“It’s been hanging in my mom’s bedroom, but that’s about all I know,” Jackie Bramos told appraiser Brian Thomczek at a recent Trash or Treasure appraisal session held at the Michigan Design Center in Troy. Titled “Twin Towers” — and the work of Lebbeus Woods, according to a small piece of paper stuck into the frame — the oil on canvas portrays a pair of tall buildings rising from a surrounding city scape with water in the background. A notation on the card also reads “open 1973.”
Thomczek’s initial impression was that the work looked older than the 1973 date. “This looks like it was from the 1950s or around there,” the appraiser told Bramos. While the city’s Twin Towers, part of the World Trade Center, did open in 1973, the buildings in the painting do not resemble the iconic modernist buildings that were destroyed in 2001. Bramos said the painting was given to her mother by her uncle, her mom’s brother, who lived in New York and whose writing is in the notecard. The painting is signed L. Woods in the lower left corner.
Born in East Lansing in 1940, Lebbeus Woods is best known as a visionary architect. He studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue and worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen on the Ford Foundation building in New York City, also producing paintings for the Indianapolis Art Museum in the 1970s. An exhibition of his work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a year after his death in 2012 — it later went on to tour, including a stop at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State.
The author of nine books, Woods was also the 1994 recipient of the Chrysler Design Award and a professor of architecture at New York City’s Cooper Union. Wired magazine called him “the architect who dared ask ‘What If?’ adding that he “envisioned underground cities, floating buildings and an eternal space tomb for Albert Einstein worthy of the great physicist’s expansive intellect. With such grand designs, perhaps it’s not too surprising that the late Lebbeus Woods, one of the most influential conceptual architects ever to walk the earth, had only one of his wildly imaginative designs become a permanent structure.”
Thomczek said the Woods did metal sculpture and “a lot of drawings” but not as many paintings, which makes this harder to authenticate and appraise. “He did a lot of work in the abstract modernist style,” the appraiser explained. While it is certainly possible the work is by Woods, the lack of similar works makes it hard to know for sure.
Thomczek said the work could use a good cleaning and shows evidence of surface dirt and tobacco residue. “If you cleaned it, the colors would really pop,” he said, adding the work would sell well at auction due to the currently popular style and image and would possibly bring more if she could confirm that it was done by Woods.
Bramos said she and her family would think about it. “We’re cleaning out,” she told him, adding they would consider getting it cleaned before deciding. “I don’t think you’d have a hard time selling this at all,” he replied.
Contact Khristi Zimmeth at trashortreas@aol.com.
About this item
Item: Painting
Owned by: Jackie Bramos and family
Appraised by: Brian Thomczek
Estimated value: $400 and up at auction
