Let’s try ‘Art Mystery’ for $200, Alex ...

UA’s recovered de Kooning piece makes ‘Jeopardy!’

The University of Arizona’s Willem de Kooning painting, recovered in August after going missing for 31 years, was featured Wednesday as a question on the popular “Jeopardy!” game show.

And the question stumped contestants, despite international publicity surrounding the painting’s safe return.

Longtime host Alex Trebek gave these clues: “Stolen in 1985, a work by this Dutch-born abstraction expressionist was found in 2017 in a New Mexico home.”

Two contestants missed the question. Trebek had to step in.

“Who is Willem de Kooning?” he said, framing the answer in a question, as the show’s rules require.

The de Kooning masterpiece, “Woman-Ochre,” was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson in a daring heist and went missing for three decades, until an antiques-shop owner in Silver City, New Mexico, picked up the painting as part of an estate sale in the summer of 2017.

The shop owner, David Van Auker,

The FBI is still investigating the theft. It’s unclear how the painting wound up in the home of a quiet, retired couple in rural Cliff, New Mexico, which is 225 miles east of Tucson.

intended to hang it in his guesthouse. But then someone came into the shop and asked whether the painting was a “real de Kooning.”

Van Auker tapped “de Kooning” into his internet browser. Up popped an azcentral.com article on the missing artwork. He alerted the FBI and the university to the possible discovery, fully realizing that he probably sounded like a crazy person, he said.

Less than a week later, university officials had authenticated the painting and it was safely back at the museum, to great fanfare.

UA Police Chief Brian Seastone was a young officer when the painting was stolen. He said he had remained optimistic the painting would be recovered.

“I always had this feeling that one day she would return home,” he said in an interview shortly after the painting was recovered. “And she has.”

A similar painting in the same series by de Kooning sold for $137.5 million a decade ago.

The FBI is still investigating the theft. It’s unclear how the painting wound up in the home of a quiet, retired couple in rural Cliff, New Mexico, which is 225 miles east of Tucson.

The couple are dead. So the mystery remains unsolved.