Discover Mid-America — September 2010

‘No Honor Among Thieves’

I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser. It’s about the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The theft is still unsolved twenty years later despite a $5-million reward being offered by the museum for the return of the stolen art. It has been touted by some as the largest art theft in history — not only because of the monetary value of the artworks pilfered but also because of their aesthetic and spiritual significance for the arts and for the world at large.

Rembrandt’s miniature etching (1 ¾” x 2”) “Self-Portrait” was among the works stolen from the Gardner museum on March 18, 1990 and still unrecovered.

While smart enough to evade detection these decades later, the art thieves were not connoisseurs; they cruelly knifed Old Master paintings from their frames leaving shredded canvas borders and paint chips behind (meaning, one might presume, that if these paintings are ever recovered in salvageable condition, their framed circumference will be slightly smaller than it was originally). The thieves “shopped” indiscriminately, stealing some lesser works while more valuable ones were left undisturbed nearby. They left untouched the most valuable piece in the Gardner collection, “Titian’s Europa.” And, given the 81 minutes they spent meandering around the museum, they managed to snatch relatively few pieces — 11 altogether, including three Degas doodles-on-paper the artist himself might hardly have classified as artworks.

Rembrandt’s massive (63.7 “ x 52.1”) oil on canvas, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” which the Gardner Museum describes as “inscribed on the rudder: Rembrant (sic),” stolen from the museum on March 18, 1990 and unrecovered.

Nevertheless, the crooks knew enough to deprive the public of Rembrandt’s “A Lady and Gentleman in Black,” Rembrandt’s “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” Vermeer’s “The Concert,” and Manet’s “Chez Tortoni,” among other works. The thieves, posing as three police officers in order to persuade the museum guards to let them in, left no trace evidence that could identity them. In a final nose-thumbing gesture, they managed to cop a “trophy” of their caper: the gilt bronze eagle finial off a silk battle flag from Napoleon’s Imperial Guard.

This gilt bronze eagle finial from a silk flag of the Napoleonic Imperial Guard appears to have been taken as a kind of “trophy” after the Gardner Museum thieves abandoned their initial effort to unscrew the glass case from around the flag itself.

While it might be tempting — even comforting, with respect to the welfare of the works themselves — to imagine the paintings sitting in the climate-controlled vault of some rich and lunatic art collector, Boser traces their whereabouts through maddeningly complex labyrinths that involve everyone from the Boston Mafia to the Irish Republican Army. It also appears that “shares” in the paintings may have been “leveraged” to raise capital for multiple buyers for various nefarious purposes. Even with FBI agents and private investigators alike devoting the better part of their careers to the recovery of these art treasures, convoluted bits of reliable intelligence sifted from the lies and fantasies of con men and other suspect sources are all that seem to remain from the Gardner grab.

Ironically, the founder of the museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner, had been obsessed with security at the museum and, prior to her death in 1924, spent many hours policing the halls herself to make sure visitors kept their hands off the art. Gardner was an eccentric in her own right, and her will clearly and unbreakably stipulates that nothing whatever can be either added to or de-accessioned from the museum. Consequently, the absence of the stolen works is eerily represented by their original, emptied frames, left where the paintings once hung.

Dealers implicated in museum thefts

Rembrandt’s massive (63.7 “ x 52.1”) oil on canvas, “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” which the Gardner Museum describes as “inscribed on the rudder: Rembrant (sic),” stolen from the museum on March 18, 1990 and unrecovered.

One of the things that struck me in reading this book was the black market involvement of antique and art dealers in the networking for the Gardner heist. Unfortunately, the trade has more than its share of scoundrels and scalawags, and nowhere has the trade’s repute been shadier than at its highest levels. One cannot read this book without inescapably concluding that the “cameo” role played by art and antique dealers is indispensable to what this book describes as a thriving international industry in museum theft, in which a painting stolen from the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art or the Guggenheim (NYC] Museum or the Paris (France) Museum of Modern Art can end up anywhere in the world.

In recent years, the theft of memorial and cemetery art, and the trade’s role in fostering it as a response to the growing consumer demand for “garden” ornaments, has also been headline news. Reacting to the negative publicity, many traders have wisely made it a point to radically curtail or desist entirely from dealing in the sale of wrought iron and marble “outdoor art” that looks even remotely as if it might have come from a cemetery.

Although most of what they took consisted of Degas etchings and master paintings, the Gardner thieves also lifted this Chinese Shang Dynasty (1200-1100 BC) bronze beaker called a “Ku.” The 10 ½” tall beaker might seem like a mere opportunistic grab, but, according to a story in the March 14, 2010 edition of the Boston Herald, the beaker had been secured to a table by a complex bolting mechanism that it took at least one of the thieves some time to master, suggesting that he wanted this item in particular — perhaps merely, however, because, as in the theft of the eagle finial, the ku’s size and compactness made it a suitable trophy of their larcenous exploit.

It behooves dealers at all levels of the trade to pay attention to the theft announcements run in many of the trade journals and to get as much information as possible about the provenance of the items they purchase for resale, whether those items are furniture, paintings, or jewelry and other smalls. The last thing the ethical dealer wants to get caught up in is the tangled web of disposing of stolen art and antiques.

CORRECTION: From the “Is My Face Red Department,” two alert and knowledgeable readers kindly pointed out to me that what I had described in a photo caption in last month’s column as a “granite fossil” was neither granite nor a fossil. Fossils, as I learned from these two geologists, are never found in granite, and the particular rock that appears in my photo is of a type that commonly produces dendrite crystals along the fractures. While this may result in pretty, “painted” effects in the sheared face of the fracture, “no plants were involved,” as one of these readers cogently put it. While value wasn’t in any way the point of the inaccurate caption, my gaffe does illustrate points I’ve often tried to make in this column: You can’t describe it accurately if you don’t know what it is — and you can’t price it fairly if you can’t describe it accurately. Thanks to these alert readers for keeping me straight!

Peggy Whiteneck is a writer and collector living in East Randolph, VT. If you would like to suggest a topic she can address in her column, email her at allwrite@sover.net.

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