The Rescue Artist

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

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 Cezanne 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