The $300,000 cottage with $30 million of forgotten art inside

A flip that became a treasure hunt

In 2007, Thomas Schultz and Larry Joseph bought a dilapidated bungalow on New York's Long Island for $300,000, intending to renovate it and flip it for about $100,000 more than they paid. Instead, they stumbled on one of the biggest art discoveries of the decade: thousands of abstract paintings and drawings by Armenian-American artist Arthur Pinajian, who had lived in the house for decades but never found recognition in his lifetime.

The artist's relatives had advised the new owners to simply throw the stored artwork away. Instead, Schultz and Joseph bought the whole lot for $2,500 — more out of sympathy than speculation. "I didn't want to be the person responsible for throwing a man's life's work into a dumpster," Schultz said. "Someone's life's work deserved more than that."

The artist time forgot

Pinajian, born in New Jersey in 1914, worked as a company clerk and cartoonist before the Second World War, then devoted himself to art — with little commercial success. He relied on his sister, a secretary, for financial support; the two never married and lived together in Bellport for nearly three decades. He died in 1999 at 85. Thousands of pieces — 70,000 paintings, sketches, and journals in all, including abstract expressionist canvases, comic book illustrations, and sketches of his fellow wartime soldiers — had been stored in the cottage ever since.

"They believed he would become famous and this would all pay off for them one day, but it just never happened," his cousin John Aramian said.

$30 million

As the two men restored the collection, Pinajian's reputation began to grow. The recovered works were appraised by Peter Hastings Falk, an authority who had previously worked with Andy Warhol's estate, at around $30 million — though it could take decades to sell through a trove of 70,000 pieces.

Fifty of Pinajian's best works went on display at the Fuller Building in Manhattan — a skyscraper where Pinajian had long dreamed of exhibiting. Schultz recalled that the artist had visited a de Kooning exhibition there in the 1950s and "talked about how he thought his works were better than de Kooning."

"I was surprised and thrilled," Schultz said of the appraisal. A painter who died unknown had finally arrived — six years after his life's work was nearly thrown into a dumpster.

Archive summary, March 2013, based on reporting by the Daily Mail.