The Rescue Artist (17 page)

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
Money Is Honey

I
f 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.
Boy 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

W
henever 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.

Is the stolen-to-order theory true? Brandy and smoking jackets aside, it certainly
seems
compelling. We know that stolen masterpieces can never find legitimate buyers. We know that masterpieces are stolen regularly nonetheless. We know that many disappear forever.

We know, too, that a person who would spend $5 million or $10 million on any painting, stolen or not, is different from you or me. Ardent collectors talk as if they are obsessed, caught in the grip of an urge to acquire that holds them helpless. J. P. Morgan, the financier who reigned over American industry at the dawn of the twentieth century, accumulated treasures on so great a scale and in such variety—
two
Gutenberg bibles, acres of old masters, the last surviving manuscript copy of
Paradise Lost—
that the art historian Bernard Berenson compared his collection to “a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesus.”

According to one biographer of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, “it was understood everywhere that he could not take a normal view toward art, could not appraise a piece according to cold market value, set a top price and stick to it. When he bid for something, it was seldom with a hard-headed take-it-or-leave-it attitude, but with the idea that he
must
have it. The thought of losing a piece to another was sheer anguish. He was aware of his own weakness, but powerless to correct it.”

J. Paul Getty, despite his miserliness, confessed himself “incurably hooked” and “an addict” when it came to art. An entry from his diary echoes the “and this time I mean it” tone of a smoker in the grip of a three-pack-a-day habit. “I think I should stop buying pictures,” Getty wrote. “I have enough invested in them. I am also stopping my buying of Greco-Roman marbles and bronzes. I’m through buying French furniture. My mind is set. I am not going to change it.”

The next words in Getty’s diary are: “The best laid schemes …”

And it is not merely that collectors in general are obsessed; art collectors in particular are at more risk than others of losing their bearings and vanishing into the stratosphere. Prices of luxury items like Ferraris and diamond necklaces can reach dizzying heights, but with art almost any price can be justified, because a work of art is an object virtually without peer. Buy a yacht, on the other hand, and someone else can always buy an identical one.

The point is not to deny a family resemblance among, say, van Gogh’s sunflowers, but simply to note the difference between that similarity and the near-identity of such assembly-line objects as Ferrari cars. “Imagine how frenzied the world would be,” the art critic Robert Hughes has written, “if there were only one copy of each book in the world.” The art world
is
that frenzied and strange a place.

When the Getty Museum bid $50 million for Raphael’s
Madonna of the Pinks
, in 2002, the art dealer Richard Feigen hailed the offer as “exactly what the Getty ought to be doing. It’s very smart to convert a bunch of pieces of green paper into a masterpiece. The green paper proliferates. The masterpieces evaporate.”
^*

Joseph Duveen, the legendary art dealer, made his fortune with the identical sales pitch. Duveen specialized in selling old masters to new money. Henry Frick, J. R Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and the other tycoons who dominated the American skyline in the early twentieth century all relied utterly on his guidance. “Art is priceless,” Duveen would rhapsodize, as a client reached for his checkbook, “and when you pay for the infinite with the finite, you’re getting a bargain.”

When items are too rare to go around, economists point out, the mere fact of that rarity may make them desirable. “Scarcity value,” the economists call it, and it can kick in even if an object has little else in its favor. A six-year-old taunting her brother by chanting “it’s mine and you can’t have it” has mastered the principle.

Great art has immense scarcity value (and visual splendor besides). But scarcity and beauty are only part of the lure. It is not simply that there are fewer than three dozen Vermeers and there will never be another. A painting has an allure that even other one-of-a-kind creations cannot match, because a person who buys a painting can own it—can possess it exclusively—in a way he could never own a novel, a poem, or a symphony. The difference is that, in an important sense, anyone who picks up a dog-eared, paperback Shakespeare owns something every bit as good as an original Shakespearean manuscript. The glory of Shakespeare lies in the words he conjured up, not in the handwriting in which he set those words down. Shakespeare’s penmanship is irrelevant to his art; Rembrandt’s way with a brush
is
his art.
^*

The most expensive words in any language, J. P. Morgan once said, are
unique au monde
—”the only one in the world.” For some collectors, the thrill of ownership so outweighs all other considerations that, once they have acquired their treasures and hidden them away, they themselves never look at them again. In seventeenth-century France, for example, one insatiable book collector, Marshall d’Estrées, gathered and immediately stashed away 60,000 volumes, every one of which remained unopened until after his death.

How natural to assume, then, that when a masterpiece vanishes, a real-life Dr. No—a collector as maniacal as Morgan or Hearst or d’Estrées but not as honest—has commissioned the theft. Robert Hiscox, a prominent insurance broker and art collector, believes that most stolen paintings end up on a rich man’s wall. “It really is a disease, and you want it almost as much as a heroin addict wants heroin,” he says. “And there are certain people who want to
own
it. Museums are just frustrating—you can go and look, but you can’t own it. That hunger is not only felt by good, honest, A-l individuals. It can be felt throughout society, and especially by villains. And why on earth bother to buy it when you can steal it?

“People say, ‘But the only point of owning art is to show off,’ “Hiscox continues. “That is
absolute paramount rubbish
. There are paintings in my bedroom that no one ever sees, and never will see, and I have no interest in showing my friends or the great British public. I think a villain who’s stolen a painting and has, you know, Goya’s
Portrait of Wellington
sitting in his dressing room, would absolutely get a thrill from that. A greater thrill than just owning the Goya, the fact that he’d nicked it.”

Even many legitimate buyers of the world’s most expensive paintings hide their trophies away forever, off-limits to all eyes but their own. Often the biggest purchases at auctions are cloaked in secrecy; the bidding is done by an agent on behalf of a buyer whose identity is never revealed. That is a modern development. In the Gilded Age, for example, tycoons gloried in flaunting their art collections, much as Donald Trump flaunts his buildings today. If consumption could not be conspicuous, what was the point?

A century before the Gilded Age, Adam Smith made a similar observation as if he were citing a universal truth. “With the greater part of rich people,” he wrote, “the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.” But today’s tycoons are different, the historian Ben Macintyre observes, and “the ownership and whereabouts of the four most expensive paintings in the world are all unknown.”

The four paintings Macintyre had in mind, lost to everyone but their owners, are van Gogh’s
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
, which last sold for $82.5 million; Renoir’s
Ball at the Moulin de la Galette
, $78.1 million; Rubens’s
Massacre of the Innocents
, $76.7 million; and van Gogh’s
Portrait of the Artist Without His Beard
, $71.5 million. Since Macintyre wrote, a new painting, Picasso’s
Boy with a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)
, has taken first place at $104.1 million. Its buyer, too, is anonymous.

Until the early 1990s, the ownership of the two most expensive paintings
was
known. Then, in two hectic days in May 1990, a Japanese industrialist named Ryoei Saito bought both
Gachet
and
Moulin de U Galette
, packed them inside plywood boxes, and hid them away in a climate-controlled vault near Tokyo. Over the course of the next few years, Saito went bust—or nearly—and was found guilty in a corruption scandal. In 1996 he died of a stroke. Amid the tangle surrounding Saito’s financial affairs, no one has yet unraveled the mystery of the whereabouts of his two masterpieces. (Saito had said that he wanted
Gachet
cremated and buried with him, but he reportedly changed his mind.)

If billionaires whose title to their paintings is beyond question see fit to lock their art up where the world will never see it, is it conceivable that a billionaire thief might do the same?

Venture a word of any of this to Charley Hill, and—depending on how energetic he happens to be feeling—he will withdraw into a prolonged and angry sulk or explode in a Rumpelstiltskin-style tirade. The whole Dr. No scenario is “Hollywood horseshit,” “bollocks,” “a complete and unmitigated load of crap.” To broach the subject, as Hill sees it, is to proclaim, “I’m an ignoramus and I’m here to waste your time.”

Hill’s anger is not a simple matter of reflex disbelief. The media’s constant invoking of hideaways lined with old masters infuriates him because it invests “scumbags” with glamour. More maddening still, Hill sees the assumption that stolen masterpieces are destined for the secret galleries of untouchable criminals as providing the police with a perfect excuse for giving up on art crime. Why spend time and money in a doomed search for paintings that are locked away forever? It is, after all, only art.

Most of the experts share Hill’s scorn of the stolen-to-order claim, but in one crucial way, their opinion is beside the point. Hill and his peers may not believe in the existence of art-loving billionaires willing to pay top-dollar for a stolen van Gogh, but what’s important is that the thieves do believe it.

And as long as they do, masterpieces will continue to disappear.