Ohio man’s luck changes with signed Picasso print

BARBARA RODRIGUEZ

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — An unem­ployed Ohio man was brows­ing at his local thrift store for items he could restore and resell when he spot­ted a Picasso poster with the word “Expo­si­tion” writ­ten across the front, some French words, and the image of a warped round face. He handed over $14.14 for what he saw as a nice com­mer­cial print.

Some Inter­net searches later — and a closer look at mark­ings on the lower right area — and he sold what’s believed to be a signed Picasso print for $7,000 to a pri­vate buyer who wants to remain anonymous.

“A pretty darn good return,” said Zachary Bod­ish of Colum­bus with a chuckle. “Can’t get that at the bank.”

The 46-year-old Bod­ish, who was an event and vol­un­teer coor­di­na­tor at a museum for six years, orig­i­nally turned to the Inter­net and a per­sonal blog to write about his neat find from early March. Bod­ish had been sup­ple­ment­ing his income with buy­ing and reselling restored fur­ni­ture, and he sud­denly real­ized he may have hit jackpot.

“I could tell it was not a mod­ern print,” he said. “So I thought, ‘Well, it’s prob­a­bly not really a fine Picasso print. What’s the chance of find­ing that in a thrift store in Colum­bus, Ohio?”

His online search led him to the print’s his­tory as an exhi­bi­tion adver­tise­ment. And he began to look closely at some very faded red writ­ing on the lower right area, which he orig­i­nally thought were ran­dom pen­cil marks from the thrift store.

“It wasn’t until I real­ized where the sig­na­ture would be, and that those lit­tle red marks were right where the sig­na­ture should be, that I got a stronger mag­ni­fy­ing glass out and deter­mined that, ‘Holy cow! It’s really a Picasso.’”

Bod­ish said he con­sulted with art experts and met with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from Christie’s auc­tion house to authen­ti­cate the piece. A Christie’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive con­firmed that Bod­ish met with a spe­cial­ist, but the auc­tion house said its pol­icy is not to com­ment on items that aren’t sold through them. In this case, Bod­ish decided to sell the print pri­vately in April.

Lisa Flor­man, an asso­ciate his­tory pro­fes­sor at Ohio State Uni­ver­sity, has writ­ten sev­eral essays and a book on Picasso. She said the print is a linocut, mean­ing it’s a design carved out and pressed with ink onto paper. She exam­ined the print only through pho­tos, but she said it’s very unlikely the piece is forged because the piece would sell for so low in the grand scheme of major art fraud. She said she’s exam­ined many forged Picasso sig­na­tures in the past, but felt con­fi­dent about Bodish’s print.

Flor­man said Picasso designed the print to adver­tise a 1958 Easter exhi­bi­tion of his ceramic work in Val­lau­ris, France. She said the artist did these prints for sev­eral years, and it’s hard to tell how many are around today. There were 100 prints made for the ceram­ics exhi­bi­tion, and Picasso signed them all.

But Flor­man said Bodish’s print, which is marked as No. 6, is valu­able for being in the artist’s proof range. That means it’s pos­si­bly one of only a hand­ful he per­son­ally reviewed before they were mass produced.

“Any of the 100 are con­sid­ered orig­i­nal prints,” she said. “There’s cer­tainly some col­lec­tors who really place a pre­mium on a single-digit num­ber because it indi­cates the artist’s greater involve­ment with the actual print­ing, so those par­tic­u­lar prints can fetch a higher price.”

Flor­man said Picasso signed so many prints, it’s very plau­si­ble the piece ended up at a thrift store in the Midwest.

“It’s kind of a fun story,” she said. “There’s noth­ing about it that seems fishy.”

Ed Zettler, a 72-year-old retired Eng­lish teacher from Colum­bus, claims the print sat in his base­ment for years before he decided to donate it to the thrift store where Bod­ish later found it. Zettler, who said it was a house­warm­ing present given to him by a friend in the 1960s, has no hard feel­ings about what happened.

“I gave it away. Some­one else found it. He for­tu­nately saw more. It’s his,” Zettler said. “That’s the risk you take when you bring some­thing to the thrift store.”

Bod­ish said he plans to use the money for day-to-day bills, includ­ing his mort­gage, util­i­ties, food and even more quirky pur­chases at thrift stores and garage sales.

“It’s just been a rough strug­gle to make ends meet,” he said. “I may have been fated to find it.”

Posted by AP News on May 11 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.