How do I get my Igor Pantuhoff waif painting back?

Now that I have officially brought home two paychecks from my antiques mall booth and have begun filling my long-dormant Paypal account with proceeds from the etsy shoppe, I've started looking around my house with a new eye. It's not an eye that says, "Wow, lookin' good!" or even "Where the hell's my dust rag?" It's more like, "Hmmm... I wonder how much I could get for that at the booth, or would it be more likely to sell online and how much did I pay for it anyway...?" Now whenever the kids see me pricing a pile of books, they start shrieking until I prove to them that they're all doubles! Promise! And Lindsay feels like I've been singling out only his possessions for possible resale—and he may be right. I mean, if you've left something in the garage for eight years, doesn't that mean you've forsaken ownership?

This Igor Pantuhoff waif painting is another story. I bought her at an estate sale for $5 several years ago. I still remember the time capsule girly-pink bedroom I liberated it from: When I took the picture down, an outline remained on the yellowed walls, a ghost rectangle marking where it had hung for god knows how long. It's not really my style so I stuffed it into a closet, where the younger daughter managed to find it when she was around three years old. She took a shine to it and I didn't see the harm—at least it's not one of Igor's very creepy topless sad-eyed waifs—but now three years later, she's kinda attached to it and I so want to sell it because there's a real market for this stuff! But alas, I know she's not going to give it up, unless I take a leaf out of my own mother's playbook and trade her for it, preferably for something far less valuable (feel free to revisit the story of how my mother hoodwinked me into giving up a collectible Lalique bottle for a rock with glued-on googly eyes). But when I've already given her—I was thinking loaned at the time but it seems more permanent now—half my Breyer horse collection and my vintaqe horsey paint-by-numbers, what does a mother have left to give?

Even more things I didn't buy

I did not buy this Igor painting because I'm not going to start collecting campy sex kitten art of the 1960s. This was one of a pair, however, and it seemed reasonably priced on the first day of this estate sale ($30), so I went back on the second day when it had dropped by 30% but I still didn't buy it because it was very grimy (its mate was water-damanged). Was it original? I spent a lot of time standing in front of it, conspicuously googling Igor Pantuhoff on my iPhone, but couldn't make up my mind. I resolved to return the next day, when the prices would be cut in half, and buy it if it was still there. I never went back. Probably for the best.

Despite my affection for obsolete technology and especially old-fangled writing machines, I didn't buy either of these typewriters. I didn't even consider it for a moment. I just thought they looked so picturesque, relics strewn about in the grass, like a kind of typewriter graveyard—the sort of image that's just begging to be instagrammed. What about replacing garden gnomes with old typewriters? In the hands of the right design blogger, I'm sure this is an idea that could be sold in certain hipster enclaves in Brooklyn.

What big eyes you have

I found this litho while crawling on my hands and knees through the supply closet of a deceased art teacher. I did not shell out a dollar for it because I'm a fan of the creepy-campy 1960s school of saucer-eyed sad art, popularized by Margaret Keane, and a bunch of mono-named artists like Igor and Gig. I bought it because this "Pity Puppy," named Potato Chip, greatly resembles my own Pity Puppy, named Cupcake. I mean, am I right? Cupcake may not have saucer eyes but that sad-sack demeanor is unmistakable.



I don't know anything about the artist Gig, to whom this puppy portrait is attributed. With the exception of Margaret and Walter Keane, who started the whole genre, these purveyors of mopey creatures—precursors to the Littlest Pet Shop critters, for sure—seem to be a shadowy lot. The story of the Keanes is pretty fascinating, though. Apparently when they were married back in the ’50s, Margaret allegedly did all of the painting while Walter got all the credit (he compared himself to Rembrandt and El Greco). After an acrimonious divorce, Margaret eventually sued him in the mid-’80s, challenging him to a paint-off in court. She produced a waif for the jury in less than an hour, while Walter claimed to have a shoulder injury. The jury awarded her some $4 million. And according to The Hollywood Reporter, Tim Burton is making "Big Eyes," a movie about the Keanes starting Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds. What—no Johnny Depp??