GUEST: This piece I actually picked up at an estate sale in Phoenix. I just loved the geometric pattern it had. I loved the midcentury modern kind of feel it has, and so I bought it.

APPRAISER: So how long ago did you purchase the work?

GUEST: I actually bought it about three years ago.

APPRAISER: Okay, well, the artist's name is Auguste Herbin. He's French. It's also dated 1950. He was born near the Belgian border in 1882. He studied art, and then he moved to Paris, as most artists seemed to do. And his studio was right next to that of Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. So by 1913, he was so influenced by them that he was painting cubist works. Then he got drafted for World War I, and he was actually too short to serve in the military, so they utilized his talents in other ways. He was asked to decorate a military chapel and also to design camouflage for the Air Force.

GUEST: Oh, wow.

APPRAISER: So after the war, he continued to experiment with different styles of painting, including abstract and representational styles. And around 1938, he became very interested in the Italian Trecento, and his forms became geometric and very simplified. And then around 1942, he designed something called a plastic alphabet. And he used different geometric symbols to stand for letters of the alphabet, and sometimes it would be the same shape but in different colors that would have different meanings. So some of his works of art, you can actually decode them, and it will spell out a word or it will have something that you can sing.

(chuckling)

APPRAISER: So I made a slight attempt but I didn't come up with much. So I don't know if that is what's going on here.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: The medium here is gouache, which is a water-based paint. Unlike watercolor, it's opaque. And you said you paid how much for this?

GUEST: $200.

APPRAISER: $200. So I think if this were to be sold in a retail gallery, it might sell for something like $30,000 or $35,000.

GUEST: Oh, that's wonderful. Wow! That's so cool.