pleasantly surprised. The writing was, as I suspected, erudite, but Barnes’s unpretentious, workmanlike philosophy struck a chord. He wrote that his method for studying art presented “something basically objective to replace the sentimentalism, the antiquarianism, sheltered under the cloak of academic prestige, which make futile the present courses in art universities and colleges.” In other words, Barnes devised a method for his students to think for themselves, to resist the urge to simply accept the prevailing and often pretentious sentiments of so-called experts. Barnes seemed like my kind of guy.
“People often suppose that there is some secret about art, some password which must be divulged before they can discover its purpose or meaning,” Barnes wrote. “Absurd as such an idea is, it contains the important truth that seeing is something which must be learned, and not something which we all do as naturally as we breathe.” He called this “learning to see.”
First and foremost, Barnes taught that all art is based on the work of previous generations. “A person who professes to understand and appreciate Titian and Michelangelo and who fails to recognize the same traditions in the moderns, Renoir and Cezanne, is practicing self-deception,” Barnes wrote. “An understanding of early Oriental art and of El Greco carries with it an appreciation of the contemporary work of Matisse and Picasso. The best of the modern painters use the same means, to the same ends, as did the great Florentines, Venetians, Dutchmen, and Spaniards.”
The purpose of art is not to create a literal, documentary-style reproduction of a scene from real life. “The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see, and in order to do so he often needs to modify the familiar appearance of things and so make something which is, in the photographic sense, a bad likeness.” The greatest artists teach us how to perceive through the use of expression and decoration. They are scientists, manipulating color, line, light, space, and mass in ways that reveal human nature. “The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing far more clearly than we could see for ourselves.”
A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye. This was an important point. As an art crime investigator, or an undercover agent posing as a collector, I would have to evaluate and expound upon a wide variety of art, regardless of whether I liked a particular piece.
For the next year, I spent four hours a week in class with ten other students. Each week, we gathered in one of the Barnes’s twenty-three galleries, just a few feet from the three or four masterpieces we would study that day. As our teacher outlined the finer points of composition, palette, makeup, and light, I drank it in. I wasn’t only listening to the teacher—sometimes I learned more by tuning out and just staring at a wall ensemble. At the Barnes, I didn’t learn how to identify a fake or a forgery, but I trained my eye to discern a good painting from a bad one. I learned how to tell the difference between works by Renoir and Manet, or Gauguin and Cezanne—and more important, how to confidently explain in detail these differences and patterns. It’s not as hard as you might think, certainly not for a trained art historian or curator. But it’s not the kind of thing most police officers know. As I would learn years later, it’s not even the kind of thing most art thieves know.
My Barnes experience couldn’t have come at a better time, personally or professionally. I remember walking through the second-floor gallery one day, depressed about the indictment, stressed about lawyer bills and the thought of leaving Donna and the kids for prison, when I came upon Renoir’s
Young kids and a mom at the shore. A family. My family.
I found a bench, sat down, and exhaled.
THE BARNES CLASSES only deepened my interest and appreciation for art, and I couldn’t help but approach my art crime cases with new enthusiasm and perspective. While I was still enrolled at the Barnes, Bazin and I got a break on an old case, a 1988 heist from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Inside its ninety-foot rotunda, the Penn Museum showcases one of the nation’s foremost collections of Chinese antiquities. Late one winter evening, thieves lifted the Chinese exhibition’s most significant piece, a fifty-pound crystal ball from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, from its place of honor in the center of the rotunda. The perfect sphere, which projects a person’s image upside down, once belonged to the Dowager Empress Cixi, and is the second largest such orb in the world. Handcrafted during the nineteenth century, the crystal ball represented a triumph of skill and patience, a year’s worth of an artist’s labor with emery and garnet powder and water. The burglars who took the orb also swiped a five-thousand-year-old bronze statue of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. Museum officials figured it was the work of amateurs, but the pieces seemed to vanish without a trace.
Now, three years later, a museum official was calling Bazin to say a former curator had spotted the Osiris statue for sale at one of the jumble of eclectic shops on Philadelphia’s South Street. We rushed over and pressed the proprietor for details. He told us that he’d bought the $500,000 bronze statue for $30 from “Al the Trash Picker,” a homeless man who trawled the streets with a shopping cart, looking for junk. We found Al and he quickly told us that he’d gotten the statue from a man named Larry, who happened to live a few blocks from the store. Bazin and I went to see “Larry.”
Larry was a compact man with a South Philly attitude and a flimsy story. “I dunno, man, it just showed up in my mudroom a few years ago,” Larry offered, lamely suggesting that a friend probably dropped it off and forgot about it. We countered with the textbook good-cop, bad-cop routine. Bazin stomped, glowered, and threatened to arrest him if he didn’t tell us “the truth.” When Bazin stormed out, I spoke softly to Larry, confiding that we wouldn’t charge him if he helped us out. When that didn’t work, I went out to tell Bazin.
“Why did you walk out so quickly?” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m hungry, I want to get lunch.”
I kept a straight face, and we went back inside to see Larry. I tried the direct approach.
“Was there anything else that you just happened to find when you found the statue?”
“Anything else, like what?”
“A glass ball.”
“A glass ball? Yeah, yeah. It was a big heavy thing, but I thought it was one of those lawn globe things. It was pretty ugly, so I just left it in the garage for about a year. Then I gave it away.”
As nonchalantly as I could, I uncapped my pen and drew my notebook. “Gave it away?” I said. “To whom?”
“Kim Beckles. My housekeeper. For her birthday, September 1989. She was into crystals and pyramids and stuff like that. She joked that she was a good witch.”
I told Larry to call Beckles, to say that he’d just learned that the crystal might be valuable, and that he was sending a couple of appraisers over to take a look. “Tell her that if you sell it, you’ll split the money, OK?”
Larry made the call and we headed for the witch’s house in Trenton, New Jersey. As soon as we arrived, we dropped the ruse. I banged on the door and yelled, “Police!” She answered quickly. From Larry’s description we were expecting a hag, but Beckles was a lithe beauty, twenty-nine years old, blond curly hair. We showed our badges, explained what we were looking for, and she seemed genuinely surprised. She told us she kept the orb in her bedroom. We followed her upstairs.
I’ll never forget the anticipation I felt climbing those stairs. It was the same kind of nervous anticipation I got whenever I went on a drug raid, or helped collar a fleeing suspect—but better. I felt my heart pound. I wasn’t searching for common drugs or guns. I was searching for lost treasure.
We found the Dowager’s crystal ball on the witch’s dresser, under a ball cap.
When Bazin and I returned the orb to its rightful place under the rotunda at the Penn museum, I felt as proud of myself as an agent as I ever had, even though no one was charged with a crime. These art cases offered a different kind of satisfaction. And because Bazin and I were the only ones working them, we won a degree of independence rare in the by-the-book world of the FBI.
It didn’t hurt, either, that the case made big headlines. The day before the scheduled FBI press conference, someone leaked the story to the
