Word: vermeers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...today's art world, a place without living culture heroes, you can't even imagine such a protean monster arising. His output was vast. This is not a virtue in itself--only a few paintings by Vermeer survive, and fewer still by the brothers Van Eyck, but they are as firmly lodged in history as Picasso ever was or will be. Still, Picasso's oeuvre filled the world, and he left permanent marks on every discipline he entered. His work expanded fractally, one image breeding new clusters of others, right up to his death...
...which was just as well), and this, in the stacked deck of hierarchical opinion, which didn't take account of the fact that different artists had different aims and temperaments, told against his reputation. After he died, it went into decline. Lotto didn't drop out of sight, like Vermeer, and have to be completely rediscovered. But he wasn't highly valued in the later 16th century or after. Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) was the cornerstone of Western art history, paid him little attention, and later art chroniclers were...
...just another out-of-work actress taking classes and studying her craft. Then she turned nine and got a job, as the blond pioneer girl in the 1973 TV movie Pioneer Woman. Even then, Helen had the mile-high forehead, perfect oval face and watchful stillness of a Vermeer maiden. "It was very strange," she says. "Somebody forgot to tell me I was a kid. In Pioneer Woman, I was trying to play Sophie's Choice...
...March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, handcuffed and bound with duct tape two feeble guards, disarmed the even feebler alarm system and spent the next 81 minutes looting the place. They left with a Vermeer, three works by Rembrandt, five by Degas--altogether, pieces valued at $300 million...
...never to get too high or too low. "The key is just to keep working every day with the same vigor that you had on Day One." Hanging over his desk, to keep the vigor up, is his going-away present from the guys in Boston: a poster of Vermeer's The Concert, the most valuable piece in the biggest, most confounding art heist in American history...