Is eBay painting a dud or a prize?

Keereweer poses in his apartment in Nieuwkoop, Netherlands. He offered the highest bid, $135,805, on the Internet auction site eBay for a painting that may have been done by Diebenkorn. The art behind Keereweer is unidentified

May 10, 2000
Web posted at: 12:47 p.m. EDT (1647 GMT)

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The man who auctioned a painting for $135,805 on eBay lied about his motivation for selling the work and said he's willing to cancel the sale if the artwork turns out to be fake, newspapers reported Wednesday.

Kenneth Walton acknowledged that he concocted his story about cleaning out his garage and selling the painting to please his wife, The New York Times reported. Walton, who had said that his child had damaged the painting with a tricycle, told the Times and The Sacramento Bee he doesn't have a family.

Walton, a Sacramento lawyer, also said he will kill the sale if an appraiser fails to validate the painting as one by the late California artist Richard Diebenkorn.

Walton didn't return e-mail and phone messages left at his home and office by The Associated Press.

Robert Keereweer, a software executive from the Netherlands, placed the highest bid Monday on the eBay Internet site for the orange and green work dated 1952. He said he had felt fairly confident that the painting was an original.

Works by Diebenkorn have sold for as much as $3.9 million.

On eBay, the seller did not say who did the painting, only that he had kept it in his garage. A photograph of the painting showed the signature "RD," the way Diebenkorn typically signed his work.

"I got this big abstract art painting at a garage sale in Berkeley ... back in my bachelor days," the seller who used the screen name "golfpoorly" said. "Then I got married, and my wife has never let me keep it in the house. She says it looks like it was done by a nut case."

He also said a puncture in the canvas was caused when his child struck it with a tricycle and that the hole can be repaired with duct tape.

Postponing the sale

Walton, a 32-year-old graduate of San Francisco's Hastings College of Law, said he was trying to raise cash to finance a new law practice.

He said he often uses eBay to resell art he has bought cheaply at estate sales, sometimes under the screen name "advice."

He told the Times he spoke with Keereweer, who lives in the Dutch town of Nieuwkoop, by phone and both agreed to postpone the sale.

"We will bring an expert opinion from the outside before finalizing the deal," Keereweer told the Times. "Both he and I want to be sure. If it is authentic, then we will proceed -- that's a fair deal."

Kevin Pursglove, an eBay spokesman, said the bids are considered legally binding but eBay does not enforce sales. He said that authenticity is between the buyer and the seller.

Art experts said the photo displayed on eBay shows some of the abstract expressionism techniques that Diebenkorn used in 1952.

Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, switched styles twice, but spent his last 25 years painting mostly lines and geometric forms in the brilliant colors that had become his trademark.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Internet frenzy drives 25-cent painting to $135,805
May 9, 2000

eBay
The Art of Richard Diebenkorn

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