The Third Thief of the Gardner Museum

The Gaze of BENOÎT GAUSSERON

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Version française 🇫🇷

On the night of the theft, the moon showed a small crescent. A cold and dry crescent. On Sunday, March 18, 1990, Boston was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. The patrician city on the East Coast of the United States had been drinking all night. Paying tribute to the Saint who brought Christianity to Ireland, New England’s Dubliners had urinated their Guinness at the foot of the trees in Boston’s parks. That night, who would be surprised that two men dressed as police officers in a car with its headlights off? There, parked on Palace Road. They got out, nonchalant, and presented themselves at the side door of the Gardner Museum. One, then two rings of the doorbell. It was 1:24 AM. Inside, one guard was finishing his rounds while the other dozed at the control desk. Rick, 23, and Randy, 25. The Minotaurs tasked with protecting the exceptional Gardner collection were the same age as Rembrandt, that of the self-portrait on the first floor of the museum. Rick hesitated, it’s true. Opening the largest private art collection in the middle of the night? Even to cops? He looked again at the intercom screen. A police cap, a badge, glasses, a mustache. He heard the voice repeating « police » and claiming a routine check. Were they really police officers? Another ring. Better avoid problems. So, Rick opened the door. And the police, real or fake, entered.

The greatest art heist in history could begin.

The two men asked Rick to call his colleague on the walkie-talkie who was patrolling the museum’s galleries. Randy, come back, police are here. A few minutes were enough. To tie up the two guards, tape their mouths shut, and chain them to pipes in the basement. Of course, they should have noticed that the fake mustache of the first man was hanging, that the makeup of the other was smudged, that it was a trick. Too late. The deserted museum and its approximately 10,000 works were at the mercy of the two burglars. This is where the news story entered the grand narrative, that of art. What to take? What to steal when you have a real imaginary museum in front of you? No limit, all in. A Manet from the blue room on the first floor, the Matisse – Terrace at Saint Tropez – from the yellow room, a Raphael from the Italian room, a Van Dyck, a Rubens, the Botticelli with incredible clarity – the Virgin, the Child, and the Angel – that Bellini near the window or the sad-faced Philip IV, so pale, so narrow, to die for, by Velasquez?

Outside, the cries of joy and drunkenness to the tune of Irish music smelled of beer and rose up here, muffled but so close. St. Patrick’s Day was in full swing when they – but who? – roamed for an hour and thirty-one minutes through the Venetian palace reconstructed by Isabella Gardner in the heart of Boston.

The first man immediately went to the Dutch salon as confirmed by the infrared motion detectors that recorded everything. With a knife or a cutter, he seized the paintings by Vermeer and the two Rembrandts. The frames were found shattered on the marble floor. With his accomplice, he also took a Manet and drawings by Degas before removing a Napoleonic eagle from its pedestal and carrying off a Chinese vase.

There was everything else to see or steal. But no, they raced down the stairs. A final farewell to the imprisoned guards. See you, guys. Thirteen works and not one more.

It was over.

A car was waiting for them at the corner of Palace Road and Tetlow Street. And they left with the video tape from the surveillance system, leaving the greatest art heist of the century without any images.

Thirty-five years later, the loot, estimated between 500 million and a billion euros, has not been found. The culprits, of whom nothing is known, are still on the run despite the promised monetary rewards. Why these works and not others? This is the greatest mystery of that night of March 18, 1990. A clueless mafia heist? Or an expert theft on behalf of collectors who might have passed on their shopping list to two thugs from Dorchester? We don’t know.

Anthony Amore, however, is investigating.

He has been appointed the museum’s director of security and chief investigator tasked with recovering the works. Twenty years of tracking, not a lead. He concludes only that the criminals were targeting Rembrandt: the proof is that they cut out two canvases, « The Storm » and « The Man and the Gentleman in Black, » both from 1634; and they attacked the artist’s self-portrait before abandoning it in its frame at the foot of a safe. Probably too bulky to carry because painted on wood. Rembrandt, who produced 2,000 works, is, along with Picasso (to whom more than 20,000 works must be attributed), the most stolen artist in history according to the chief investigator. The thieves came for Rembrandt. And him alone. Our expert is adamant. The lesser-value Degas drawings and the Napoleonic eagle, and even the Vermeer, our two art criminals would have taken for fun. Like bank robbers who would steal the cashier’s pen after completely emptying the vault. Thanks, buddy, nothing personal.

On this January 24, 2025, the night in Boston is freezing, and we, too, are searching for the artefact that matters. The one that will remain. The Charles River separates us from MIT and Harvard; it is frozen; patches of snow hope for Whistler and his winter landscapes. In the museum that will soon close, glass eyes await. The empty frames are the windows to our absent loves.

Behind its facade that resembles a brick mirror factory, nothing hints at the Venetian palace that wealthy Isabella Gardner had built at the end of the 19th century to transform it into a museum in 1903. Upon her death in 1924, Isabella Gardner bequeathed the palace and its works with the express condition that none be moved. That especially nothing be touched, a dream program for a curator in politics or a chief. Only a glass gallery, designed by Renzo Piano, was added in 2012 in front of the building. So, because everything must remain as it is, at the location of the stolen paintings remain the empty frames. So many glass eyes looking at you, gaping and you blissful. These frames of absent works have inspired Sophie Calle (Disparition, 2000, Actes Sud) and nourished the chronicles of key novels, Lupin remakes, and Netflix series (This Is Robbery) and BBC series (The Billion Dollar Heist). OrStolen, the documentary by Rebecca Dreyfus for the American public channel PBS.

Isabella Gardner did not like light. And it is visible. You visit her house in the dim light. The spectator moves from room to room without a guide. She wanted the public to get lost, to fumble, to advance in her night, without those terrible flashlights that serve, in museums, as labels under the works telling you what to see and what to think. The United States is a young country, Gardner declared, I want to share beauty with the greatest number. Let them discover it themselves. No labels, no tags. Here art for all is offered without proper names or footnotes, those cumbersome (with videos) things of today’s museums.

Our favorite painting has also been stolen.

Its name, « The Concert. » Easy to carry, it is not very large, 72.5 centimeters by 64.7 centimeters. An oil on canvas from 1666 among the approximately 34 that Vermeer painted. Did the two thieves know that the artist, born and baptized in Delft in 1632, died in 1675 in absolute poverty, leaving behind eleven orphans? Poor little ones. Isabella Gardner, who was aware of this, acquired « The Concert » in 1892 in Paris during an auction of the Thoré-Bürger collection. She bid more than the Louvre and the National Gallery in London and thus brought this fascinating canvas to the United States, which seems to turn its back on you: a woman at the harpsichord, another singing, while a lute player. Not a glance at us, the spectators. On the floor, black and white key caps serve as a music score. And in the painting, other works – a piece of carpet or curtain, fabrics and clothing, an Arcadian landscape on the lid of the harpsichord, a matchmaker on the right and a landscape on the left – outline the horizon of a promise. That of sex perhaps, of death certainly, of a Calvinist God undoubtedly. « The Concert » is one of the thirteen works by Vermeer that includes paintings within the painting. These mises en abyme are not there to tell, only to open the window to a world in mute mode.

Silence. Something is going to happen.

The music, written on the floor, rises, seizing the three characters, who, as structuralism teaches us, disappear as people or objects – it doesn’t matter – so that only the relationships, the links, the connections that unite them remain. They do not need us. Only a God who will not arrive through the window on the left side of the canvas, nor through the paintings suspended in the work. He will reveal himself among them like the Holy Spirit suddenly becoming familiar with the secular.

So, what has become of the stolen painting by Vermeer?

The two thieves took it, perhaps by chance, but where? Today we only have the photos. In memory of its window, its winter light. The yellow, the ochre, its blue. The violin, the harpsichord, the lute. Yes, « The Concert, » a painting of waiting, of things and beings that settle, suspended to hear. Paul Claudel, in The Eye Listens, says exactly this: you see, and you listen more than you read in Vermeer. Forget Italy and its narrative painting, all those works that open onto stories. Vermeer only unfolds a map, a world map of the intimate, the closed space of the inside. The furniture and objects in the foreground obstruct. Worse, Vermeer’s characters, often seen from behind or in profile, do not visibly seek to welcome the spectator. Daniel Arasse speaks of this visual obstruction that prevents the viewer from entering the painting and even less from staying in it. So we look with our eyes and remain on the threshold of family secrets. The thesis by Sandra Deslandes, « Visual Strategies » in Vermeer (October 2023), is enlightening in this regard. The space represented by Vermeer closes in on itself, she writes, « by visually obstructing the entrance door for the spectator into the work. »

Thus a closed work, « The Concert » by Vermeer is a genre scene, an everyday scene. Jacques Rancière qualifies it as a mixture of the heterogeneous, combining disparate elements of common and prosaic life. Ours. That of things that are there for what they are. And not for more. The folds of everyday life. The anecdotes of days. The common details that are nothing special and yet have as much value as history – the grand one – mythologies and gods. There is no need to look for the syntax of sacred texts, the codes to decipher, the learned references.

With Vermeer, the painting is not a window to the world; it is the world in the window.

You had to think of that. But then, on which wall and in which genius of evil is « The Concert » hiding today? Or, perhaps worse, in which cellar is it rotting? More than 80% of stolen works of art are found, says expert Anthony Amore. Often shortly after the events, sometimes several decades later. They eventually resurface like acne under the skin after a sunny vacation. The lesson of our nighttime visit to the Gardner Museum, the only one undoubtedly: the two thieves from that night, the one in March 1990, confessed that their accomplice, the third man in the affair, was us. The spectator who wondered what he would steal from the museum. What he would take if he were in their place. Aware that to look, after all, is to keep something of what you see and thus also to take.

Spectator and thief.

There you go. Cicero was already lamenting the art thefts committed by Catiline. And we say after him: how long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience? In Latin, it went like this: Quosque tandem Catilina abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? And in the case that concerns us, on the night of the Gardner Museum, we would have said to the thieves: well then, you give us back our Vermeer, guys?

The museum offers 10 million dollars to anyone who returns the works.

Feel free to call + 617 278 5114 or send an email to theft@gardnermuseum.org. Anthony Amore, the head of the investigation for the museum, guarantees anonymity and confidentiality. And for Vermeer, you can contact benoit.gausseron@gmail.com.