'Antiques Roadshow' guest's parents called her flag print 'worthless' — then she found out its value
"Antiques Roadshow" has opened doors for people to find out the real value of old items they've been seeing at home, and has also sparked curiosity. It also made a guest ignore her parents' advice against taking an old flag print to the show. The owner of a 1969 Jasper Johns Flag Print was told by her parents that it isn't worth anything, but she chose to present it to the show's expert, David Weiss, anyway. In the end, Weiss estimated that the historically significant item was worth $10,000 to $15,000, which was unbelievable for the guest.
The guest told Weiss that she had to make a choice between the flag print and another item that she was about to bring to the show. "We had two paintings that I had inherited from my grandmothers, and this was actually going to stay in the car because it was big and clunky," she said. The guest then explained, "When I was growing up with it, I remember that we would look at the circle in the middle, and you'd blur your eyes for a minute, and then you'd look up, and it would have the flag in red, white, and blue. And it hung in our home. I grew up in Florida. My parents moved to New Mexico in '91. It went in the garage, and it's been there ever since. My husband and I recently bought our first home, and they gave this to us to hang in our home."
She further added that the print came from an artist called Jasper Johns, and that was all she knew about it. Weiss then explained that the item was a mechanical reproduction of a painting, and flags, along with targets, were a real source of inspiration for Jasper Johns. "He was a real seminal figure in 20th-century American art. And the flag theme, he said, he had thought of in a dream. He started doing the flags roughly in the mid-'50s. This print was done in 1969 as a real anti-war statement of what was going on in Vietnam," Weiss explained. He added that a famous dealer, Leo Castelli, commissioned Jasper Johns to make this print in commemoration of the Moratorium, a series of marches organized across the U.S. in 1969 to promote the anti-war sentiment of an outfit called the Committee Against the War in Vietnam. Only 300 prints of the flag were made, and there's also an edition that has typeset on the bottom that says "Moratorium," and "Flag (Moratorium)," which is the name of the flag.
He further explained the use of colors and the bullet hole, which created an optical illusion. "Jasper Johns was really one of the great minimalists. He was a figure who foretold what was going to happen in pop art. And it's an interesting print. It's iconic and something that people remember from the late '60s," Weiss noted, before revealing, "Because it's signed and numbered, in today's market at auction, this print has a value of $10,000 to $15,000." Reacting to the appraisal the guest said, "What? And it's funny because my parents this morning were saying, 'Don't bring it, it's worth nothing, it's damaged.'"
In the end, Weiss told the guest that he was glad that she chose to bring the print in, to which the guest replied, "It was going to totally stay in the car. That's crazy!"
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