Jeffrey F. S. Neumann · The Museum
Not catalogued
No image survives.A small number exist only in the background of a photograph of another, catalogued work.
Undated · lost at an unrecorded point in the studio's history NO ARCHIVE NO.

The Register of Loss

An estimated 500 to 1,000 works
Count
Estimated 500–1,000 worksNo inventory was ever made. The range is his own estimate, given in testimony.
Titles
Not recordedNone survive. Most were never titled to begin with.
Medium
Not recordedBelieved consistent with the surviving corpus — collage, assemblage, mixed media on paper and found objects.
Dimensions
Not recordedTestimony describes "some great large pieces" among them. No measurements exist.
Circumstance
Discarded following a bed-bug contamination at the storage location; the artist was told not to enter and to stay back.
Whereabouts
Set out on a residential curb for removal. Destroyed.
Photographs
None, except incidentallyA handful of these works may appear, unidentified, in the background of photographs made of other, catalogued pieces.

The ratio

Catalogued and surviving1,087
Estimated lost, uncatalogued500–1,000
Named individually below3
In his own words
What Didn't Survive — the full testimony

Three that can be named

Most of what was lost has no title, no date, no image — the aggregate record above is the honest shape of that. These three are different: specific enough, remembered clearly enough, to stand as their own entries rather than dissolve into the count.

1. The Guernica-scale painting

Made
Year unknown — in his home-studio basement
Size
Approximately 11 × 25 feet
Materials
Flexible collage materials, rolled rather than stretched
Seen by
No one — never shown, never photographed
Fate
Lost in the water damage, from storage (not the original basement)
"it was about time"
On why he made it full scale

2. The CIA sculpture

Made
Late 1970s, at the Cleveland Institute of Art
Size
Approximately 38 in wide × 24 in tall × 3–4 in deep
Materials
Prism paper over iron gridwork found in a junkyard, with something torn from a magazine incorporated
Fate
Not destroyed — shown at a student show and sold. Unreachable rather than lost: buyer and current whereabouts unknown.

3. The paper snowmen series

Made
Roughly early 1980s — possibly for a Christmas art show ("maybe")
Size
Various, all approximately 6 feet tall
Materials
Colored paper and spray paint
Fate
Unknown

Confirmed a real memory by Jeff directly, 2026-08-06 — a search of the full oral-history record found no prior mention of this work before that.

Why one entry stands for hundreds

Every other entry in this catalogue documents a single object, and now three of the lost works do too — the three above, specific enough to be named. But most of the loss isn't like that. The aggregate entry stands in for the rest: hundreds of works with no inventory, no photographs, no titles. Inventing placeholder records for them would manufacture a precision that does not exist and has never existed. One record, carrying the true weight of the loss, is more accurate than many records carrying none.

What is here is what he has said, in his own words, more than once, over more than one recording session:

"Saw it out front waiting for the garbage men to take them all away."
On the day he lost 500 to 1,000 pieces
"From around six feet away on the sidewalk."
How close he could get
"I made some great large pieces and I thought they were really good."
On the work that was lost
"Only in one picture."
All that remains of some pieces
"Sad. Enough."
How he describes that feeling