When an American art dealer dropped $15,000 on what he thought was “junk” in a New Jersey storage locker, he never imagined it could be the deal of a lifetime. But he now believes stashed in the unit were six paintings by Dutch-American abstract master Willem de Kooning, which could be worth millions of dollars. The auction record for a de Kooning is $66.3 million, set for large canvas “Untitled XXV” at Christie’s in 2016, while another sold privately for a reported $300 million in 2015. Another piece of luck, according to New York gallery owner David Killen, is a painting by Swiss modernist Paul Klee that he says was also found in the unit. The works originally came from the studio of Orrin Riley, a superstar in the art restoration business who died in 1986, leaving everything to his partner, Susanne Schnitzer, who was killed in a traffic accident in 2009. Her executors — friends in New Jersey — spent years trying to find rightful owners for the art, but no one came forward to claim<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When an American art dealer dropped $15,000 on what he thought was “junk” in a New Jersey storage locker, he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications"],"yoast_head":"\n