As officials from the Cook County public guardian’s office sorted through decades of accumulated belongings in an elderly woman’s house last year, amid dusty towers of newspapers and junk mail, they began to find paintings.
Paintings under beds. Paintings in boxes and crates and closets. Paintings in the sweltering, leaky attic. And, of course, the paintings that covered the walls.
By the time they had an expert look at them, they had collected 85 watercolors, sketches, and oils on canvas and wood, all by American impressionist Alfred Juergens — an unprecedented and unexpected collection with a value that would start, conservatively, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Juergens, born in Chicago in 1866 and trained in Europe, spent most of his career in Oak Park, growing in fame and popularity until he was regularly shown at the Art Institute. After his death, his fame slipped, in part because few of his works were in circulation.
Richard Norton of the Richard Norton Gallery, which specializes in American art from that era, said he would value Juergens oil paintings between $2,500 and $15,000, but said they could go higher, depending on the individual work and the interest created by a new find.
“One of the issues has been, there haven’t been many important Juergens paintings that surface for sale. If 70 have been in one spot for all these years, that would explain why,” Norton said. “This will renew appreciation for the artist.”
For Margaret Tikalsky, 82, whose family owned the La Grange Park house where the paintings were found, the value of the paintings is more personal.
“They are part of my life,” Tikalsky said in an interview in the Hillside nursing home where she lives. “They were part of everyday life.”
Tikalsky was forced to move out of the house, which her family had owned since 1923, in 2004 after La Grange Park officials declared it uninhabitable, saying the stacks of papers had made it unsafe. A neighbor and, ultimately, the public guardian’s office helped her get the house ready for sale.
And as Tikalsky learned of what they were finding — and what art experts were saying — she realized how much she missed the paintings.
“I took them for granted,” she said.
Along with the paintings, the collection includes photographs, notes and letters Juergens wrote to Tikalsky’s father, Francis, who was a friend of the artist.
Despite growing up poor on Chicago’s South Side, Francis Tikalsky developed an early love for art. As a teenager, he one day decided to visit Juergens — an artist he had heard of in a class — at his Oak Park studio.
He knocked on the front door, according to Francis Tikalsky’s son, Frank, and told Juergens, “I’d like to learn something about art.”.
The men soon became dear friends. Later, in the 1920s, Francis Tikalsky began buying Juergens’ work, paying anywhere from a few dollars to $1,000 for sketches and paintings, his son said.
Margaret Tikalsky recalled visiting Juergens’ studio, where the charming artist would display paintings on an easel and discuss them with her father.
“He and I were good friends,” Tikalsky said of Juergens. “We would play parlor games. I would assist him.”
Margaret and Frank Tikalsky grew up surrounded by Juergens’ works, in what was then a meticulously kept home. Margaret’s favorite pair of paintings, depicting spring, hung in the dining room. They remind her of the time Juergens ate Thanksgiving dinner there with her family.
Frank Tikalsky’s favorite, depicting flowers from the garden outside the window, hung in the library. He recalled the way his father would describe the craftsmanship.
“When my dad talked about Juergens’ works, it was like listening to a [William] Wordsworth poem,” Tikalsky said.
After graduating from the University of Arizona, Margaret Tikalsky lived at home for about 20 years while working at a telephone company. She eventually moved to Colorado to work on her doctorate but often returned to La Grange Park to care for her parents, who died in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She never married or had children, and had become estranged from her brother.
In the early 1990s, Tikalsky returned permanently to La Grange Park. In the years that followed, she suffered from health problems and clutter began to fill her home.
Colleen O’Hea, 40, a friend and neighbor for 13 years, would offer Tikalsky rides to the grocery store. When problems with the village mounted, O’Hea offered to help clean the clutter in Tikalsky’s home but soon realized it was too big a job for her. But O’Hea, who comes from a big family, became Tikalsky’s aide, trying to fill in for some of the family support the elderly woman lacked.
After Tikalsky moved to a seniors home, attorneys with the public guardian’s elderly division asked an appraiser to inventory the home’s contents. When the team arrived, Joan Stewart, a nurse with the county, said she encountered debris up to the countertops.
“My mouth dropped open because it wasn’t what I expected — mountains of trash, junk mail, newspapers. You’d go into a room totally trash-filled and, sure enough, you’d find something,” she said.
Stewart said she did not know then the value of the paintings her team was uncovering.
“We knew these were nice paintings. She kept telling us they were valuable. We thought, ‘Well, yeah, that’s good, some nice pictures that her father bought.’ We didn’t realize the value.”
After county officials finished their search, Tikalsky asked O’Hea to go back and search for additional paintings the county had missed and other items special to Tikalsky.
Margaret Tikalsky asked O’Hea to call her brother and offer him some of her father’s slides of flowers. O’Hea told him of the home’s sale and the removal of the paintings. Frank Tikalsky then called public guardian attorney Thomas Brennan and asked to see the works, which had been moved to a storage locker. Tikalsky brought along an art conservator and a Juergens biographer. O’Hea came too, handling some of the paintings.
“It’s hard for me to talk about,” Frank Tikalsky said, his voice cracking. “It was a very, very powerful, emotional experience.”
Juergens biographer Edward Bentley was amazed.
“It was so much better than I even imagined,” Bentley said. “I thought he was a pretty good artist, but I had not seen his best work. You just stop breathing.”
Today, the paintings are being stored at Parma Conservation in Chicago, where facility owner Elizabeth Kendall is adding shelf space for them.
“Some are absolutely extraordinary. They are very, very dirty but very beautiful,” she said. “It would be impossible not to appreciate how large the collection is, that one person had it.”
Wendy Greenhouse, an art historian who lives in Oak Park, said Juergens is underappreciated despite once being a major part of the art scene.
“He was considered one of the leading lights of the Oak Park artist community,” Greenhouse said. “He was part of the first generation of local artists to paint the city.”
Officials at the Oak Park Art League, where Juergens was a member, said they may exhibit the works in the future. Frank Tikalsky said his father would have wanted the public to know Juergens.
“I’m not interested in financial advantage from the pictures,” he said. “I honor my dad’s request.”
The paintings and the memories associated with them seemed to have helped heal a 30-year rift between Tikalsky and her brother.
For helping her out, Margaret Tikalsky asked her brother what she could do for him. He said he wanted the chance to buy from her his favorite painting, the one that had hung in the library. She gave it to him.
“It was an overture toward healing,” he said.
With the profits of her home’s sale funding her care, Tikalsky plans to donate some paintings and give others to friends. She may eventually sell a few. She plans to keep one painting that was unlike most of Juergens’ beautiful landscapes — a wedding gift from the artist to her father, depicting a dreary, snowy day.
“I have no interest in making money at this time in my life,” she said. “This belongs to humanity.”
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Alfred Juergens
1866-1934
* Born in Chicago
* Trained in Chicago; Munich, Germany; Paris
* Studio in Oak Park
* Primary subjects were impressionist landscapes, still lifes
* Exhibited at Art Institute of Chicago at least four times between 1899 and 1937
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