Chasing Pablo
For old-school art pickers, the thrill is fading—as is the payoff
ThereNs a big plaster duck in the driveway of Rick OrrNs mobile home in Phoenix. If you know Rick Orr, you know this canNt possibly be just any plaster duck; itNs almost certainly one of the worldNs rarest plaster ducks, probably worth tens of thousands of dollars and crafted by some dead guy no one has ever heard of but whose work is deeply coveted. And given the duckNs placement, about halfway between the door of OrrNs house and the bumper of his big, beat-up Ford van, you would have to assume the duck is about to be delivered by Rick to some rich guy whoNs waiting anxiously for its arrival. Someone who will peel several large bills from a thick roll and hand them to Orr.
And youNd be right about everything but that last part. The duck is inestimably rare, and it is on its way to the home of a local gazillionaire. But the rich guy wonNt be paying thousands of dollars to Orr, who has spent his adult life schlepping rare artifacts from other peopleNs driveways to the homes of wealthy collectors, whose lifelong knack for finding fine art in dusty attics is so renowned itNs the subject of a new documentary film. Rather, heNll be paying Orr a couple of bucks for fixing the duckNs beak. Because Orr is presently making money as a handyman to the rich people to whom he used to sell million-dollar paintings.
If heNs lately reduced to repairing expensive lawn ornaments, Orr is still known among the art collectors and dealers whoNve heard of him—and they are legion—as the King of the Pickers. At the height of his game, he was, according to Benjamin Storck, an art dealer in Palm Springs, “the single most impressive finder of fine art and important furnishings in the country. Perhaps in the world. He was the picker.”
For nearly 40 years, Orr has made his living hunting for treasure among other peopleNs trash; he prefers to think of himself as a treasure hunter, but heNll cop to “picker,” the term used in the antiques and fine-art worlds to describe people who scout out valuables at yard sales and then mark them up and sell them to dealers, who in turn mark them up again and sell them to us.
Call them what you like (and some call them vultures), pickers are a dying breed. Internet auction site eBay has seen to that. As has Craigslist. And other Internet auction houses. Even PBSNs Antiques Roadshow.
“TheyNre killing us off,” Orr says. “Nowadays, Grandma dies, and her kids put the china on eBay, and they overprice it because they saw some poor slob get a thousand bucks for a teacup on TV. Instead of sticking stuff into a yard sale for $5, theyNre putting it on eBay for $150. ItNs the death of my industry, man.”
These days, the King of the Pickers would gladly trade his kingdom for a decent oil painting.
HeNs had them, too. Highly prized Expressionist paintings and dead-mint Alexander Calder rugs and George Jensen bracelets, too. Some heNs found in galleries or antique stores, then marked up 700 percent and immediately resold. Most heNs discovered at flea markets, thrift shops and estate sales, those halfway houses for fine art that no one recognizes. He buys “ugly” paintings for $50 and resells them for $50,000.
ItNs that Picasso that Orr remembers most, though: the untitled painting he calls Three Wise Men. ItNs the painting that ignited his career as a picker in 1979. He thinks about it every day while heNs out treasure-hunting, hoping heNll find something as rare and beautiful as that painting, which has an estimated value of $20 million and which, at that estate sale, was priced at $500. The story of the painting that got away is the backdrop of OrrNs new no-budget movie, Picking for Picasso, about the fate of the American picker. Both the movie and OrrNs story have a happy ending, although neither narrative may be entirely true. At the moment, Orr isnNt saying.
“What is true,” he says, patting the plaster duckNs head as he heads toward his truck, “is there might be treasure out there today. And INm going to go find out.”
* * *
Time was, finding treasure at tag sales and junk shops was as easy as getting into your car and heading for them. Michael Robertson, who did most of his own picking for the antique shops he once owned in Phoenix and San Diego, recalls having to get up at 4 in the morning to stand in line at better estate sales, which Robertson calls “a kind of an indoor yard sale, where usually the homeowner has died, and everything in the house, even the aspirin in the medicine chest, is for sale.
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“It was insane,” he recalls of pickingNs glory days. “The estate company would open the doors to the pickers, and theyNd charge in. Leaping over sofas, knocking one another down. INd see Rick in that line, usually toward the front, and heNd just calmly walk through and point to things. ‘INll take that and that and that.N He had a good eye, and he was polite, but I think people were put off by him. HeNs very intense and quiet, and—how can I say this nicely?—Rick doesnNt really look like most other pickers.”
Indeed. With his trademark head rag—he has a seemingly endless supply in various shades and patterns—wraparound sunglasses and carefully sculpted, graying facial hair, Orr looks more like a Central Casting biker than a man in search of a Stickley dining suite. Think Bruce Willis without the swagger, Mickey Rourke before the plastic surgery. Pickers, one imagines, would be slender, effeminate men and better-than-middle-aged housewives with an eye for Hummel figurines, not gruff, articulate, middle-aged dudes with a droopy goatee and a gravelly voice.
The dealers Orr sells donNt care about his appearance; they want his eye for rare stuff. “You canNt buy what Rick has,” says Jonathan Wayne, who owns RED Modern Furniture in Phoenix and has bought from Orr for nearly 10 years. “You canNt train people to know what he knows. HeNs an anomaly—a fair businessman with amazing knowledge about art and furniture.”
Orr has refined this knowledge over a lifetime. He started as a kid, growing up in Hollywood and raised by a mother Orr describes as “a hippie with little ambition.” Dad was small-time movie actor Greg Benedict (you can see him in the 1963 Troy Donahue picture Palm Springs Weekend), whom Orr rarely saw.
“My stepbrother and I would go pester this old guy in our neighborhood named Junkman Jack,” Orr recalls. “HeNd go out picking, be gone for a week, and come home with these great stories and a truck full of stuff—Tiffany lamps and cool old furniture. He gave me a glimpse into a world most kids wouldnNt care about.”
Orr cared. Deeply. He dropped out of school at 15, scrounged up enough to buy a used truck and became consumed with picking. Eventually, treasure-hunting took its toll on OrrNs personal life. When he was married, he saw his wife only once a week; when he was home, he was on the phone brokering art deals. Time spent with his daughter, Shannon, usually involved camping out overnight in front of estate sales so Orr could be first in line when the house opened the next morning. Eventually, his wife left him.
He might have picked for a few more years, then moved on to something else—perhaps opened a gallery in Los Angeles or become a dealer himself—if he hadnNt spotted Three Wise Men hanging over the mantel of a spec home where Orr had come to scrounge.
“The house was crammed with all kinds of sculpture and studio pottery and fine art,” he remembers. “The sellers didnNt know what they had, so everything was priced cheap. I turned the corner, and there was this Cubist painting of three figures. Lots of bright colors. It was beautiful, and it was priced at $500—more money than I had in the world at the time. I was paying for my stuff, and this lady walked up with the painting under her arm, handed the seller cash and left.”
A few days later, leafing through a book on Spanish painters, Orr spotted a photo of the painting heNd just missed owning. “It was a Picasso,” he says with quiet despair. “It got away from me, and INve been chasing it ever since.”
The one about the valuable painting procured from a garage sale is an oft-told tale—and more often than not, it seems, the painting is one by Picasso. Last year, an early watercolor by the famed painter was found in an attic in Dorchester, Dorset, England. The year before, a Carolina Beach, North Carolina, couple bought a Picasso for a dollar at an estate sale. And just this past October, a Shreveport, Louisiana, woman paid $2 for a Picasso at a yard sale. “It just kind of caught my eye,” she told a local news reporter. “It looks like a woman holding a guitar or possibly a baby.”
Orr doesnNt begrudge these folks their yard-sale Picassos. “The guy was prolific,” he says, laughing. “He paid bar tabs with paintings. And then there are the copies—good ones, too. That one in Shreveport doesnNt look right to me. INve seen fakes, but INm not fooled. I keep right on going.”
Orr is holding out for the real thing. ItNs a quest that once made him a very wealthy man—and, more recently, an extremely poor one. “I have a decent head for business, but when things were going great, I lived large,” he admits. “INd drive by a Mercedes dealership and see a car I liked and go in and write a check. I drove a Rolls and a Bentley. I had homes here [in Phoenix] and in LA. I had huge years where I could afford to live like that. I didnNt know it would end. I figured, people will always die; theyNll leave behind valuable stuff I can buy and resell. I thought I could always make good money.”
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He was apparently mistaken. Orr sold his last Mercedes, a G-500, in 2007; he needed the cash for picking. He lost his home, and he had to sell off his personal possessions as the Internet gobbled up his business, putting him and many other pickers mostly out to pasture.
These were losses Orr sustained with good grace. ThereNs an excruciatingly obvious but unavoidable irony in OrrNs life: HeNs a minimalist.
“You get jaded, being in the stuff business,” he says. “I have a couple of cool things INve kept through the years because they had stories behind them that meant something to me, but when business took a dive, I sold them off. My rule is, ‘Everything is for sale.N”
No one knows this rule better than Shannon Narron, OrrNs 27-year-old daughter. She lived with her dad through her teen years and remembers coming home to find the sofa gone on more than one occasion.
“I grew up in a gallery of constantly rotating furniture and artwork,” Narron says with no trace of bitterness. “Nothing stayed long. If he got a good price for it, it was out the door.”
Narron remains bewildered, she says, by her fatherNs ability to survive without what she considers essential comforts. “I always ask him, ‘How can you not have a toaster?N I go to see him, and he has this great piece of art, but thereNs nothing to sit on.”
Orr used to prowl not only in Arizona, but also far beyond. A weekly haul from Las Vegas always netted him an unusual amount of midcentury-modern furniture. He knew on which day each thrift store in Los Angeles and Orange County put out new merchandise. Most shops held items for him based on what heNd bought from them the last time he was there. Once his van was full, heNd head home.
For Donald Moger, who co-founded the Long Beach Antiques and Collectible Market in 1982, pickers like Orr are just part of the antique-sale food chain. “TheyNre kind of a covert group,” he says. “They come in, and you donNt know who theyNre buying for and exactly how theyNre operating. But theyNve been part and parcel of our business for 27 years. It means more business for our vendors, and whatNs good for their business is good for our business.”
“I have always been mystified by the value of things,” Orr says. “INve sold quarter-million-dollar paintings to guys who just bought a signature on a piece of old canvas. INve sold valuable paintings to people who have said, ‘Can you hold the check until payday?N INd want to say, ‘Are you shitting me? YouNre spending next weekNs paycheck on a painting instead of food?N But INd be like, ‘Okay. Whatever. INll hold your check for $10,000.N”
Those days are long past. Earlier this year, one of OrrNs most reliable clients, an art collector in Maui, returned to Orr a canvas heNd been considering for some weeks. “The guy loved the painting,” Orr says, “but he said, ‘I canNt buy it because I lost $10 million on the stock market last week.N You know youNre in trouble when billionaires are passing on your stuff.”
* * *
Art dealer Storck remembers the moment he suspected pickers might go the way of eight-track tapes and carbon paper.
“I was at a smaller store in Palm Springs,” says Storck, who operates art and designer-furniture galleries in New Jersey and Los Angeles and has been buying from Orr for years. “And when the seller saw that it was me buying things, he told me everything I was interested in was already sold.” Shortly after, Storck found the items for sale on the Internet for a higher price. “The seller figured if I wanted them, it was to mark them up for resale. He wanted my markup for himself. It was a very sad ‘Aha!N moment.”
Orr didnNt see the slump coming. “Then, one day, I got a call from someone selling a Guy Rose painting,” he recalls. “I get there, and the seller starts pulling out auction records and computer printouts. And heNs like, ‘The last Guy Rose sold for $50,000, so we want at least that much.N”
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Toni Dieb, who has been selling at the Orange Circle Antique Mall in Orange for more than two decades, thinks the pace of modern life has slowed the demand for collectibles. The kids of todayNs antique shoppers, she says, wonNt be inheriting musty, overstuffed estates like their parents and grandparents did. “The young market coming up is totally different,” she says. “TheyNre not necessarily interested in sterling silver or fine china. EverybodyNs at top-notch speed, and if it doesnNt go in the dishwasher, pretty much they donNt want it.”
The county is a dead-end for pickers. “The guys who are picking for antique hardware—door handles and faucets and like that—are taking it straight to sellers in Orange County,” Robertson explains. “The stuff is already so expensive once it reaches Orange County, it canNt be marked up by pickers and resold.”
Joel Hamilton, owner of PhoenixNs Antique Artisan Marketplace, blames Antiques Roadshow, the public-television series in which average Joes are told the value of ephemera from their attics. “In one episode, Doris brings her cuckoo clock to the show, and surprise! ItNs worth $25,000. And then antique dealers get to spend the next three months explaining that not every cuckoo clock is worth that much. Yours is worth $7.”
Hamilton doesnNt much like eBay, either. By making rare objects immediately available, the site has decreased the value of pretty much every collectible, while erroneously inflating the price on even worthless junk.
Orr wishes heNd exploited Internet auctions when he had the chance. “I was too old-school about picking,” he admits. “There were guys who jumped right on the eBay bandwagon, and now theyNre doing all their buying and selling on the computer. In their pajamas, man! I tried selling stuff online, but I thought it was a trend.”
In fact, it turned out to be the beginning of the end. “Every year got a little worse until there was nothing left,” Orr says. “Up until about three years ago, I could still find a $40,000 or $50,000 pick. Two of those a year, all in cash, and I was set. Now, even 89-year-old women are computer-savvy, and theyNre online selling the contents of their basements. And I, to put it politely, am screwed.”
Ken Lesko of ClevelandNs Kenneth Paul Lesko Galleries is even more polite. “People simply do not care about the death of the American picker,” Lesko says. “Well, some dealers care. But by and large, collectors are thrilled that the Internet has made things easier to obtain. WhatNs gone is the kind of knowledge that someone like Rick brings to this business. He could stand across the room from your painting and tell if it was a copy. Can eBay do that for you?”
Lesko, who was himself a picker for 35 years before opening his popular gallery, met Orr in the 1980s on a trip to Phoenix. “HeNs been a great friend—another service eBay canNt provide.”
But being a good friend doesnNt pay the bills. “INve got to start making money again,” Orr says. “I canNt just keep existing. I need a Plan B.”
Actually, Orr has a Plan B, although heNs not quick to admit it. HeNs secretly hoping the little homemade movie about his life will wind up on the film-festival circuit, generate some buzz and land him some Hollywood dough. Maybe some film mogul will option it and reshoot it with actors, and Orr can live off royalty checks.
The story (as told by Orr himself) goes that, while Orr was scrounging around, trying to make a living picking in a post-eBay world, he was approached by a couple of college kids who wanted to make a movie about his life. Orr declined, but the film students kept after him until he finally relented. On one condition: HeNd do all the filming himself. The young men agreed, and a few months later, Orr returned their camera and the several “rolls of film” from which Picking for Picasso was culled.
The direct-to-DVD film, in which Orr is the only person seen, is riveting in a serene, sluggish way. Orr chats amiably about picking while driving around town in search of treasure. He looks straight into the camera thatNs wedged onto the dashboard of his van and reminisces about his glory days: the time he found a stack of rare Helmut Newton photos; the 350-year-old Francesco Ruschi painting he bought from a slum in Glendale, Arizona, and sold for six figures to a museum in Italy. We watch him broker a deal for a small, unimportant painting; purchase a William Saltzman canvas at an auction; drive past his recently foreclosed house in Scottsdale, Arizona (“I came home last week, and theyNd changed the locks,” he tells the camera. “There was a note on the door from the sheriff telling me not to go in”). There are lots of shots of Arizona desert rolling past his van window, stark footage of jumbled junk-shop interiors and an endless parade of OrrNs many head rags.
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“If this movie sucks you in,” says Steve Stoops, owner of Stevens Fine Art in Phoenix, “itNs because RickNs depression is so contagious.” Stoops, who has known Orr for 15 years, recently showed the movie to houseguests who have no interest in art or antiques. “And they were spellbound because itNs a movie about a world most people donNt even know exists. ItNs a captivating story.”
ItNs also a vaguely disingenuous one. The one-sided phone conversations—a testy one with a client who owes Orr money; an emotional one with his daughter, whoNs too busy to see him—seem staged and stilted, and some of the speeches about waiting for that big find seem rehearsed. The film commences with Orr telling the story of that first Picasso, ending with him, on his way to check out a storage unit full of junk, running out of gas. He walks the rest of the way to the appointment, and the film wraps up with a montage of newspaper headlines (e.g., “Man Finds Lost Picasso for the Second Time”) suggesting that, among the pots and pans and other items in that storage unit, Orr discovered—and bought—the untitled Picasso painting that breathed life into his career.
But a little quick digging on the Internet (that 21st-century scourge of the picker) turns up absolutely no evidence of such a news story, a story that would certainly have merited a column inch or two. And, of course, thereNs the obvious question: If Orr actually did again find and resell that painting, why is he presently living in a mobile-home park?
Orr caves in immediately when asked about the veracity of his biopic. “I never meant for the movie to be taken as completely autobiographical,” he says. “ThatNs why I never say my name in the film. ItNs more a movie about a guy very much like me, but with a more hopeful ending to his story.”
Okay. What about the college kids who made the film? “That partNs made up, too,” Orr confesses. “I shot it with my own camera, and I hired a guy off Craigslist to edit it for me.”
All this truth-bending might make one wonder just exactly how much of OrrNs life story is invented, if it werenNt that heNs so forthright about being a loser. “Why the hell would anyone make up a story about a guy whoNs spent his life doing nothing but driving around,” he asks, “pawing through other peopleNs junk?”
* * *
After driving around and pawing through other peopleNs junk all day, all Orr has come up with today is a pair of small seascapes by the German painter Otto Nautschmann, for which he paid $35 at a yard sale. “INll probably get $100 for them,” he says. “ItNs not big money, but itNs something. It keeps me motivated, keeps me hopeful that thereNs still something left out there.”
Orr makes one last stop at a downtown thrift. The owner greets him at the door with a hug. While they chat, Orr circles the store, touching canvases as if the texture of their dried paint can tell him about their value. His phone rings, and he excuses himself to talk to a client.
The client is calling to say she has cancer. She recently purchased a piece of Paolo Venini glass for $12,000 and is trying to sell it to help pay her medical bills. SheNll take $6,000 for the piece, which is among her favorites. Orr tells her heNs sorry, that not only is her piece of glass only worth a couple of grand in todayNs market, but he also thinks she should sell it for whatever she can get. Her health, he reminds her, is more important than Italian glass.
HeNs headed home now. Along the way, he pulls into the parking lot of a dentistNs office on Thomas Road. “This was my building here,” he says of the low, flagstone-covered structure by lauded modernist architect Al Beadle. “My daughter and I lived in the back, and I had a storefront where INd meet dealers. Those were good times.”
Good times are long gone, Orr fears. He canNt manipulate the end of his real life the way he did the movie version. HeNs thought about opening a gallery, but even if he had the capital, heNs not cut out for sitting still long enough to run one. “Anyway, I hate the idea of all that schmoozing and party-throwing and telling people how great they look,” he says, pulling into his driveway.
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What he really wants to do is walk into an estate sale and find a Picasso hanging over someoneNs mantel. And if he does, will he use the proceeds to retire to a sunny cottage near the sea?
Orr squints through his windshield at the plaster duck staring at him from just outside his front door.
“The truth,” he finally says, “is that even if I never found another thing, INd want to spend the rest of my life picking.”
Staff writer Spencer Kornhaber contributed to the reporting of this story.
