When the owners of a New Mexico antique store agreed to appraise and buy an estate in rural Cliff, New Mexico, in August 2017, they found a lot of unusual possessions left behind by the deceased elderly married couple who’d previously owned it. The antique store guys were struck by a mid-century abstract painting curiously tucked away behind a door in the master bedroom, but their main focus was on how cheap and ugly its frame was. They planned to display it in a guesthouse after getting a better frame, but soon after placing it in their store, a customer told them he thought it was an authentic Willem de Kooning painting and offered $200,000 for it. Realizing they might be in over their heads, they started some basic online research and quickly started to suspect they had unwittingly acquired Woman-Ochre, one of the most infamous and valuable stolen paintings in the world.
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