Gardner Heist Quotes

In fact, if a museum were filled with all of the world's stolen artworks, it would be the most impressive collection ever created. It would have far more Baroque sculptures, much better Surrealist paintings, and the best Greek antiquities of any known institution. A gallery of stolen art would make the Louvre seem like a small-town gallery in comparison. Experts call it the Lost Museum.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a talked-about woman. Anyone with a tongue for scandal followed her every provocation, from smoking in public to brandishing large hats during Boston Symphony Orchestra performances. They talked about every male she bumped into, and she bumped into many. She wore French fashion, exposing more flesh than Boston puritans were accustomed to. Even noncontroversial acts fanned the flames of story. She did nothing to quell the rumors about her, adding witty one-liners which appeared with exclamation points in newspaper gossip columns. Henry James cast her life in Portrait of a Lady. Paris

I read a heap of books to prepare to write my own. Valuable works about art crime include The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian, The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser, Possession by Erin Thompson, Crimes of the Art World by Thomas D. Bazley, Stealing Rembrandts by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg, Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor, The Art Stealers by Milton Esterow, Rogues in the Gallery by Hugh McLeave, Art Crime by John E. Conklin, The Art Crisis by Bonnie Burnham, Museum of the Missing by Simon Houpt, The History of Loot and Stolen Art from Antiquity Until the Present Day by Ivan Lindsay, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, Priceless by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, and Hot Art by Joshua Knelman. Books on aesthetic theory that were most helpful to me include The Power of Images by David Freedberg, Art as Experience by John Dewey, The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee, Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, Experiencing Art by Arthur P. Shimamura, How Art Works by Ellen Winner, The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton, and Collecting: An Unruly Passion by Werner Muensterberger. Other fascinating art-related reads include So Much Longing in So Little Space by Karl Ove Knausgaard, What Is Art? by Leo Tolstoy, History of Beauty edited by Umberto Eco, On Ugliness also edited by Umberto Eco, A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar, Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, Art by Clive Bell, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe, and Intentions by Oscar Wilde—which includes the essay “The Critic as Artist,” written in 1891, from which this book’s epigraph was lifted.

Art’s inspiration can be raw and painful. It can be a sort of sickness. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art once had to remove a sculpture by Ed Kienholz because visitors would vomit when they saw the work. Philosopher Richard Wollheim made three trips to Germany to view the Isenheim Altarpiece, Matthias Grünewald’s sixteenth-century masterwork, but each time he looked at the canvas, he found it unbearable

Stendhal’s Syndrome, where extensive exposure to Old Master paintings can cause dizziness, confusion, and hallucinations. Graziella Magherini, the head of psychiatry at Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, Italy, identified the syndrome in 1989 and has devoted much of her life to curing it. In addition to intensive therapy, she prescribes tranquilizers, bed rest—and time away from art.