SF company sells attic treasures to Michelin Guide restaurants

Diana Ferlini could have become a household name. Instead, she nearly vanished from history. 

Born in Switzerland in 1911, the surrealist painter immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 11, eventually settling down in Hollywood. In the eighth grade, her parents pulled her out of school to work, and she taught herself how to paint in her free time. So began the life of an outsider artist.

In an alternate timeline, people would describe David Lynch’s films as Ferlini-esque. In many of her paintings, people gaze blankly in front of dreamlike, gothic backdrops. Even her still lifes have an uncomfortable, arresting quality to them — as if the vegetables hide mouse traps underneath. 

Her work was brilliant, but she never showed or sold any of her 88 paintings in her lifetime, “with only two exceptions,” according to a new collection of her work, “a painting that found its place in the Basel Fine Arts Museum in 1977 and a tribute piece to John F. Kennedy Jr., which was presented to the John F. Kennedy Library.” When she was shot and killed by an unstable neighbor in 1983, her works were packed away in a box, where they gathered dust for 40 years.

Nearly half a century later, her art is beginning to draw attention, thanks to the work of San Francisco’s Lost Art Salon. And if the success of the salon’s other artists offers any indication, her renown will only grow.

San Francisco’s Lost Art Salon, located on South Van Ness next to the Central Freeway, has spent the past 20 years unearthing paintings from outsiders like Ferlini. The salon collects the work of brilliant but unknown artists who, for one reason or another, never received the attention they deserved during their lifetimes.  

Art collectors and designers have taken notice. Paintings stored under houses, sketches stashed in storage units and sculptures tucked in the dusty corners of garages have now found second lives in Michelin Guide restaurants, upscale hotels and Bay Area homes.

Lost Art Salon is the project of longtime friends Rob Delamater and Gaétan Caron. They established the salon in 2004, while living on different floors of the same apartment building. At the time, Delamater was the design director for a boutique hotel, and Caron worked for a search engine. Both men were getting burnt out on their corporate jobs, and began brainstorming a way out. Drawing on their backgrounds in the arts, they came up with an idea.

The Lost Art Salon grew out of a simple question, Delamater told SFGATE: “What happened to the collections of all the artists that were the peers of all of the well-known names?” 

For every Frida Kahlo or Jackson Pollock, there are thousands of artists’ names that escaped art history textbooks, and thousands more whose work never circulated at all. These include artists who painted with the cubists and pontificated with the surrealists, artists who were there but never got their lucky breaks. These are artists with day jobs as graphic designers, fashion illustrators or advertising artists. Many weren’t recognized by the museums and galleries of their time because they happened to be women, immigrants or people of Jewish descent. 

Caron and Delamater also had a secondary goal: to start an art gallery that sold reasonably priced 20th-century art. At the Lost Art Salon, the average framed piece costs between $550 and $800, which, while not cheap, is merciful by fine art standards.

At the beginning, the pair bounced around Bay Area auction houses and flea markets, collecting 20th-century art, which they displayed at weekly showings in their living rooms. But for the past 18 years, they haven’t hunted for any art at all — it comes to them.

“There is a massive need in this area,” Delamater told SFGATE. So massive that on a regular week, the salon gets three or four phone calls from people who want to sell them an artist’s collection. Typically, these are family members of deceased artists who are looking to find recognition for their loved ones’ work.

The process goes something like this: a family member of an artist calls the Lost Art Salon. Delamater and Caron look at the collection, first in photos and later in person. Their vetting criteria are straightforward. “We’re looking for those artists that we really believe would have something to say, aesthetically and content wise, in today’s culture that people would connect with,” Delamater said.

After acquiring the art, the seven-member salon staff gets to work cleaning, restoring, archiving, researching and framing pieces. 

When SFGATE visited the Lost Art Salon, a staff member worked to clean up a Ferlini painting, which had some varnish stuck to its paint from its years of captivity. 

Delamater and Caron also write biographies for the artists. The vast majority of the artists have never had biographies written for them before, so the salon interviews artists’ family members. They use these testimonials and their art history knowledge to place the work in the broader context of 20th century art. 

By Delamater’s estimation, the salon has developed a collection of 10,000 pieces. This includes drawings, sculptures and “a couple thousand” paintings. In the salon’s main room, which doubles as both a viewing gallery and storage area, racks line the walls, each loaded with as many canvases as can fit. Some paintings rest on the floor and lean against tables. The room used to look like a normal living room, Delamater said, but the collection gradually encroached. Now, the only remaining furniture is a couch and two tables.

As we walk past a wall covered in paintings, Delamater points from one to another: “Bay Area artist, Bay Area artist, Bay Area artist. Bay Area, Bay Area, Bay Area…” Approximately 70% of the salon’s works come from artists from the nine counties.

“I don’t think we could have done this in many places in the U.S.,” he told SFGATE. “San Francisco has been, for a very long time, a place where artists have wanted to be, going back literally to the late 1800s.” The city’s bohemian scene, coupled with its wealth, made it a “magnet” for artists. As a result, the area is filled with a nearly inexhaustible supply of local art.

According to Delamater, few analogs to the Lost Art Salon exist in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, except on the high end.

Little by little, the salon is accomplishing exactly what it set out to do, raising lost artists’ profiles. When the salon first acquired the works of Calvin Anderson, he was mostly unknown. His prints, paintings and drawings had been tucked away in his San Francisco apartment for years, with some resting in place since the 1950s. Nowadays, people walk into the salon and ask specifically for his work. 

Another artist, Georgette London Owens, was friends with the cubists and worked as an assistant for Salvador Dali. She is a rare example of a living artist who sold her work directly to the salon, hoping to take control over her legacy. Caron and Delamater introduced her works to the head curator at the Berkeley Art Museum, which accepted three of her works for coveted placements in its permanent collections in 2022.

Freeman Sargent’s California regionalist paintings are currently on display in the salon. From a quick glance, it’s hard to imagine that they spent the last 30 years stashed in a basement with dirt floors.

The salon has sold around 7,000 pieces in recent years. A little over half go to people’s homes. The rest are scooped up by designers, who use them to furnish restaurants and hotels. 

Selby’s, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Redwood City, features more than 150 works from the Lost Art Salon, many of which are from the salon’s Bay Area collections. These include three massive abstract expressionist paintings by Jack Freeman, which had been sitting in his Folsom Street studio for more than 50 years. Spruce, another Michelin Guide restaurant, boasts a collection of pieces by Seymour Tubis.

The lost art has also been found by the San Francisco Proper luxury hotel and Villa Mara, a boutique hotel in Carmel.

But there are a few paintings that the salon doesn’t sell. 

On a wall overlooking the preservation room hang self-portraits of the lost painters. They gaze out at the salon staff as they frame and restore new (old) works, a reminder that there are always more artists waiting to be found.