In 1990, three separate art heists took place in the week leading up to Christmas, baffling New York authorities as well as the FBI. In this special holiday episode, we look at police efforts to recover the stolen artworks as well as the many mysteries that hover over the case to this day.
MUSIC CREDITS
"Deck The Halls" by Alexander Nakarada (CreatorChords) | https://creatorchords.com--Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
“Nutcracker- Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” by Jon Sayles (Creative Commons License)
All other music by Liam Bellman-Sharpe.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
--Bagli, Charles V. “’Tis the Season for N.Y. Art Thieves: Paintings Worth Millions Are Stolen,” The New York Observer (January 7, 1991), p.2.
--DeLeo, Isabella & Mariam Khan. “A Renaissance of Mysterious Circumstances,” Shoe Leather Podcast, May 2020.
--Freeman, Nate. “The Unsolved New York City Art Heists of Christmas 1990,” from artsy.net, August 2019 ( https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-unsolved-new-york-city-art-heists-christmas-1990).
--Gaensenheimer, Susanne. Chaïm Soutine: Against the Current (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023).
--Stevens, Mark and Annabel Swan. de Kooning: An American Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).
--Websites: Sotheby’s, NYPD, FBI, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
TRANSCRIPT
Imagine, for a moment, that it’s 1990—and the holidays are upon us. The events of the outgoing year have shaken the world. Startling transitions have taken place in politics. In August, East and West Germany announced their plans to reunite as a single country. In November, Margaret Thatcher stepped down as prime minister of the U.K., an office the Iron Lady had held since 1979. Beyond the U.K. and western Europe, Nepal ratified a new constitution, and Armenia declared itself an independent nation. In South Africa, political prisoner Nelson Mandela was set free after twenty-seven years of captivity. In a less promising development, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait set the stage for the First Gulf War.
1990 was no less eventful in the realm of technology. The completion of the so-called Chunnel at the end of October made it possible to travel between Paris and London by rail, via the English Channel. The Human Genome Project was founded and the Hubble Telescope launched into space. And, just in time for Christmas, the world’s first website and server went live on December 20.
It was also a banner year for crime in the arts. Some artists’ brushes with the law were notable, but mostly harmless. Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor spent three days in jail for slapping a police officer in Beverly Hills in 1989. In September, New York punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone was arrested in Washington Square and charged with marijuana possession. Reefer madness also plagued British pop-reggae band UB40, who got deported from the Seychelles in August on allegations of weed possession. Other cases had greater social significance. In two unrelated trials, prosecutors in the U.S. tried—and failed—to convict rappers 2 Live Crew and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center on charges of obscenity—the former for performing songs from their 1989 album, As Nasty as They Wanna Be, and the latter for exhibiting photographic nudes by Robert Mapplethorpe. The acquittal of the defendants in both cases was viewed as a victory for champions of free speech.
But the art crime story of the year was definitely the jaw-dropping heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. Just after midnight on Sunday, March 18, two thieves disguised as police officers gained entrance to the museum, quickly subduing and restraining the guards on duty. In under an hour, they stole thirteen works of art, including peerless paintings by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Manet. In total, the pair escaped with $200 million worth of art. This was the largest known art heist in history—and, to this day, it remains unsolved.
Yet the Gardner affair was not the only mysterious heist to take place that year. During the holiday season of 1990, not one but three thefts puzzled the NYPD. In the week leading up to Christmas, four paintings were stolen from three different locations. At the time, the total value of these stolen artworks was estimated at $4.3 million ($10.8 million in today’s currency). The thief—or thieves—were never brought to justice. Today, we’ll hear how this Yuletide crime spree unfolded, how the police went about hunting the culprits, and how recent events have rekindled interest in these unsolved mysteries. This is The Art of Crime, and I’m your host, Gavin Whitehead. Welcome to this special holiday episode of Crimes of Old New York . . .
The Yuletide Art Heist of 1990
Act One: The Missing De Kooning
Christmas of 1990 was marred by a recession and a related slump in retail sales. Even so, New York City celebrated the festive season in style. Tuba players from miles around descended on Rockefeller Center for Tuba-Christmas, an annual holiday concert and proud civic tradition. Office parties swapped out roast beef for the more budget option of chicken, but they nevertheless carried on in the same raucous, drunken fashion that they had in more prosperous years. As custom dictated, the Rockettes high-kicked their way to standing ovations at Radio City Music Hall. With all the frivolity, you could almost forget the economic downturn.
Amid these festivities, trouble was brewing. December 17 was a particularly unlucky day for high-profile art dealer Peder Bonnier, who owned a prominent gallery on West 23rd St., in Chelsea. At some point that day, a thief infiltrated the Bonnier gallery when nobody was around. The thief could have stolen any number of paintings from the main exhibition space—but they didn’t. Instead, the criminal took the elevator up to Bonnier’s personal office.
The burglar went after an untitled 1962 painting by Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, who was still making work at the time of the theft. Though hardly considered a masterpiece, the artwork was notable because de Kooning had painted it with his left hand as an experiment, making it an unusual entry in his body of work.
There is little publicly available information about what happened next. What is known is that the thief removed the painting, got back on the elevator, left the building, and went out onto the street with the framed canvas in hand—all without arousing suspicion. NYPD detective Joseph P. Keenan, who served as lead investigator on the case, told a journalist in 1991 that no one even saw the perpetrator, who effectively vanished into thin air.
In 1990, the stolen de Kooning was valued at $750,000. Today, it would command a much higher price, if for no other reason than the fact that de Kooning died in 1997, giving his works the well-documented dead-artist price-bump. Indeed, in 2015, billionaire David Geffen sold a de Kooning picture titled Interchange for a cool $300 million. I’m sure he needed the money. At the time, this was the highest known price ever paid for a painting and would hold that record until 2017, when the oil painting Salvator Mundi—putatively painted by Leonardo da Vinci—fetched $450 million at auction. To this day, Bonnier’s stolen—not to mention supremely valuable—de Kooning has never resurfaced.
A Double Crime
Two days later, on December 19, a second art gallery fell victim to a heist. The Robert Miller Gallery kept a private exhibition space in a seventh-floor loft on East 20th Street. The apartment doubled as the New York residence of the gallery’s director, John Cheim. When Cheim got back home around 6:15 that evening, he found the front door of the apartment ajar. There were no signs of forced entry.
A horrible realization awaited inside. Missing from the walls was a framed painting by contemporary American artist David Salle. The picture, painted in 1982, was titled Sales Girls. The canvas measured 102 by 78 inches (that’s roughly 259 x 198 cm for our Metric-system listeners), which could not have made it particularly easy to yoink.
Yet the thief—or thieves—pulled off an even more audacious maneuver, too. On another wall hung an empty frame that formerly housed a painting by Lee Krasner, the modernist painter who, at one time, was more widely known as Mrs. Jackson Pollock. The Krasner piece was an enormous canvas titled The Eye is the First Circle, painted in 1960. Part of a series of monumental paintings that Krasner undertook in the early 60s, the picture was 16 feet wide (or 4.88 meters). The culprit took a razor to the 18-foot frame and hacked out the painting, making it easier to remove from the building. The New York Daily News reported that the crime occurred sometime between 11:00AM and 6:15PM. However, as in the case of the de Kooning theft, there were no eyewitnesses to this double heist.
Combined, the two stolen works were assessed at $1.5 million. While this theft was shocking, a bolder art heist was yet to come.
Dude, Where’s My Truck?
Two days passed between heist number one and heist number two. By a strange coincidence, the same amount of time separated heists two and three. On December 21, a courier was driving his truck to a framer’s workshop, where he was to retrieve a painting titled L’Apprenti, created by French artist Chaïm Soutine around 1927. An expressionist portrait of a young apprentice boy, L’Apprenti was dominated by bold greens, reds, and yellows. It was the driver’s job to pick up the newly framed Soutine masterpiece and convey it to the Beadleston Gallery, on East 91st Street. The first leg of his assignment was uneventful. He loaded the painting into his truck and headed for the Upper East Side.
However, L'Apprenti would never make it to its intended destination. In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, the driver decided to make a second delivery while en route to the Beadleston. To that end, he pulled up in front of the Acquavella Gallery on 79th and Madison. Stepping down from his truck, he took his delivery inside, leaving his automobile—and the Soutine—unattended. When he came out from the Acquavella Gallery, his truck was gone—the Soutine with it.
Of the three art heists that had taken place that week, this was perhaps the most eyebrow-raising. There were historical and sentimental factors that made the disappearance of L’Apprenti particularly distressing. Having passed away at the age of fifty, Soutine’s career had been cut short while he was still in his prime. A Frenchman of Jewish and Belarusian descent, Soutine died of a belatedly treated stomach ulcer in Paris in 1943, while hiding out during the Nazi invasion. L’Apprenti was, moreover, the most valuable of the stolen paintings at the time, having been appraised at $2 million.
Then, there was the fact that so few people knew about the transfer of the painting from the framer to the uptown gallery. It’s hard to believe that the culprit stole the truck without knowledge of its cargo. If that’s the case, the culprit also needed to know that the driver would make a stop at the Acquavella Gallery. Finally, making off with the truck and its contents would have required split-second timing. Unlike the previous two thefts, this one screamed “Conspiracy!”
In the weeks to come, numerous investigators struggled to track down and recover the missing artworks—with mixed results. We’ll hear more about the investigation after a quick break.
The Hunt
Representatives of several institutions rushed to recover the stolen paintings. The NYPD were the first responders. At some point in time, they were joined by the Art Theft unit of the FBI. Rounding out the assortment of detectives were investigators from the various companies that had insured the missing artworks. One insurance firm offered $50,000 for information that would lead to the discovery of the two paintings stolen from Cheim’s apartment. Harold Smith, the insurance investigator who was on the trail of the pilfered Soutine, announced an award of $150,000.
Despite these measures, Christmas came and went without any new clues presenting themselves. That changed on December 26, however, when police discovered the truck that had been stolen from outside the Acquavella Gallery. The abandoned vehicle was found in Harlem, at 148th Street and College Avenue. The Soutine painting was, unfortunately, nowhere in sight.
This was the last that the public heard about this case for some time. From the start, the chain of Christmas thefts attracted little press attention. Authorities, mindful that their investigation was still open, proved tight-lipped with the few reporters who expressed interest in the case. Most of the victims and witnesses also seem to have shied away from press inquiries. The result was an informational black-out that allowed thefts to fade into obscurity.
Nevertheless, breakthroughs were happening behind the scenes. At some point in 1991, an anonymous tip reached Detective Keenan of the NYPD. According to the lead, the stolen Salle and Krasner paintings could be found in the lobby of the Radio City apartment building on West 49th St. Police descended on the scene, and sure enough, the paintings were waiting, concealed in nondescript packaging. Nobody could say who had left the parcel there. The artworks were returned to the Miller Gallery, and eventually both paintings went up for auction. Krasner’s The Eye is the First Circle was repaired and reframed. In 2019, it sold for more than $11.6 million, setting a record for the most expensive painting by a woman artist. Sales Girls went up for auction just last year, in 2023, fetching north of $100,000—a price that reflects the fact that David Salle, age 72, is still alive and kicking. The Soutine and the de Kooning, meanwhile, were never recovered. You can read the entries for both paintings in the FBI’s National Stolen Art Files database. Yes, there is such a thing.
For thirty years, most people assumed that this was the end of the story. However, reporters for the podcast Shoe Leather caught up with Detective Keenan in May of 2020. Much to my surprise, they learned that someone had, in fact, been arrested as a suspect in the Miller Gallery theft. Keenan, who is now retired, dropped the following bombshell: “I do remember that I did make an arrest on that particular case. And it was an employee that worked in the building. But when it went to the DA’s office in New York in Manhattan, they couldn’t get it out of the grand jury for some reason. The people in the art world…[have] a lot of connections…and we thought we had a dead good case here. And for some reason, the grand jury never indicted the guy, who was a former employee in the company.”
To date, this vague account is the closest anyone has come to offering a solution for this trio of New York art crimes.
Conclusion
The Yuletide Art Heists of 1990 did not garner much in the way of media attention, especially compared to the much more brazen Gardner affair of the same year. However, the 2019 sale of Krasner’s painting revived interest in the story.
Each heist represents a mystery in itself—all remain unsolved. But a greater mystery hangs over all of them: were they connected? Did the same thief or group of thieves plan or execute them? The crimes do have some things in common. Three high-value art heists took place in the span of a single week. Could it be that three independent criminal entities just so happened to carry out as many thefts in such rapid succession? The first two heists also unfolded in similar ways. The thief—or thieves—entered a gallery, bypassed paintings on public display, and targeted privately owned pictures instead. In all three cases, whoever swiped the paintings know where to look for them, whether the artworks were hanging in an office or apartment or safely packaged in the back of a delivery truck. It’s possible—even probable—that the the perpetrator—or perpetrators—had connections with the art world.
But there are glaring differences among the crimes as well. While the first two heists resemble each other in execution, the third breaks the pattern. Perhaps most significantly, whoever plundered the Krasner and Salle pictures ultimately returned them. In the end, it’s possible that the spate of art heists is nothing more than coincidence. And as one expert opined in 1990, the Christmas season may have had something to do with it: “These people work harder this time of year.”
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