Displaying items by tag: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The FBI agent in charge of the investigation into the theft of $500 million worth of masterpieces from a Boston museum nearly a quarter century ago says the bureau has confirmed sightings of the missing artwork from credible sources.

MyFoxBoston.com first reported that FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly, who lead the international investigation for more than 10 years, says the trail for the missing artwork has not grown cold.

"We believe that over certain periods of time, this artwork has been spotted," Kelly told the station. "There have been sightings of it, confirmed sightings."

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston presents the exhibition The Inscrutable Eye: Watercolors by John Singer Sargent, which includes eight paintings that explore the artist’s relationship with the museum’s founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner. The show runs concurrent to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s exhibition John Singer Sargent Watercolors.

Sargent and Gardner shared a long-lasting friendship after meeting at the artist’s studio in London in 1886 by arrangement of their mutual friend, the writer Henry James. Besides the watercolors, the exhibition includes personal mementos such as letters and photographs that span their lifelong friendship.

The Gardner Museum is home to numerous works by Sargent as Gardner acquired 42 of his paintings during their acquaintance. The institution’s holdings span every stage of Sargent’s career and include genre paintings, formal oil paintings, watercolors, studies for public murals and personal sketches. Gardner acquired many of the watercolor paintings on display through buying gifts Sargent made for his friends as they came onto the public market.

The Inscrutable Eye: Watercolors by John Singer Sargent will be on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through January 20, 2014.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hardford, CT announced the appointment of Oliver Tostmann as the institution’s new Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art. Tostmann, who previously served as a curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, will officially assume his position at the Wadsworth on October 28,2013.

An expert on Renaissance and Baroque artists, Tostmann has lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe and his writings have been widely published. He will oversee the Wadsworth’s comprehensive European art collection, which includes 900 paintings, 500 sculptures, and 3,500 works on paper. Tostmann said, “I am delighted and honored to work in such a renowned institution. To explore the Wadsworth’s collection of European art is simply irresistible, and I embrace its commitment to scholarship.”

The Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest free public art museum in the United States and boasts an impressive collection of baroque paintings, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School landscapes, modernist masterpieces, and extensive holdings in early American furniture and decorative arts.  

Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum announced that it will host the exhibition Last Seen by the French artist Sophie Calle beginning on October 24, 2013. The show will feature works created by Calle in 1991 in response to the Gardner’s tragic heist, which took place the year before. New works created in 2012 will also be on view.

The exhibition presents 14 photographic and text based works divided into two categories. The first series includes pieces created shortly after the heist, which saw the theft of 13 works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and others. The second series was created at the Gardner Museum while Calle was revisiting her earlier project.

Soon after the heist, Calle interviewed curators, guards and other staff from the Gardner in front of the museum’s stark walls. Years later she repeated the process but this time, in front of the empty frames that the Gardner later hung. She asked her interviewees what they remembered of the missing works and what they saw when they looked at the blank frames. She used text from the interviews and her own photos to create visual interpretations of loss and memory. Pieranna Cavalchini, the Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner, said, “This exhibition is a poignant reminder of just how much power art and a great artist like Sophie Calle can yield in bringing life, energy and beauty to what is in essence a never-ending story of loss.”

Last Seen will be on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through October 24, 2014.

A major step has been taken in the Menil Collection’s master plan to create a “neighborhood of art” on their 30-acre campus. The Houston museum has chosen landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh to helm the expansion, which consists of the construction of six buildings dedicated to art, an outdoor sculpture park, bungalows, and green spaces spread across several blocks. Van Valkenburgh, who has offices in Brooklyn, NY and Cambridge, MA, has redesigned Pennsylvania Avenue at the White House (Washington, D.C.), Brooklyn Bridge Park (New York), Hudson River Park (New York), and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston). The London-based firm David Chipperfield Architects is directing the Menil’s overarching expansion plan, which includes the creation of new green spaces, walkways, visitor amenities, and gallery buildings.

Renzo Piano designed the Menil, which was founded by collectors John and Dominique de Menil, in 1987. The museum houses the de Menil’s comprehensive collection of 20^th century art, which includes works by René Magritte (1898-1967), Man Ray (1890-1976), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). The museum also includes a separate gallery dedicated to Cy Twombly (1928-2011), which was also designed by Piano.  

The first phase of the renovation is expected to kick off in September 2013.

23 years after the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist took place in Boston, the FBI announced that they have identified the thieves responsible for the crime. Officials stated in a press release that the unnamed suspects are from a “criminal organization” based in the Mid-Atlantic States and New England. It is believed that some of the stolen artworks were transported to the Connecticut and Philadelphia regions, where they were offered for sale.

While the works have yet to be recovered, the FBI is reaching out to the public for helpful information and a $5 million reward is being offered for the paintings’ safe return. Today at a news conference, federal law enforcement officials announced that they will launch a comprehensive public awareness campaign that will include a dedicated FBI website, video postings on FBI social media sites, digital billboards, and a podcast.

On March 18, 1990 two thieves posing as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with thirteen works of art valued at $500 million. The stolen masterpieces include Johannes Vermeer’s (1632-1675) The Concert, one of only 34 known works by the artist in the world; three works by Rembrandt (1606-1669) including his only known seascape; five drawings by Edgar Degas (1834-1917); and an ancient Chinese vessel from the Shang Dynasty. The Gardner heist remains the largest private property theft ever.

In March of 1990, two thieves posing as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole thirteen works of art including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet. Now known as the greatest art heist in history, the case has remained unresolved despite the countless hours of investigating the FBI has conducted. While the Bureau has offered immunity to anyone who assisted in the recovery of the artworks, they have never received a concrete lead.

While it would appear that the reputed organized crime figure, Robert V. Gentile, who found himself in federal court this Wednesday on drug trafficking and gun possession was irrelevant to the Gardner case, the FBI believed Gentile had vital information to share. Gentile, 76, of Manchester, Connecticut, helped federal authorities for 10 months prior to his arrest but none of the information was useful in tracking down the thieves. Gentile’s lawyer claims that his client did know some of the individuals the government believed were involved in the heist, but that most of them were dead by now. Gentile now faces a maximum of 150 years in prison if he is convicted. The government is willing to negotiate his sentence so that his prison term will be reduced to 46-57 months.

Gentile became involved in the Gardner case when Elene Guarente, the widow of Robert Guarente, a mob associated who died in 2005, told investigators that her husband gave Gentile a painting that he had kept in a tube since the 1990s.

As of yesterday, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) painting that was stolen during an armed robbery at a Houston home last September has been named one of the FBI’s top ten unsolved art crimes. A private insurance company has offered a $50,000 reward for any helpful information leading to the work’s recovery.

The painting, Madeleine Leaning on Her Hair, was completed by the pioneering Impressionist in 1918 and has an estimated value of $1 million. The painting has also been added to the Art Loss Registry, the National Stolen Art File, and Interpol’s Works of Art System. Interpol, an international police organization, encourages cooperation between law enforcement agencies in different countries. By taking these measures, the thief will most likely be unsuccessful if he/she attempts to take the painting to a knowledgeable dealer or gallery or tries to sell it at auction as most members of the art world regularly check these databases.

The other top unsolved art crimes on the FBI’s list include the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in which four Rembrandts, five Degas drawings, and one Vermeer (among other works) were stolen. Also on the list is the theft of two Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney commissioned Maxfield Parrish paintings from a Hollywood gallery, the 2002 van Gogh Museum robbery in which two paintings valued at $3 million, and the 1969 theft of a $20 million Caravaggio from Italy’s Oratory of San Lorenzo.

One of the foremost female patrons of the arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s (1840–1924) (Fig. 1), interest in collecting began in the 1880s after attending lectures on art history and readings of Dante at Harvard College. Enamored by the writer, Gardner began collecting Dante’s rare editions. In the coming years her interests grew and she began collecting Dutch and Italian paintings and, in 1894, Gardner turned to the young art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) for advice on her acquisitions. Under Berenson’s instruction Gardner added Sandro Botticelli’s (ca. 1445–1510) Lucretia, Titian’s (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488–1576) Europa (Fig. 2), and Rembrandt’s (1606–1669) Self-Portrait to her holdings. To this day, Europa is revered as the most important work in Boston by many museum directors in the area.