Dog walker's miraculous discovery: A lost Chuck Close masterpiece and a priceless story
Mark Herman, a dog walker and recreational drug enthusiast in upper Manhattan, New York, came into possession of a dog, a painting and a story. The dog was Phillipe, a 17-year-old toy poodle that belonged to Herman's only client, an 87-year-old retired law professor named Isidore Silver. The painting, which belonged to Silver, may be a lost work by artist Chuck Close, whose canvases once sold for as much as $4.8 million.
Or it may not. Therein lies the story. On a recent afternoon in his cluttered apartment, Herman offered a broken chair and began a circuitous account of friendship, loss and a commercial art market not meant for people like him.
In 1967, Close was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, «desperately unhappy» (as he recalled in a 1987 interview) and eager for the New York art world, when the school offered him his first solo exhibition, in the student union. Close, best known for his monumental photorealist portraits, had not yet found his style and was painting in an expressionist mode heavily influenced by Willem de Kooning. For his exhibition, he chose 31 works, several of which featured male and female nudity.
One semiabstract painting depicted Bob Dylan wearing only a T-shirt. Others had titles like «I'm Only 12 and Already My Mother's Lover Wants Me» and «I Am the Only Virgin in My School.»
Mark Herman with a painting — which was likely painted by Chuck Close — that he says was given to him by Close’s one-time lawyer, at Herman’s home in New York, July 13, 2023. Herman’s efforts to authenticate what would be an early work by the artist kept running into roadblocks — but a discovery by an archivist at the University of Massachusetts may change that. Read more on economictimes.indiatimes.com
