TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040290/0402401.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.9 KB | 177 lines

                ñ&                                                            ART, Page 54

A Boston Theft Reflects The Art World's Turmoil


Bungling burglars get away with two masterpieces and expose the
dark side of an inflated industry

By ROBERT HUGHES -- With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston, with
other bureaus


    In its way, the sensational heist of old-master paintings,
including a Vermeer and two Rembrandts, from the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston last week showed that there
is still some respect for the law. All the thieves needed was
two rented cops' uniforms and some flimflam at the security
entrance on a Saturday night, and -- presto! -- in they walked.
They immobilized the two night guards, ignored the museum's
security system (which was not connected to the police
precinct) and then spent two hours pulling paintings off the
walls and out of their frames. Then exeunt: a clean getaway.

    At most, only two of the works stolen from the slightly
frayed but beloved museum, built as a re-creation of a Venetian
palace in 1903, have real significance in art history.
Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee is his only seapiece,
and the Vermeer Concert is, well, a Vermeer: a sublime patch
of silence and visual harmony washed in pearly light, one of
only 32 known works by the master. The other "Rembrandt"
painting, of a husband and wife, is probably by one of his
pupils; the French works -- one by Manet and several by Degas

thieves had very little idea of what to go after, since the
glory of the Gardner Museum is its Italian paintings, starting
at the top with Titian's Rape of Europa, regarded by some as
the greatest single Italian Renaissance canvas in the U.S. and
bought by the formidable "Mrs. Jack" Gardner for what seemed
to her and everyone else an enormous price in 1896: just under
$100,000.

    The morning after the theft, there were outbursts of fantasy
about a supergang of ultraprofessionals, specialists in
pinching masterpieces for some Dr. No in a remote art bunker
outside Osaka, Bogota or Geneva. Even the museum's director,
Anne Hawley, suggested that the robbers had been following a
"hit list" given them by a mastermind collector. But it seems
unlikely. Apart from a Greek plutocrat who tried, and failed,
to commission some heavies to lift a Raphael from a museum in
Budapest in 1983, no trace of this glamorous fiction has ever
been found in real life. This was more like the Gang That
Couldn't See Straight -- which soothes no anxieties about the
fate of the heisted artworks.

    The Gardner paintings would be worth a tidy sum on the
legitimate art market, though nowhere near the ridiculously
exaggerated figure of $200 million or so that was trumpeted all
last week on the front pages and TV. The Vermeer could be worth
$70 million, the Rembrandt  seapiece $15 million and the rest
a lot less: the five Degas being trivial and the Manet not much
better. So why the inflation? It is a standard police technique
to increase publicity and make fencing more difficult for the
thieves, who are apt to get their notions of value from press
reports. (If one fence will not pay, the reasoning goes, the
villains will try others, increasing their exposure each time.)

    Thieves usually fence their loot for 5% of its "real" value.
This robbery will yield nothing like that. The only
professional thing about it was its speed. As art thieves,
specialists in heisting old paintings under the best conditions
for resale or ransom, last week's pair were bunglers. They cut
some canvases off their support stretchers, a hasty amateur act
that enables the painting to be rolled up but severely damages
it by cropping and cracks the old dry paint like a potato crisp
when it is rolled, thus causing big problems of restoration.
(When another Vermeer, The Letter, was stolen in Brussels in
1971, the thief not only rolled it up but sat on it in the back
of a taxi, ruining it.)

    Apart from a Shang bronze and a little Rembrandt
self-portrait etching, nothing in the haul could be resold on
the open market, or even in its shadow line. With the Vermeer,
resale is all but inconceivable, although famous stolen
paintings do sometimes get sold: the very picture that named
the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet's Impression: Rising
Sun, was stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris by armed
robbers in 1985 and is believed to be in Japan.

    Japanese law puts a two-year statute of limitations on the
recovery of stolen art from citizens who can plausibly claim
they did not know it was hot when they bought it. This has made
Japan the natural destination of hot art from the West. But
after the worldwide outcry this theft has caused, it would be
hard for a Dr. No -- or a Dr. Noh -- to claim he had never
known the Vermeer was stolen.

    The job may have been an "insurance theft," where the
criminals hope to make their money by bargaining with the
museum's insurance company for a cash fraction of the value.
That might sound hopeful, except that there is no insurance
company to bargain with. The Gardner Museum -- like many other
U.S. museums -- carries damage insurance but no theft coverage
on its collection. To do so in the context of today's art
prices, a spokesman explained, could cost some $3 million a
year; the museum's total operating budget is only $2.8 million.


    Instead, the Gardner offered a $1 million reward for
information leading to the return of the paintings. This ransom
money -- "reward" is a euphemism -- may work, if it does not
gum up the investigation with half the flakes and crazies from
Boston to Miami. But it does not dispose of the ghastly
possibility that one of the greatest of Vermeer's paintings
(along with other things of lesser significance)  may be
destroyed by the thieves as too hot to handle.

    Is there a moral to this event? Only the obvious one: that
we owe it to the sanctimonious, inflated racket that the art
industry has become. The theft is the blue-collar side of the
glittering system whereby art, through the '80s, was promoted
into crass totems of excess capital. Sotheby's and Christie's
tacitly recognized this last week when, after conferring with
the museum board and the FBI, they volunteered the $1 million
reward money for the Gardner -- a touching p.r. gesture, like
a cigarette company giving money to a cancer ward.

    The black market is right behind the white. The worldwide
volume of art thefts is now epidemic: a business, according to
Constance Lowenthal of New York City's International Foundation
for Art Research (set up to keep records of reported art
thefts), that turns over between $1 billion and $2 billion a
year. That was about the global size of the legitimate art
business a generation ago. Around 90% of stolen art is never
found. If one wanted a perfect example of how the crazed art
market has come to work against American museums and their
public, what happened in Boston last week would be it.


____________________________________________________________
    RECENT MAJOR HEISTS



    DECEMBER 1988: Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, the
Netherlands. Three Van Goghs worth up to $90 million. Ransom
demand refused; recovered by police after seven months.

    MAY 1988: Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. A Van Gogh, a
Cezanne and a Johan Jongkind worth a total of $52 million.
Recovered by police in eleven days.

    MAY 1986: Sir Alfred Beit's Russborough House in County
Wicklow, Ireland. Eighteen old masters including two Rubenses,
a Goya, a Gainsborough, a Vermeer, all then worth $40 million
(quadruple that today). Seven  recovered hours later. One
believed found last week. Ten still missing.

    OCTOBER 1985: Marmottan Museum in Paris. Nine paintings
including Monet's Impression: Rising Sun, a Renoir and a
Morisot, today worth $80 million. None recovered. Rumors trace
Monet's Rising Sun (its value now nearly tripled) to Japan.