What you see is what you see. I don’t know what else there is,” painter Frank Stella once said, explaining his spare 1950s work.

It turns out that art historians and students at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) didn’t know what they were seeing when they visited the bathrooms at Judy Bayley Hall, passing a painting that some at the university thought was a work by Stella.

The Las Vegas Sun sent a photo of the work, which it describes as “unsigned, undated, and torn with a broken frame,” to the artist via Paul Kasmin Gallery, which represents the artists in New York. After an examination, the artist stated that he believes the work is a fake and has asked, through his lawyer, for the work to be destroyed or returned to him.

One art expert, who asked to remain anonymous, originally believed that the canvas was Takht-i-Sulayman I, a 1967 painting owned at one point by Robert A. Rowan, a Pasadena collector. According to Stella’s attorney, the work may be part of a series of forgeries produced around a decade ago in New York.

UNLV officials say they want to cooperate with the artist’s wishes, but that they don’t own the painting. The work was given to them as an indefinite loan by a woman named Ruby Arkow in 1998. She died a year later, leaving no survivors.

Stella’s lawyer has suggested that if the university cannot immediately return or destroy the painting, it should place a placard near it that reads, “This is not a Frank Stella painting.”

Read more at the Las Vegas Sun.