischman curator in charge of the American Wing, said in a news release.

“Lawrence’s dynamic treatment of the 1786–87 Shays’ Rebellion reinforces the overall theme of the series — that democratic change is possible only through the actions of engaged citizens, an argument as timely today as it was when the artist produced his radical paintings in the mid-1950s.”

At the conclusion of the Met's Lawrence exhibition, the work will travel for presentations to Birmingham, Seattle and Washington, D.C., through fall 2021.

As for the four remaining missing panels, maybe it's not the worst choice to do some digging around in your Upper West Side apartment.