Displaying items by tag: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Peggy Fogelman, the director of collections at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, will be heading up to Boston to serve as the director of that city’s primo collection-turned-institution, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Fogelman will take over from Anne Hawley, who’s set to step down after nearly 30 years at the helm of the institution, the Boston Globe reports.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston will be the sole venue for the first ever monographic exhibition dedicated to Carlo Crivelli in the United States. Titled, Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice, the exhibition opens Oct. 22 and runs through Jan. 25, 2016.

Carlo Crivelli (about 1435–about 1495) is one of the most important – and historically neglected – artists of the Italian Renaissance. Distinguished by radically expressive compositions, luxuriant ornamental display, and bravura illusionism, his works push the boundaries between painting and sculpture.

The two men suspected of masquerading as police officers to rob an art museum of $500 million worth of masterpieces in 1990 are dead, the FBI said.

Two years ago, investigators announced that they knew who stole 13 works — including paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer — from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but they refused to elaborate, saying only that the investigation was focused on recovering the artwork.

Never-before-seen video released Thursday shows a security guard admitting an unidentified man into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the night before the infamous 1990 art heist, adding a stunning new clue to Boston’s most enduring mystery.

The video footage, taken by the museum’s surveillance cameras and recently examined by investigators, shows the night watchman open the museum’s side door and grant unauthorized access to the man at about 12:49 a.m. on March 17, 1990 — 24 hours before the museum was robbed by two men dressed as police officers who arrived at the same door.

It seems Robert “Bobby the Cook” Gentile can’t catch a break. The 79-year-old mobster, who has been touted as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s best hope for finding out what happened to $500 million worth of stolen art, says the agency has twice entrapped him, sending informants to induce him to commit crimes so that they can offer leniency in exchange for information on the missing work.

The art theft, the largest in American history, went down in 1990 and involved a Rembrant, a Vermeer and more which were taken from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

A $5 million reward for masterworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum a quarter century ago has failed to lead to their recovery, prompting authorities Tuesday to announce a new offer: $100,000 for the return of one of the least valuable items, a bronze eagle finial.

The reward far exceeds the value of the 10-inch-high gilded eagle, which was swiped from the top of a pole supporting a silk Napoleonic flag. It was taken along with 12 other pieces valued at $500 million, including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Manet, in what remains the world’s largest art heist and one of Boston’s most baffling crime mysteries.

The thieves allegedly behind one of the most brazen art thefts in American history, perpetrated 25 years ago on Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, have been revealed as two members of a local organized crime syndicate. The controversial right-wing website Breitbart News first reported their names Sunday as George Reissfelder, then 49, and Lenny DiMuzio, then 42, citing sources within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Breitbart story appears to follow-up on a segment produced by WCVB TV of Boston, which states that the FBI has known the suspects’ names for some time, but has not released them publicly.

Both suspects died within a year of their purported March 18, 1990 break-in at the museum, frustrating investigators who have searched in vain for the 13 works since — including drawings and paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and others, worth some $500 million today.

It’s been called the biggest art heist in U.S. history, perhaps the biggest in the world. But 25 years later, the theft of 13 works from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains unsolved.

The theft has spawned books, rumors and speculation about who was responsible — and multiple dead ends.

Yet authorities and museum officials remain hopeful, noting that stolen art almost always gets returned — it just sometimes takes a generation or so.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley, whose 25-year tenure began with a notorious art heist and culminated in a successful $180 million capital campaign, announced Wednesday that she plans to step down at the end of the year.

Hawley said she has been quietly weighing the decision for two years now, as the museum completed fund-raising efforts that included $114 million for the museum’s sleek 2012 expansion, designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, and an additional $50 million to fortify the museum’s endowment.

In our era of rapid prototyping and 3D printing, technologies that promise to transform the production of everything from medical devices to skyscrapers, it is easy to lose sight of how three-dimensional objects came into being in the predigital age. One way into this question is through drawing. What role did it play in the production of Renaissance sculpture, some of the most ambitious and technically accomplished ever produced? Or, as Columbia University art historian Michael Cole puts it, “Why did sculptors draw?”

his is the problem at the center of “Donatello, Michelangelo, Cellini: Sculptors’ Drawings from Renaissance Italy,” currently on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and co-curated by Mr. Cole and Oliver Tostmann, formerly of the Gardner and now Curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.