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“He died in a Jewish ghetto. How did his long-lost art end up on a bench in San Francisco?” 

That provocative question — which began in the minds of a few art sleuths and became the headline of an SF Standard investigative piece by culture reporter Julie Zigoris earlier this year — graces a temporary gallery wall inside the San Francisco Ferry Building.

In May 2022, Port of San Francisco worker Joseph Jermaine spotted 48 pieces of art arranged on a cement bench in Crane Cove, a bayfront park in the Dogpatch neighborhood. 

“Many of the artworks were framed, and the majority were signed with versions of the same name: Ary Arcadie Lochakov,” wrote Zigoris in her latest article about the saga, highlighting an exhibit of 38 of his works on the second floor of the Ferry Building, free and open to the public for four days through Sunday, Aug. 18. 

“Jermaine considered tossing out the artworks,” she wrote, “but sensing that they had a provenance worth investigating, he alerted his colleague Arianna Cunha, who took them back to the port’s offices.”

Through the detective work of Cunha, Zigoris and others, an incredible story emerged in a series of articles about the mystery behind the found art.

Lochakov was born in the Russian city of Orhei (in modern-day Moldova) in 1892 to a family involved in the arts. He studied art in Odessa before returning home and working as a P.E. teacher in a Jewish athletics club founded to counter antisemitic, nationalist sports associations. He fought in World War I and moved to Paris in the interwar period to continue studying art.

“Led by a group of predominantly Jewish artists, the second wave of the School of Paris began around 1912 and continued following the end of World War I. Lochakov was part of this wave,” reads wall text in the exhibit.

“Their styles were diverse, but they shared common circumstances. They were all fleeing discrimination and antisemitic persecution in their home countries and seeking to settle in Paris,” the text says. “Some of these Jewish artists had the opportunity to gain recognition in the 1920s, such as Soutine, Lipchitz, Kisling, and Chagall. But as waves of antisemitism moved through France, and pogroms and ‘Jew-hunts’ continued throughout Europe, the majority did not.”

He seems mostly to have sketched and painted, but the exhibit — presented by the Port of San Francisco, in partnership with the Contemporary Jewish Museum — includes a group of evocative woodblock prints as well.

But how did his artwork end up on a park bench? Zigoris, Cunha and company have traced most of the story, though the final step of it remains a mystery. The art passed through an increasingly tenuous series of relatives, then to the Jewish Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel and, eventually, to Huntsville, Alabama, identified via the stamp of a local framing shop behind some of the frames.

And when I say tenuous, get this, from the Standard’s Zigoris: Lochakov’s nephew, Michael Lochakov, “married Inge Traub in 1946, and the couple joined Traub’s parents in New York City, later moving to Providence, Rhode Island, where they were divorced in the 1950s. Traub ultimately remarried and moved with her new husband to — wait for it — Huntsville, Alabama. Inge’s sister Lore Traub also moved to Huntsville and had a daughter, Diane Sammons, in 1948.” 

Sammons later moved to San Francisco, bringing Lochakov’s art with her. She worked for years as a nurse at UCSF, near the park where the art was found. She died in 2019 with no living heirs — and then what? How did they make their way out of the hands of her estate and to this bench in a bayfront park a couple of years later?

We may never know.

And yet, the story of Ary Arcadie Lochakov, an obscure artist who died of starvation in 1941 while hiding in an apartment in Nazi-occupied Paris, has captured the attention and imagination of so many.

It is bizarre that the story of someone who died in the Holocaust would come back to life in this way. Everyone who lost their lives in that horror deserves to be remembered, but more and more that possibility is fading as the few remaining souls who knew them grow old and pass away themselves. Yet through this vigorous investigation into Lochakov and the mystery of his artworks’ appearance in a San Francisco park, there is yet another opportunity to bring one of their stories to light.

After all of this tragedy and obscurity, there is something of a happy ending. When his works depart the Ferry Building, they will be sent to the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, France’s largest Jewish museum. What more could an interwar Parisian art student want than an exhibit telling his life story at one of the City of Light’s great museums?