By Anthony G. Attrino
tattrino@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
When a N.J. elementary school teacher offered David Killen a chance to buy 200 paintings she had in storage, the Manhattan art dealer thought they'd make great filler items at his next auction.
"I thought it was a bunch of junk," Killen said Monday. "I saw good, bad and ugly. Overall, I thought it was garbage, but I'm always looking for filler."
He offered $75 a painting - a total of $15,000.
When he loaded the boxes of artwork onto his truck, he began to realize he'd stumbled onto an unbelievable find that could fetch millions.
"The more I looked at them, the more I realized - these are real de Koonigs,"
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch abstract expressionist artist who died in 1997. His paintings have sold worldwide for tens of millions.
Two experts say the paintings Killen has are authentic.
Originally, the 200 pieces of art were gathered in New York City, in a world-famous art restoration studio run by conservator Orrin Riley.
When Riley died in 1986, his girlfriend Susanne Schnitzer took possession of the paintings and held onto them for years, according to Killen.
In 2009, Schnitzer was hit by a car and died.
Her trusted friends - a group from New Jersey serving as executors that included the teacher - took the paintings, along with many other of Schnitzer's possessions and stored them in Ho-Ho-Kus.
"They tried to do the right thing and return everything to its original owner," Killen said.
But there were a bunch of paintings whose owners they could not track down. Killen surmises the pieces were given up by their owners, who collected insurance money on them based on claims of damages.
"If you look at them closely, you can see there are slight tears and holes here and there," he said. "I believe they were given to Orrin to be restored after the owners collected insurance."
After several years, the group from New Jersey contacted the New York State Attorney General's Office asking what they should do with the paintings, Killen said.
The AG's office told them they were now considered abandoned property and they could do whatever they wanted - including sell them.
"I didn't hear back for a year, then they called and said, 'Do you still want it?'" Killen said. "I said, 'Sure.'"
Killen declined to name the teacher or her friends, saying he did not have permission to identify them.
He says he plans to place the paintings up for auction in the fall and will advertise the sales on his website.
"I've been in this business for many years," he said. "I sell buy and sell paintings all the time. Never in a million years would I dream of finding original works like this."