Exclusive | Long-lost $3M Georgia OKeeffe painting buried in NYC apartment closet for 40 years hits auction block

It was a stroke of luck.A Rhode Island woman discovered a long-lost Georgia O’Keeffe painting — valued at around $3 million — tucked away in her elderly aunt’s East Village apartment closet, The Post has learned.The groundbreaking abstract art had been hidden under a row of fur coats for nearly 40 years — and has never before been seen by the public, the niece and experts said.“I thought, wow, that’s that’s pretty wild,” said Betsy, 65, who made the jaw-dropping discovery while helping her aunt clean out her apartment.“I wondered, ‘Is there any way I can keep this?'” she recalled.“But once we started exploring what the value of the piece was, I realized that it’s worth more than my house.”The provocative landscape painting, titled “Near Abiquiu, New Mexico,” will now hit the auction block later this month, according to Christie’s auction house.The first hint of the hidden treasure popped up when Betsy’s aunt made an offhand comment while the two were clearing out her apartment to prepare for home health aides in 2022, she said.“That’s when she mentioned, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe in the hall closet,’” said Betsy, who asked to be identified by only her middle name.Her since-deceased aunt — a “worldly,” “incredibly accomplished” and “ultra intelligent” former Foreign Services worker whose family requested anonymity for her — had been given the painting as a graduation gift from her mother in the 1960s.Her mom bought it for just $3,800 on April 15, 1963, at The Downtown Gallery on 51st Street, O’Keeffe’s dealer in Manhattan, according to Christie’s.The art hung in her apartment until the 1980s, when she got creeped out by a guest who was “eyeing it a bit too closely,” Betsy said. Her “extremely private” aunt then put it in the closet and never hung it back up after that, she said.“I think she was fully aware of its value … she recognized that it was an expressi...