Word: vermeere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most, only two of the works stolen from the slightly frayed but beloved museum, built as a re-creation of a Venetian palace in 1903, have real significance in art history. Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee is his only seapiece, and the Vermeer Concert is, well, a Vermeer: a sublime patch of silence and visual harmony washed in pearly light, one of only 32 known works by the master. The other "Rembrandt" 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...
...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...
...bunglers. They cut some canvases off their support stretchers, a hasty amateur act that enables the painting to be rolled up but severely damages it by cropping and cracks the old dry paint like a potato crisp when it is rolled, thus causing big problems of restoration. (When another Vermeer, The Letter, was stolen in Brussels in 1971, the thief not only rolled it up but sat on it in the back of a taxi, ruining...
Apart from a Shang bronze and a little Rembrandt self-portrait etching, nothing in the haul could be resold on the open market, or even in its shadow line. With the Vermeer, resale is all but inconceivable, although famous stolen paintings do sometimes get sold: the very picture that named the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet's Impression: Rising Sun, was stolen from the Marmottan Museum in Paris by armed robbers in 1985 and is believed to be in Japan...
...know it was hot when they bought it. This has made Japan the natural destination of hot art from the West. But after the worldwide outcry this theft has caused, it would be hard for a Dr. No -- or a Dr. Noh -- to claim he had never known the Vermeer was stolen...