Antiques Roadshow guest talks of late father's 'delight' at 'staggering' value of his work

PBS Antiques Roadshow: Valuation on rare Salt Lake City drawing

WARNING: This article contains spoilers from Antiques Roadshow. 

An Antiques Roadshow guest couldn’t quite believe the “staggering” value of his dad’s contribution to the iconic Spiral Jetty.

The PBS series travelled to Salt Lake City for another round of filming and met the son of a contractor who had a major part to play in bringing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to life.

The guest not only brought in a signed photograph of the jetty, but also he brought the various diagrams drawn by Smithson with some help from his dad during the construction phase.

Explaining, the guest said: “When I was a kid growing up in our house, we had a large photograph of the Spiral Jetty hanging in our house for as long as I can remember.

“It was a photo that my dad loved and that my mum didn’t love quite so much.

“It wasn’t until I went to college and I was in an art history class and opened my art history textbook and saw the photo that was hanging in our family room for years and years and years, that I went to my dad and said ‘This is kind of a big deal, dad.’

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Antiques Roadshow guest talks of late father's 'delight' at 'staggering' value of his work. (Image: PBS)

“Apparently four or five different contractors passed on the job, because they didn’t want to take their equipment out to the Great Salt Lake for fear of damaging it.

“He was the first one who accepted the job from Robert Smithson.

“He worked in construction for decades and built practical things - roads, gas lines, things like that.

“But for whatever reason, I think this was special enough to him or weird enough to him, that he kept everything.

“He would tell stories all the time about how Smithson was very particular about going down with these big wooden lathes and then climbing back up the hill to look at where rocks were being placed.

“He was very particular, apparently, about the way it was constructed.”

The guest added how the jetty originally resembled a big ‘J’ before Smithson told his dad that it needed to be changed to make it look like a spiral, costing another $3,000.

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An Antiques Roadshow guest brought in the plans for the Spiral Jetty, made by his late father. (Image: PBS)

Expert Betty Krulik commented that Smithson was born in 1938 and died in 1973 in a plane crash while surveying Amarillo Ramp, just three years after the Spiral Jetty.

“What you have here are a variety of drawings with a variety of different detail”, she added.

“This one is more a general piece, and this is the second version of the Spiral Jetty, I would take it.

“This work has more of the landscape surrounding it, this one has some red pencil as well.”

The guest commented: “The red is my dad doing drawings and diagrams to sort of explain how things could actually be built.”

Krulik went on: “So the importance of having the proposal and having the photograph that was autographed to your father is that it authenticates the drawings, because the drawings themselves are unsigned.

“There are records of drawings of Spiral Jetty coming up and selling. There’s a wide range.”

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An Antiques Roadshow expert valued a set of Spiral Jetty plans for more than $47,000. (Image: PBS)

It was then time for the expert to give her summary but the owner of the drawings wasn’t prepared for what he was about to hear.

“Works of this quality with all of the detail, so this work and the work in the centre here, I would value at about $15,000 each conservatively, in a retail gallery.

“I would think that this would be more like $10,000 in a retail gallery and this one, which shows the first version and the second version, I would say would probably be about $7,500.

“So the collection altogether is $47,500.”

Taking a moment, the guest then replied: “Wow. That’s pretty staggering. I mean, that would have really delighted my dad.

“He passed away just earlier this year, and he probably would have been delighted just to have the work shown.

Antiques Roadshow is available to watch on PBS.