An Original Salvador Dalí Artwork Was Found in a North Carolina Thrift Store
A North Carolina thrift store is not the place one would normally venture to look for valuable artwork. But, that was exactly the spot where an observant volunteer spotted a Salvador Dalí woodcarving.
Wendy Hawkins volunteers twice a week at the Hotline Pink Thrift Shop in Kitty Hawk, N.C. It was there that she saw a vintage-looking, framed artwork that, to her, stood out among the rest. The piece was waiting to be priced, where it would have been marked somewhere between $10 to $50, when Hawkins pulled it aside.
"One day I saw this, with a bunch of other paintings lined up on the floor, and I said, 'This is old, this is something special,'" she told WAVY.
With the shop's permission, Hawkins took the painting a few blocks over, to the Seaside Art Gallery in Nags Head. Melanie Smith, who owns the gallery, is an accredited fine arts appraiser with the International Society of Appraisers.
Some were skeptical of Hawkins' efforts, including Michael Lewis, the executive director of the Outer Banks Hotline, which runs the thrift shops."We've had situations where we thought something was original and was amazing and it wasn't, and I was still expecting her to say 'Oh no, it wasn't really anything,'" he told CNN. "But it was."
Smith, indeed, discovered the artwork was created by Surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí. "This matches all the information, all the reference and so it checked off all the things in order to confirm it was an original," she said.
Original Salvador Dali artwork discovered at Outer Banks thrift store https://t.co/uU29H1Av3i
— Melanie Smith (@seasideart) March 5, 2020
Smith also confirmed that the woodcarving was part of a series commissioned by the Italian government in the 1950s. These works celebrated poet Dante Aligheri, who wrote The Divine Comedy. There are 100 different images in this series, because Dante wrote 100 different verses.
Indeed, this artwork could have been lost forever, were it not for Hawkins' gut instinct. "It's rare to find anything like this," Smith said. "It's like a treasure hunt, and thanks to Wendy, it's been rescued, and brought to light so people in the art world can really enjoy it."
The piece has since been sold for $1,200, with all of the proceeds going to benefit Outer Banks Hotline's shelter for abuse victims.
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