The art of Goodwill: Usually the good stuff doesn’t make it to the sales floor

Cityscape by Joseph Floch taken in the backroom of Nora Goodwill by Dan Grossman

In May, 2022 Terrelle Brown, a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, walked into a Goodwill retail store and spotted an original ashtray by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara in the locked display case. Brown paid $10 for the ashtray before flipping it on eBay for $2,800. A few days later, another story started making the rounds on social media about a 2,000-year-old Roman bust that was bought for $34.99 in a Goodwill in Austin, Texas. 

I spent four years working as a team lead for Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, from 2012-2016, so I have a few stories of my own. But my stories are about items that never made it onto the sales floor.

One spring morning, several months into my job at Nora Goodwill, I found a Sacagawea gold dollar coin while sorting incoming wares. It is Goodwill policy not to set such items onto the sales floor, but to ship it to the nearest Goodwill warehouse to be processed for auction. Ten days later, the coin sold on ShopGoodwill.com for $1,600. 

Not too long after that, I opened up a box and found it full of Charles Dickens novels in hardback. It turned out to be a complete set of his works, dating from the 1860s or 1870s. I also sent those off to ShopGoodwill.com.

Such valuable finds are not at all uncommon in terms of the items Goodwill retail stores sort through on a daily basis. 

In early June 2013, however, some paintings came in through the donation door that seemed anything but common to me. I was in the backroom putting tags on clothes when I saw them. I immediately put down my clothing tagger gun and walked over to the open box of six paintings or so, resting on the conveyor belt. There were some professional quality portraits, some landscapes. All of them were original oil paintings; two of them seemed worthy of special attention. 

One was a modern urban landscape depicting a city street and a skyscraper under construction with a brooding indigo-blue sky in the background. The second was a biblical scene, abstracted and Chagallesque. You see David on his knees playing the harp. King Saul, draped in a red shawl, sits beside him.

I took the box of paintings with me into the store office, where I googled the painter of the cityscape, Joseph Floch. He was an Austrian, born in Vienna in 1895, who studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He went to Paris in the 1920’s, and became involved with the avant-garde art scene there. He made his way to New York in 1941. In 1947, a prominent New York gallery featured his work in a solo show. In the catalog for that exhibition, Floch is quoted directly: 

On my arrival in New York, I found a studio on the 21st floor of a midtown building. I was overwhelmed by the enormous sight. However, as I gradually got used to the aspect of the city, I came to see the boundless quality and diversity a new conception of quality. I started to work haltingly and it took me years to re-evoke architectural space in painting. The framework has to be interpreted in colors which of necessity were harder than those I had used in the milder atmosphere of France, but they were the colors of a different climate and of a new world.

In his cityscape painting, Floch brought that new “harder” world of color to light.

I also had a chance to google the painter of “Saul and David”, Sigmund Menkes, who was described online as a “School of Paris” painter, born in Lviv, Ukraine, in 1896. At the age of 16 he entered the School of Decorative Art of Lviv.  Like Floch, Menkes spent a lot of time in Paris, where he arrived in 1923. He was fortunate enough to emigrate to the US before the Nazis invaded in 1939, as he was Jewish. (The Jewish Museum in New York features a hauntingly abstract and stark work of his, titled “Warsaw Ghetto”, in its collection.)

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that Goodwill Industries of Central and Southern Indiana doesn’t want paintings that could fetch hundreds — or thousands —  of dollars priced at Goodwill sales floor prices. And while some might argue it’s a good thing that high value items slip onto the sales floor occasionally, because of the resulting media coverage, I didn’t want to take the blame for such a fuckup. So I packed each one of these paintings as quickly as possible, to get them shipped to the Goodwill warehouse.  

The paintings were shipped out the next day. Around two weeks later, the store manager Jeff Owens told me that both the Menkes and the Floch painting had sold for around $5,000 each on ShopGoodwill.com auctions. He also relayed to me what the Goodwill warehouse’s art had said about the Floch painting, that “it belongs in a museum.” 

Who knows? Maybe it is currently in a museum. But, just as likely, it’s hanging in some art buff’s living room. And when he dies, there’s always a chance that, instead of the family selling off the art while prepping the house for sale, they make several runs to drop off donations at Goodwill.

And because high value items slip onto the sales floor from time to time, despite the best efforts of Goodwill employees, Goodwill retail stores attract a fair share of resellers who buy items for resale online. Some even make a living doing that: most specialize in buying clothes and purses. Many of them can tell the real Coach purses in the locked display case, say, from a knockoff. (Often, the resellers were the first ones at the door at Nora Goodwill when the store opened at 9 a.m. )

Rarer are the resellers who specialize in art.

 Not long after the Floch and Menkes paintings sold, I had a conversation with a reseller while I was putting out a fresh cart of priced frames, prints, and reproductions onto the sales floor.  He was in his 40s, or maybe a little younger, wearing a gray suit jacket that was just a little threadbare.

“Anything good today?” he asked. 

“Some good frames,” I said. “That’s about it. “But some of these are pretty old, in pretty good condition.”

“You know,” he said. “There used to be a lot of really good paintings here. Really good. But there’s been nothing in the past few months. It’s like someone turned the faucet off, not even a trickle.”

“Well sir, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I said.  

- Dan Grossman

Dan Grossman meets the Goodwill Guy