Word: gardners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sensational heist of old-master paintings, including a Vermeer and two Rembrandts, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston last week showed that there is still some respect for the law. All the thieves needed was two rented cops' uniforms and some flimflam at the security entrance on a Saturday night, and -- presto! -- in they walked. They ) immobilized the two night guards, ignored the museum's security system (which was not connected to the police precinct) and then spent two hours pulling paintings off the walls and out of their frames. Then exeunt: a clean getaway...
...painting, of a husband and wife, is probably by one of his pupils; the French works -- one by Manet and several by Degas -- vary from slight to trivial. It seems quite clear that the thieves had very little idea of what to go after, since the glory of the Gardner Museum is its Italian paintings, starting at the top with Titian's Rape of Europa, regarded by some as the greatest single Italian Renaissance canvas in the U.S. and bought by the formidable "Mrs. Jack" Gardner for what seemed to her and everyone else an enormous price in 1896: just...
...Gardner paintings would be worth a tidy sum on the legitimate art market, though nowhere near the ridiculously exaggerated figure of $200 million or so that was trumpeted all last week on the front pages and TV. The Vermeer could be worth $70 million, the Rembrandt seapiece $15 million and the rest a lot less: the five Degas being trivial and the Manet not much better. So why the inflation? It is a standard police technique to increase publicity and make fencing more difficult for the thieves, who are apt to get their notions of value from press reports...
...have been an "insurance theft," where the criminals hope to make their money by bargaining with the museum's insurance company for a cash fraction of the value. That might sound hopeful, except that there is no insurance company to bargain with. The Gardner Museum -- like many other U.S. museums -- carries damage insurance but no theft coverage on its collection. To do so in the context of today's art prices, a spokesman explained, could cost some $3 million a year; the museum's total operating budget is only $2.8 million...
Instead, the Gardner offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the return of the paintings. This ransom money -- "reward" is a euphemism -- may work, if it does not gum up the investigation with half the flakes and crazies from Boston to Miami. But it does not dispose of the ghastly possibility that one of the greatest of Vermeer's paintings (along with other things of lesser significance) may be destroyed by the thieves as too hot to handle...