Sofia Benavides
(CNN) – Most artwork galleries and museums are identified for the artwork they comprise. Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” are on the Nationwide Gallery in London; “The Starry Night time,” for its half, might be seen in New York’s Museum of Fashionable Artwork, in good firm with Salvador Dalí’s molten clocks, Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait .
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, nevertheless, is at the moment extra well-known for the artworks that don’t exist, or not less than, those who now not exist.
On March 18, 1990, the museum suffered the largest artwork theft in historical past. 13 items of artwork with an estimated worth of greater than $500 million, together with three Rembrandts and a Vermeer, have been stolen in the course of the evening, whereas the 2 safety guards sat within the basement tied up. with duct tape.
A brand new episode of CNN’s “As It Actually Occurred,” airing Sunday, Might 19 at 9 p.m. ET, options an interview with a kind of guards: Rick Abat, who gave his solely televised interview to CNN in 2013 and died in February 2024, aged 57.
The theft is a treasure trove of peculiar information and surprising plot twists. Listed below are 5 issues that make the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its well-known theft so attention-grabbing.
The girl behind the constructing
Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum’s founder and namesake, is a exceptional character. Gardner, the daughter and final widow of two profitable businessmen, was a philanthropist and artwork collector, who constructed the museum to deal with her treasure.
Isabella Stewart Gardner, a philanthropist and early ladies’s rights activist, constructed this free museum in Boston to deal with her private artwork assortment. (Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston)
“When he opened the museum in 1903, he ordered it to be free for the admiration and attendance of all of Boston,” mentioned Stephan Kurkjian, writer of “Grasp Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Tablet Off the World’s Nice Artwork Heist,” he mentioned. CNN. “His museum housed, on the time, the most important non-public artwork assortment in america.”
Gardner additionally had ties to the unique marketing campaign for ladies’s political rights. The museum will show pictures and letters from her good friend Julia Ward Howe, an organizer of two American suffragette societies, and a print by Ethel Smyth, a composer and shut good friend of the English suffragette chief Emmeline Pankhurst.
Gardner met Smyth via their good friend, the painter John Singer Sargent, the writer of an exquisite portrait of Gardner during which she reveals loads of cleavage.
Gardner appeared to get pleasure from flirting with scandal and gossip: he arrived at a live performance on the Boston Symphony Orchestra carrying a hat band bearing the identify of his favourite baseball group, the Crimson Sox, and a photograph from The January 1897 subject of the Boston Globe confirmed her. apparently taking one of many lions on the Boston Zoo for a stroll.
Paradoxically, when the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, Gardner instructed the museum guards that in the event that they noticed anybody attempting to steal it, they need to shoot to kill him.
artwork that was not stolen
It’s estimated that there was greater than US$500 million within the loot of the thieves. Nevertheless, they left the most costly work within the constructing: “The Abduction of Europe,” by Titian, which Gardner purchased from a London artwork gallery in 1896, for what was then the very best value for an Outdated Grasp portray. .
The Titian Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is taken into account probably the most invaluable work within the museum, but it surely was deserted by thieves. (Sean Dungan/Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston)
Why commit the largest artwork heist in historical past and go away with out the most costly piece within the museum? Properly, possibly measurement performed a component. The biggest murals taken was “Christ within the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” by Rembrandt, well-known as Rembrandt’s solely seascape and measuring roughly 1.5 by 1.2 meters. “Abduction of Europe,” however, measures nearly 1.8 by 2.1 meters.
The Napoleon issue
Round 2005, the seek for the stolen artworks was despatched to the French island of Corsica within the Mediterranean Sea. Two Frenchmen with alleged hyperlinks to the Corsican mafia have been attempting to promote two work: Rembrandt and Vermeer. Former FBI Particular Agent Bob Wittman was concerned in a sting operation to attempt to purchase them, however finally failed when the boys have been arrested for promoting artwork it was taken from the Museum of Fashionable and Up to date Artwork in Good.
Why would “Corsican Gangsters”, as CNN correspondent Randi Kaye known as them on the present, be considering robbing an artwork museum in Boston? The reply could lie within the public sale of the Bronze Eagle, the 10-inch decoration that was stolen from the highest of Napoleon’s flag through the heist.
“It was an odd selection for the thieves to take (the Finial),” Kaye mentioned, “but it surely seems that Corsica is just about Napoleon’s homeland.” The French emperor was born on the island in 1769, and his former household house now homes a nationwide museum.
“It is a robust concept,” Boston Globe deputy editor Kelly Horan mentioned of the present, “{that a} group of Corsican gangsters tried to reclaim their flag and did the remainder of the heist within the course of. “
A rock’n’roll suspect
March 18, 1990 was not the primary time a Rembrandt was stolen from a museum in Boston. In 1975, profession prison and artwork thief Myles Connor entered the Museum of Advantageous Arts in Boston and emerged with a Rembrandt stuffed in his overcoat pocket. Though he was the FBI’s first suspect within the Gardner case, the partitions of the federal jail, the place he was imprisoned on drug expenses, gave him a really stable alibi.
When he wasn’t stealing well-known artworks from his reveals, Connor was a musician. It was via his performances that he met Al Dotoli, who labored with stars resembling Frank Sinatra and Liza Minelli.
In 1976, Connor was jailed for an additional artwork theft dedicated in Maine. Hoping to make use of his stolen Rembrandt to get a decreased sentence, he wanted Dotoli, who was touring with Dionne Warwick, to show the portray over to authorities on his behalf.
An invisible thief?
One of many stolen artworks, “Chez Tortoni,” by Édouard Manet, was stolen from the museum’s first flooring Blue Room. The image stands out for 2 causes, the primary being its framing. The thieves left nearly all of the frames and minimize the works in entrance.
“Even leaving traces of the photographs was onerous,” Horan mentioned. “For my part, it is like slitting somebody’s throat.”
Nevertheless, the “Chez Tortoni” body was uncommon for the place it was left: not within the room from which it was stolen, however on the chair within the safety workplace downstairs. Much more notable is that not a single movement detector was activated within the Blue Room. Whereas investigating the opportunity of phantom robberies, investigators puzzled if this indicated that the crime was an inside job.
“On the FBI we discovered that about 89% of museum builders are inside jobs,” Wittman mentioned. “That is how this stuff are stolen.”
“Gardner Artwork Heist: Theft of Magnificence” from As It Actually Occurred premieres on CNN on Sunday, Might 19 at 9pm ET/PT.
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2024-05-20 00:39:30
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