A Boston Theft Reflects

By ROBERT HUGHES

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 -- vary from slight to trivial. It seems quite clear that the 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.

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston, with other bureaus