The Rescue Artist

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.

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.