Discovered on a San Francisco Park Bench, Mystery Art Makes Final Pilgrimage to Paris

It’s an unlikely end for art found on the street — to be welcomed by a distinguished curator, celebrated at a cocktail-filled fête and ushered into the permanent collection of one of the most prominent museums in Paris.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening on Feb. 11 with 48 artworks discovered on a concrete bench in San Francisco’s Crane Cove Park in 2022, a fairytale ending for a find that could have easily ended up in the dumpster.

“It’s insane,” says Arianna Cunha, a senior administrative analyst for the Port of San Francisco, who was among the city employees to rescue the art. “To discover that number of pieces by one artist.”

The majority of the found artworks — most of them signed and some of them dated — are by the Jewish painter Ary Arcadie Lochakov, a member of the famed School of Paris group that includes the likes of Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Chaïm Soutine. Born in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), Lochakov moved to Paris in 1920 and died there alone in 1941, when the city was under Nazi occupation.

That the art survived at all is its own miracle, the result of an unlikely line of stewardship, from artist, to nephew, to nephew’s ex-wife, to ex-wife’s sister, to ex-wife’s sister’s daughter. The artworks traveled from Paris to New York to Providence, Rhode Island to Huntsville, Alabama to San Francisco, where they were in the possession of Lochakov’s distant relative Diane Sammons. Sammons, a pediatric nurse at UCSF, died nearly a year before the pieces surfaced.

While many parts of the mystery have since been put together to understand how they arrived in San Francisco, the question of who put them on the bench remains.

“It’s bittersweet,” Cunha says of the art’s final voyage. “We have such an investment in this story.” Cunha helped to coordinate the transfer of the artworks to the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris (mahJ), where she established contact with curator Pascale Samuel.

The timing could not have been better. Samuel had been organizing an exhibition at the museum, Hersh Fenster and the Lost Shtetl of Montparnasse, and was looking for art by the perished Jewish artists from the School of Paris included in Fenster’s book, Our Martyred Artists.

Upon receiving the box of Lochakov artworks, Samuel and her assistant, Sophie Rodrigues, were overcome with emotion.

“We had seen them on paper,” Rodrigues wrote in an email. “But it feels like we just discovered them.”

Cunha, in turn, feels a deep sense of gratitude that the artworks are ending up in a place where they can be studied and appreciated. “It’s the birthplace of this research,” she says. The museum intends to digitize the artwork and make it available online; there are also plans for a future exhibition.

In the meantime, clues have continued to emerge regarding the Lochakov mystery.

From park bench to Ferry Building

In August 2024, San Franciscans got the chance to view the artworks at a free public exhibition at the Ferry Building. There, an attendee recognized a previously unidentified piece as an etching by Joseph Uhl, appropriately titled Lost. Another exhibition-goer recognized a stamp from the Odessa art school that Lochakov attended, positively identifying it as one of his works.

Additional research also revealed that a photograph found on the park bench in 2022 is of a portrait Lochakov painted of the former Prime Minister of Romania, Nicolae Iorga.

The public’s reaction to the artwork was just as emotional, with the sense that this story belongs as much to San Francisco as it does to Paris.

“An only-in-SF story — why I love this city!” wrote one attendee in the guestbook. Another wrote they were moved to tears. Several thanked the city workers for their dedication, another noted the power of investigative reporting.

Over 1,000 people visited the exhibition over its five-day run. The presentation had particular resonance for local writer Jim Van Buskirk, who found out when he was 55 — and his mother was on her deathbed — that he was Jewish. “So many things clicked into place,” he says. Seeing a lost Jewish artist helped him to reflect on his own once-lost Jewish identity. But Lochakov’s story also feels universal.

“He’s a relatively minor artist,” Van Buskirk says. “But the story is gigantic.”

The mystery deepens

Further layers of discovery have made the Lochakov narrative ever more complex. While one Lochakov piece surfaced in an April 2022 South San Francisco Goodwill auction, another recently came to light — an artwork by Lochakov’s brother, Michael.

Michael Solomon Losakov was born in 1882 and moved to Paris in 1926 to join his brother. He moved back to Bessarabia in 1940. (To add to the complication of researching the artists, there are numerous ways of spelling their last name: Losakov or Losacov in Romanian, Lochakov or Lochakow in French, and Loshakov when transliterated from Russian.)

Brent Verkler, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, snagged the piece signed “Melih Losacov” (Melih is Romanian for Michael) for $50 in April 2022 on an online auction from the South San Francisco Goodwill. The watercolor is framed by the same company as the other pieces found on the park bench, The Wall Paper Co. in Huntsville, Alabama, indicating it likely passed through the same hands and also came from Diane Sammons’ personal collection.

“I’m super grateful,” Verkler says, “because I feel blessed for what I was able to get.” Verkler used to spend hours a day on the site combing through thousands of auctions.

With the Lochakov artworks’ arrival in Paris and subsequent research and exhibitions planned, even more strands of a once-lost legacy could surface in the future.

“I still believe there’s more to come,” Cunha says. “This isn’t the end of this story.”