The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  The painting, renowned for its loveliness, depicts a young woman absorbed in her music and caught in midsong; somehow Vermeer contrived to paint the strings of the guitar so that we can virtually see them vibrating. In a corner of the painted scene, deep in shadow, a few stacked-up books sit neglected. The musician and her guitar glow with a honey-colored light.

  The frame turned up the day after the theft, damaged, in a bush in Hampstead Heath where the thieves had thrown it. The public and the media responded to the break-in with the usual paradoxical mix of outrage and nonchalance. On the one hand, the stolen work was a priceless masterpiece and recovering it was a national priority. On the other hand, it was only a painting. Television reporters announced the robbery in breathless tones. Tellingly, though, they had to describe the missing picture without showing pictures of it, because the company that held the rights to the color slide had demanded a £10 fee for its use. Both the BBC and ITV, the commercial television channel, decided to save their money.

  At this point, the story took an unexpected twist. Newspapers and radio stations began receiving anonymous phone messages. The three-centuries-old painting had apparently been stolen to right a twentieth-century political grievance. The Guitar Player would be destroyed, the caller warned, unless the authorities transferred two IRA activists, sisters named Dolours and Marion Price, from a London prison to an Irish one. The Price sisters had been convicted the previous year of carrying out a string of car bombings in London. Two hundred and thirty people had been injured.

  The sisters, who were themselves demanding to be transferred to Ireland and on hunger strike, had been sentenced to life in prison. But the thieves had apparently made their phone calls without informing the Price sisters of their plan. Two weeks after the theft, on March 6, 1974, an envelope arrived at the London Times. Inside was a tiny strip of painted canvas, about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide, and an oddly phrased note, unpunctuated and all in lowercase, typed on a piece of thin blue paper. The strip of canvas had been cut from the back of The Guitar Player, the note said, and it went on, “… the price sisters have given no sign of gratitude all we have established is that a capitalist society values its treasures more than humanity therefore we will carry our lunacy to its utmost extent the painting will be burnt on st patricks night with much cavorting about in the true lunatic fashion.”

  On St. Patrick’s Day, Albert Price, the father of the convicted bombers, issued a plea asking the thieves to return the painting. His daughters had studied art, Price said, and they didn’t want Vermeer’s painting destroyed. “Dolours has seen the painting,” her father said, “and she told me that there were few beautiful things left and it would be a sin to destroy it. They appreciate the effort that is being made on their behalf but do not want anything to happen to the painting.” St. Patrick’s Day passed uneventfully.

  One month later, on the evening of April 26, 1974, with The Guitar Player still missing, Rose Dugdale approached Russborough House on foot. She rang the bell at the service entrance, and when a servant opened the door, she said that her car had broken down. While Dugdale described her predicament, three gun-wielding men suddenly appeared behind her and pushed their way inside the house. They ordered the servant to lead them to Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, who were sitting in the library listening to music. The gunmen forced the Beits to the floor and tied them up.

  Now Dugdale reappeared, telling her three accomplices which paintings to snatch off the wall. She interrupted her orders now and then to shout “Capitalist pigs!” at the Beits. Ten minutes later, the thieves fled with nineteen paintings that represented the gems from one of the greatest private art collections in the world.

  A week later, the director of Ireland’s National Gallery received an anonymous letter. Part of the message carried an impossible-to-miss echo of the St. Patrick’s Day ransom note from the Vermeer theft the month before. The Beit paintings would be destroyed, the letter warned, unless the English authorities transferred the Price sisters to Ireland, along with two fellow prisoners and a $1.2 million ransom. With the letter, the thieves included three pages torn from Sir Alfred’s diary, which had been stolen at the same time as the paintings.

  The thieves’ plan made little sense—who would try to put pressure on politicians in London by stealing paintings in Dublin?—but, regardless, the Russborough House paintings were gone. The Irish police organized a nationwide search for the thieves. On the day after the ransom letter was delivered, a policeman checking hotels and rental properties for suspicious characters peeked through the window of a small, isolated cottage near the sea, in Glandore, 200 miles from Dublin. Three oil paintings caught his eye. (These turned out to be Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, Goya’s Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate, and Velasquez’s Maid in Kitchen with Christ and Disciples Outside Window—the best of the 19 stolen works.) Rose Dugdale had rented the cottage two days before the theft. The other paintings were still in the trunk of her car. All were unhurt.

  Dugdale was arrested. Only a few days later, the police in London received an anonymous phone tip bringing welcome news. They raced to St. Bartholomew’s Church. In the graveyard, leaning against a headstone, inside an old newspaper tied up with a piece of string, they found Vermeer’s Guitar Player.

  Dugdale was never charged with stealing The Guitar Player, though the police assume that she was responsible. In June 1974, a month after she was found with the Russborough House paintings, she was put on trial in Dublin. She pleaded “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

  In 1986, Martin Cahill robbed Russborough House. In this second theft, in contrast with the Dugdale one, the Beits were away. Cahill’s gang made off with eighteen paintings. In June 2001, the thieves were back. This was the third robbery overall, and the first in daylight. In a stolen Mitsubishi jeep, three thieves roared up the steps to Russborough House, rammed the front doors, and raced inside. Three minutes later they raced out again with Bellotto’s View of Florence and (for the third time) Gainsborough’s Madame Baccelli. The thieves sped away in a second stolen car. The two paintings together were worth £2.3 million.

  The theft was bold but hardly polished. The thieves poured a can of gasoline over the jeep and tried, unsuccessfully, to set it on fire, and the police found a pair of used gloves inside. During their getaway, the thieves tried to hijack a car at gunpoint (to throw off police pursuit), but the driver refused to hand over his keys.

  It happened again in 2002, a fourth attack on the same target, this one at dawn on a September morning. Just four days before, police acting on a tip had found the two paintings that had been stolen from Russborough House the year before. A month before that, they had recovered a Rubens portrait stolen from Russborough House in 1986. The point of the latest theft was presumably to remind the police that, despite their recent successes, it was the crooks who had the upper hand.

  This time thieves stole five paintings, worth a total of $76 million. The two best were by Rubens. His Portrait of a Dominican Monk had been stolen before, by Martin Cahill. This latest theft differed only in details from its predecessor of the year before. Rather than crash through the front doors, the thieves drove up to Russborough House from the back. Armed with a makeshift battering ram, they blasted through the steel shutters that blocked a ground-floor window, took what they wanted, and raced off at 100 miles an hour. The lone guard on duty in the sprawling house, a caretaker in his seventies, stood no chance.

  “They do it,” says Charley Hill, “because they’re flipping the bird to the Irish state and the police.” So far, nearly all the stolen paintings have come back. All Rose Dugdale’s paintings were found with her. All but two of Cahill’s haul have turned up. The two paintings stolen in 2001 and the five stolen in 2002 have all been found, by police following up on tips.

  But the thieves have the advantage, and they know it. When the mood strikes, they’ll hit again.

  18

  Mo
ney Is Honey

  If the Russborough House thefts have a moral, it is that the lure of big money is only one of the reasons that thieves steal big-time art. But none of the other reasons—the notoriety, the thrill, the thieves’ urge to flaunt their contempt for the patrons and collectors of art—would ever come into play if great paintings did not command stunning prices.

  The giant numbers skew everything. “The first thing you have to understand about the art world,” Charley Hill likes to say, “is that, with a very few exceptions, including me, everyone’s a crook.” This is, in part, a joke. In small part.

  Hill lives in a black-and-white universe, and he contemptuously dismisses the commonplace view that the world is composed largely of honest, hardworking folk. Whether in politics or history or society at large, he sees a swarm of crooks and con men and cheaters and backstabbers and hypocrites, with, here and there, a hero.

  For a man with Hill’s preconceptions, art is the perfect field. Revolving around hugely desirable, one-of-a-kind objects whose value is in large measure a matter of opinion, the art world’s upper tiers are a natural home for vanity, envy, and greed. Moreover, the art market is a virtually unregulated, anything-goes bazaar. In short, it is a stage for the human comedy in its most rambunctious and delectable form. “I live in a world of bollocks and bullshit,” Hill says. His lament would carry more weight if he did not so plainly revel in what he professes to regret.

  In Hill’s jaundiced view, Ulving and Johnsen were merely the latest unsavory characters he’d run across in a field beset by scoundrels and renegades. Many of the top-end players all but acknowledge that no one is quite as high-minded as he seems. They are more likely to quote than to fret about the old joke that the art trade is made up of “shady people peddling bright colors.” To protest in indignation would be to proclaim oneself a novice and a rube, close cousin to the playgoer who rushed onstage to wrest a knife from the villain.

  “One knows perfectly well that it has been rubbish all the time,” remarked Peter Wilson, for more than twenty years the chairman of Sotheby’s. “When I go and advise someone to sell their picture because now is the moment to sell it, and they’re going to make more money than they’d ever dreamt of, and there’s never going to be another moment like this, I know that I’m giving them the wrong advice. I should be telling them to keep their picture, because isn’t that what we are telling our buyers—that now is the ideal moment to invest, and that they should all be buying?”

  The rich have always collected art, but the money frenzy that now surrounds great paintings is something new. Even the highest prices from past centuries, when translated into today’s dollars, fall far short of modern records. One key reason, the critic and art historian Robert Hughes points out, is that the idea of art as an investment scarcely existed before the twentieth century. “One bought paintings for pleasure, for status, for commemoration, or to cover a hole in the ancestral ceiling,” Hughes remarks. “But one did not buy them in the expectation that they would make one richer.”

  Today that expectation—or, at any rate, that hope—is central. But if art is also business, it is a singularly strange business. Fashion and chance play central roles. A year before his death, van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother thanking him for his latest loan and boldly claiming, “I dare swear to you that my sunflowers are worth 500 francs,” which would be perhaps $500 in today’s dollars. No buyer agreed. In 1987, in a frantic auction at Christie’s, a bidder acting on behalf of Japan’s Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance purchased van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $39.9 million.

  Everything can hinge on a name. Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents sold in 2002 for $76.7 million, at this writing the fourth highest price ever paid for a painting. For over two centuries, the Massacre was thought to be the work not of Rubens but of one of his followers. The family that inherited it in 1923 disliked it so—it depicts infants torn from their weeping mothers and slammed against the ground—that they tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it. Finally they lent it to an Austrian monastery, where it hung for decades in a dim corridor, ignored. Only in 2002, when the eighty-nine-year-old owner tried once again to find a buyer, was the painting properly identified. In the monastery, the painting hung in such darkness that the Sotheby’s specialist who attributed it to Rubens had to wield a flashlight.

  When the simple equations of supply and demand run head-on into the complexities wrought by human psychology, they emerge from the collision bent and twisted. High prices in the art world, for instance, may serve not as a deterrent but a lure. Record-setting prices, one New York dealer explained, work “like a magnet.” For buyers, high prices confirm the value of the objects they are chasing. For sellers, high prices draw new objects to market. In the apt words of the late art dealer Harold Sack, “Money is honey.”

  The result is topsy-turvy bragging, where people boast not about unearthing a bargain but about spending a fortune. One New York art dealer claimed not long ago to know people who wanted to spend $1 million on a painting and weren’t particular about which one. The discovery of this quirk was perhaps the key to the success of the most famous art dealer of all, Joseph Duveen, whose glory days were the early years of the twentieth century. “Duveen’s clients preferred to pay huge sums,” his biographer observed, “and Duveen made them happy.”

  Such tackiness is not reserved for rubes. In 1967, when the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., purchased Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra Benci for $12 million, the museum’s director, John Walker, pointed out that “the cost per square inch of paint… is the greatest in the history of collecting.”

  For similar reasons, stolen-and-recovered paintings tend to command higher prices after their return than before. What endorsement could be more sincere, after all, than someone’s decision that a painting deserved stealing?

  The great boom in art crime came with the skyrocketing art prices of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1961, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $2.3 million for Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, the price set a record that more than doubled the previous high. Time magazine put the painting on its cover, and the story of the “million-dollar Rembrandt” dominated the front page of the next day’s New York Times.

  Thirty years later, at the peak of the most recent art frenzy, $1 million would seem like small change. On the evening of May 15, 1990, in an overflowing room buzzing with chatter in half a dozen languages, Christie’s auctioneer opened the bidding for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet at $20 million! From there, bids increased at $1 million increments. Five minutes later, the portrait sold for $82.5 million. Two days after that, Sotheby’s auctioned off $300 million worth of paintings in an hour.

  Even the pros seemed awed by the new world that had emerged. “We have moved into a whole new set of prices,” Christopher Burge, the president of Christie’s in the United States, told the Washington Post. “A $1 million sale once was thought scandalous and shocking—then it was $2 million, then $5 million, then $40 million. The $2 million Renoir has become a $6 million picture. The $6 million Renoir is now worth $20 million, and the most important of his paintings would go for a lot more.” (In 1868 Renoir traded a portrait for a pair of shoes.)*

  An economics writer for the New York Times could only shake his head and marvel. “Great Impressionist canvases, worth as much as Rolls-Royces in the 1970s,” he wrote in February 1990, “now trade at parity with Boeing 757s.”

  Through the rest of the 1990s, prices dropped from those record highs. Then, in the spring of 2004, another symbolic barrier fell. In an auction at Sotheby’s in New York City, in front of a large and buzzing crowd, an anonymous bidder purchased Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe (The Young Apprentice) for more than $100 million. The painting depicts a young boy dressed in blue, wearing a garland of red roses. Picasso painted it at age 24, in 1905. His world-renowned paintings would come later. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon dates from 1907, for example, Girl Before a Mirror from 1932; Guernica from 1937. B
oy with a Pipe—”a pleasant, minor painting,” in the words of one Picasso scholar—is not of that rank.

  But unlike Picasso’s masterpieces, which belong to museums, Boy with a Pipe was available to anyone who could meet the price. The bidding opened at $55 million and rose, for eight minutes, in $1 million increments. It passed $60 million, then $70 million, then $75 million. At $80 million, a new bidder joined in. In the end, the anonymous winner paid $104.1 million.

  News like that draws crowds, and the crowds are not composed entirely of solid citizens.

  19

  Dr. No

  Whenever a painting with a value like a Boeing 757 vanishes—whenever thieves steal a Rembrandt or a van Gogh or a Vermeer or another “name” painting—the police respond as if they were reading from a script. A beleaguered police chief approaches a bouquet of microphones and sadly delivers the news that yet another masterpiece has been stolen to satisfy the whim of an art-loving recluse. On Millennium Eve, 2000, to cite one of dozens of examples, a thief stole a $4.8 million Cézanne from Oxford University’s Ashmolean Museum and disappeared into the crowd partying outside. “The theory we’re going on is that it was stolen to order,” the police quickly announced. “We think an art lover from somewhere in Britain or the world probably earmarked the painting for their collection and hired a professional thief to steal it.”

  The press laps it up. Who are the reclusive art lovers commissioning these thefts? The news accounts seem to have in mind a figure out of a Sherlock Holmes story: Late at night in a castle hideaway, a criminal mastermind—who happens to be an art connoisseur—summons a servant to bring a glass of brandy, give the logs in the fireplace one final poke, and then shut the library doors behind him. Then, finally alone, the reclusive genius strides toward a wall that is empty but for an object about two feet by three feet, concealed by a pair of green velvet curtains like those on a miniature stage. The curtains are closed, as they nearly always are, but now the silent figure in the smoking jacket draws them apart. Then he steps back and gazes contentedly at a painting instantly recognizable all over the world but destined never again to be seen outside this room.