A PAINTING stolen 20 years ago was found lying in garbage along a street in New York, and now it could fetch up to US$1 million at auction.

Elizabeth Gibson didn’t know anything about the brightly colored abstract work she spotted on her morning walk four years ago on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sotheby’s auction house will be selling the work next month for the now-widowed original owner.

It turned out that it was a 1970 painting titled “Tres Personajes” (Three People) by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo, whose work has soared in value in recent years.

A Houston couple whose names were not disclosed purchased the work — an oil on canvas with marble dust and sand worked into the paint — in 1977 at Sotheby’s. It was stolen in 1987 from a warehouse where they had placed it while moving.

August Uribe, Sotheby’s senior vice president of Impressionist and modern art, said in an interview Tuesday that the husband paid US$55,000 for it as a gift for his wife.

Sotheby’s said it could bring up to US$1 million at its Latin American Art auction. Gibson will receive the US$15,000 reward the couple put up when it was stolen, plus a percentage of the sale of the painting.

Tamayo was born in 1899 in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and studied at Mexico’s School of Fine Arts. His early work had similarities to that of famous Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera. His later style is more individual, featuring the vivid colors and expressions of Oaxaca and the influence of pre-Columbian art.

By the time he died in 1991, Tamayo was famous worldwide with numerous prizes to his credit and exhibitions in the United States, South America, Europe and Russia.

(SD-Agencies)

<25BA>Elizabeth Gibson stands next to the curb where she found the 1970 painting, “Tres Personajes,” lying in the garbage in New York four years ago, on Tuesday.