Here’s to finding a Picasso in the attic or storage shed

Great works of art have been fetching record prices, and Asians have emerged as deep-pocketed buyers.

In May, the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, which included paintings by Picasso, Monet and Matisse, took in more than $800 million, the most for a singleowner collection.

Christie’s pitched to buyers in China and Japan with dedicated marketing campaigns, according to Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman of the Americas.

But what I find more intriguing than all those dizzying auction digits is something akin to winning the lottery — stumbling on the works of a master in a storage locker or attic.

Consider the Manhattan art gallery owner who bought the contents of a storage locker last year for $15,000.

While that sounds like a lot of money on pot luck, the locker contained a half-dozen paintings believed to be by Willem de Kooning that could be worth millions, the New York Post reported on July 21.

At first, David Killen, 59, who has a gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood, was hesitant to buy a locker full of abandoned paintings, and he was unimpressed by a cursory glance at the collection.

But when he started to load the paintings from the New Jersey locker onto his truck, Killen was stunned.

“I see these huge boxes that say de Kooning on them,” he said. “What are the odds of finding a de Kooning in a storage unit? It’s unheard of!”

Killen has six paintings that he’s confident are by the Dutch abstract expressionist, who died in 1997 at the age of 92, and one he believes to be by Swiss-born modernist Paul Klee.

The paintings’ sellers, who were executors of an estate, believed they had only prints and were tired of paying storage fees, so eventually they unloaded them.

In 2015, a sculpture of Napoleon caught the eye of graduate student Mallory Mortillaro who was working as a parttime cataloger for the art collection at the municipal building in Madison, New Jersey. William Hennelly

Mortillaro had noticed a faded signature after slipping around the back of the 700-pound piece.

That bust of Napoleon turned out to be sculpted by the French master Auguste Rodin, and it had been in plain sight for 85 years.

“Right away, I saw the signature, and the piece characteristically fitted in with Rodin,” said Mortillaro, who studied art history as an undergraduate.

The sculpture is worth between $4 million and $12 million, according to Rodin expert Jerome Le Blay, Readers Digest reported.

An 18th century Chinese imperial vase discovered in

Claude Monet’s

Nympheas en fleur (Water Lilies in Bloom), which provisionally priced between $50 million and $70 million, sold for $84.7 million, a new record for the artist, at the auction of David Rockefeller’s collection in May. the attic of a home in France sold for $19 million at Sotheby’s in Paris on June 12.

The amount was the highest on record for Chinese porcelain auctioned by Sotheby’s, and the buyer was Asian, Reuters reported.

Sotheby’s said the vase is the only known example of its kind.

The vase had been left to the great-grandparents of the present owners by an uncle who died in 1947.

British auction house Bonhams said the emergence of buyers from the Chinese mainland was one of the most important developments in the art world in the last decade.

“These Chinese mainland collectors are passionate about classical Chinese art and they now have the opportunity to buy and also perhaps really understand quality pieces,” said Colin Sheaf, head of Asian art at Bonhams.

Asian buyers accounted for a third of Christie’s $6.6 billion global sales in 2017, up 39 percent from a year earlier, according to bloomberg.com.

But they could be on the other side of the auction if they happen upon some ancient vase or calligraphy sitting in the basement.

Price paid for what could be several de Kooning paintings