Latest news with #GardnerMuseum
Boston Globe
18-03-2025
- Boston Globe
On the 35th anniversary of the Gardner Museum heist, retired FBI agent offers theory on whodunnit
Advertisement 'And then they wake up on March 19 to realize that they've committed the heist of the century,' said Kelly, 57, who spearheaded the investigation from 2002 through last April and is now a partner at Argus Cultural Property Consultants. Kelly said he searched until the day he retired and cautions that, typically, stolen artwork is often not recovered until generations have gone by. 'Someone is going to be looking in an attic and find these pieces,' he said. 'There's always hope.' No one has been charged with the theft and none of the artwork has been recovered, despite a $10 million reward. After scrutinizing d Two suspects in the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft are: Leonard DiMuzio (left), who was shot to death in 1991, and George Reissfelder, who was found dead of a cocaine overdose in 1991. Handout/Joe Runci Early that morning on March 18, petty thief George Reissfelder parked his red Dodge Daytona near the Gardner Museum's Palace Road entrance, with Leonard DiMuzio, an associate implicated in home invasions, in the passenger seat. Dressed as police officers, they rang the museum buzzer and claimed to be investigating a disturbance. Th The thieves tied up Abath and a second guard and spent 81 minutes in the museum, slicing some masterpieces from their frames. They stole 13 pieces: Rembrandt's only seascape, 'The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,' 'A Lady and Gentleman in Black,' and a stamp-sized self-portrait; Vermeer's 'The Concert'; Flinck's 'Landscape with an Obelisk'; five Degas sketches; Manet's 'Chez Tortoni'; an ancient Chinese vase; and a finial of a gilded bronze eagle from atop a Napoleonic flag. Advertisement Before leaving, they snatched computer printouts from a motion sensor that had tracked their movements. But their steps were preserved on a hard drive, which showed the thieves hadn't entered the first floor Blue Room, where Manet's 'Chez Tortoni' was taken. Only Abath's steps, as he made his rounds before the thieves arrived, were picked up there. And Abath had briefly opened a side door minutes before letting the thieves inside, which Kelly said he suspects was a signal he was ready for them. Former Gardner Museum night watchman Rick Abath is pictured in 2013. (Matthew Cavanaugh for The Boston Globe) Matthew Cavanaugh Abath, Kelly is convinced he did. He said Abath had given his two-week notice around the time of the theft, and must have taken the Manet since he was the only one who entered that gallery. He speculated Abath left the painting for the thieves, hoping they would save it for him. Instead, they left the empty frame on the security director's chair. 'The Storm' and other pieces were too big to fit in Reissfelder's car, suggesting they had accomplices with a truck or van, Kelly said. Kelly's theory is that the mastermind of the theft was Carmello Merlino, a mob associate who ran a repair shop in Dorchester and likely sent the thieves inside the museum with a 'shopping list.' Advertisement 'It didn't require a master thief to go in there,' Kelly said. The job was 'basically pull the stuff off the wall and carry it out.' The Manet was likely not on the list, according to Kelly. Years later, Reissfelder's relatives told authorities they saw a distinctive painting of a man in a tall hat — just as in 'Chez Tortoni' — on the bedroom wall of Reissfelder's Quincy apartment months after the heist. The painting was gone when Reissfelder, 51, was found dead inside his apartment in March 1991 of a cocaine overdose. 'It was a suspicious death,' said Kelly, noting Reissfelder died of an intravenous overdose, which was 'very strange, considering his family said he was scared of needles.' The painting "Chez Tortoni," by Edouard Manet, was one of the paintings stolen from the Isabella Gardner Museum in 1990. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Two weeks after Reissfelder's death, DiMuzio, 43, of Rockland, disappeared. His body was found in the trunk of a car in East Boston in June 1991. No one has been charged with his death. Kelly said he believes DiMuzio and Reissfelder were killed 'for the paintings or to keep them quiet.' Two other men linked to the Gardner artwork were mob associates: Marks, 50, was shot to death outside his Lynn home in February 1991, and Donati was stabbed to death outside his Revere home seven months later. The deaths of Reissfelder, DiMuzio, Marks, and Donati within 18 months of the heist had 'a chilling effect' on the investigation, Kelly said. Kelly said Donati's home was broken into at the time of his slaying, fueling the theory his killers were after the stolen artwork. Advertisement Paul Colantropo, a friend of Donati's who had appraised jewelry and other items for him, told the FBI Donati 'My opinion is that some of those pieces were under Donati's control and he died, and the secret of where he hid them went with him,' Kelly said. The FBI's heavy focus on Merlino has been well known. He boasted to two FBI informants he planned to recover the artwork and collect the reward. Instead, he was caught in an FBI sting in 1999 and convicted of trying to rob an armored car depot. Despite offers of leniency in return for the stolen artwork, Merlino never produced them and died in prison in 2005. Robert Gentile, 81, arrived at federal court in Hartford on Feb. 27, 2018. Federal prosecutors said they believed he had information about the whereabouts of the stolen Gardner Museum paintings. Patrick Raycraft/Hartford Courant via AP The FBI believes some artwork ended up with Robert Guarente, a convicted bank robber with mob ties who died in 2004. Six years later, Guarente's widow told the FBI he gave two of the stolen paintings to During a 2012 search of Gentile's home in Manchester, Conn., agents found a list of the stolen artwork, with their black market value, tucked inside a March 1990 copy of the Boston Herald reporting the theft. They also found weapons, police hats, handcuffs, drugs, and explosives in the house and an empty Rubbermaid tub buried under the floorboards of a backyard shed. 'What was so important that he had to bury it under the ground in the backyard?' said Kelly, who remains convinced the tub once contained some stolen pieces. Advertisement A law enforcement agent searched a shed behind the home of reputed Connecticut mobster Robert Gentile in Manchester, Conn., on May 10, 2012. AP/Associated Press In 2013, the FBI said it believed some of the stolen artwork, including 'The Storm,' was moved through organized crime circles to Philadelphia, where the trail went cold around 2003. Gentile insisted he never had access to the paintings and didn't know where they were, even after he was offered freedom on gun and drug charges if he could produce the artwork. He died in 2021. Kelly, who partnered on the investigation with Gardner security director Anthony Amore, said they relentlessly pursued leads across the United States and overseas. 'I couldn't even count the number of hot dirty attics and moldy basements I've been pawing through in my career,' Kelly said. There have been credible sightings of the Vermeer, Rembrandt's 'The Storm' and the tiny self portrait, the Manet, and the finial. But, none for the remainder, he said. On Friday, Jodi Cohen, special agent-in-charge of the FBI's Boston office, said the FBI continues to seek the public's help to recover the artwork. She urged people to 'refamiliarize themselves' with the works. Kelly said the pieces could be 'anywhere on Earth,' buried underground or hidden under a mattress or behind a wall. And the challenge is, 'You have to find them.' An empty frame for Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee" at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2009. Globe staff photo David L. Ryan Shelley Murphy can be reached at
Boston Globe
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
At the Gardner, Fabiola Jean-Louis summons ancient Vodou spirits
There's something vaguely holy about 'Lwa,' Fabiola Jean-Louis's softly menacing effigy of a Haitian deity posed in a flood of daylight at the Gardner Museum. The handful of steps leading up to its perch are dotted with candles, altar-like; the gothic arch that frames the piece echoes stained glass windows in any Catholic church, anywhere. Spiritual reference matters to Jean-Louis, who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. But the sword in the figure's hands, offered to the viewer as though a sacred object, tells us the spirits conjured here are of a different sort. 'Lwa' is, in Haitian Creole, a Vodou spirit of both grace and vengeance. On the sword are the words 'PRAN TET,' loosely translated from Haitian Creole to mean 'take heads.' With its gilded robes, radiant crown, and gold-encrusted body, the figure is darkly beautiful — apt, perhaps, given the fractures of its land of origin. It's the centerpiece of 'Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom,' Jean-Louis's first major museum exhibition, just opened at the Gardner. Jean-Louis, who emigrated to Brooklyn as a child with her family and still lives there, was an artist-in-residence here in 2023; the Gardner proposed the exhibition shortly after, and Jean-Louis got to work. The show now occupies all three of the museum's temporary exhibition spaces, including its towering facade commission. Advertisement Left: Fabiola Jean-Louis, 'Govi Vessel Shrine,' (with niche) 2024, and 'Ode to Merab: Study of Ateni Sioni Frescos,' 2023. ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Materially, Jean-Louis' work often has the presence of stony devotional objects, exhumed from the sea- bottom and crusted with coral and shell, an accretion of the ages. Their very nature makes it all the more astonishing to learn that she works almost exclusively with papier-mache, delicate and ephemeral; she crafts the weight of an ancient cosmology almost out of thin air. The wraithlike 'Peregrine,' 2024, sprouts flowers from one of its silty wings; poised somewhere between life, death, and resurrection, the piece is a loose self-portrait of Jean-Louis herself. 'Lwa,' made in 2021-22, is an exception to most of the 40-some pieces here; almost all were made in the past year, specifically for this show. The piece does, however, strike a tone. Jean-Louis went to Catholic school in the United States, but as an adult, she became more deeply entranced by her Haitian heritage. Its history carries broad symbolic weight: The first land to be colonized in the Americas, Haiti was also first to abolish slavery, in 1804, after more than a decade of enslaved revolt against the island's French colonists. Advertisement Haiti's particular spirituality, drawn from the various practices of West Africans brought there against their will, coalesced as Vodou. As Jean-Louis tells it, a Vodou ceremony sparked the revolution itself, in 1791, when a conflagration of enslaved people called on the spirits for guidance. In her telling, the spirits compelled them to freedom at any cost, and the revolution was born. Fabiola Jean-Louis's "Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom" will be on display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 25. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 'Waters of the Abyss,' then, is inevitably narrative. Through an array of dizzying sculptural pieces, Jean-Louis not only means to capture Haitian history and spirituality, but to craft a deeper myth from the little island-state's outsize status as the first free nation of formerly enslaved peoples. Vodou is at the center of Jean-Louis's particular mythology, which she casts as ancient history: In an anteroom preceding the main gallery, earthy alcoves arrayed in a grid contain spot-lit objects, which evoke notions of a shrine replete with grave goods unearthed from watery tombs. Many are tiny vessels made, in Jean-Louis's imagining, to safeguard the spirits of the departed — ornate urns in dusty clay tones. Others evoke notions of mysteries lost to the ages; one alabaster-hued panel embeds a god-like figure amid crystals and shells, like a devotional to a household god. Fabiola Jean-Louis, "Out of Obsidian" (L) and "Peregrine," both 2024, in "Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom" at the Gardner Museum. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Mystery, I think, is a key to Jean-Louis's work. She proposes a holistic long-view composed of known fragments, with her imaginative framework as the connective tissue. Nothing is certain, as the country's own fractious story can attest; even now, amid an eruption of gang violence there, Jean-Louis's work is dream-like aspiration of something solid to cling to amid the chaos. Advertisement As much as they might seem like artifacts, her pieces evoke ideas unstuck in the material world. 'An Entry Point to Heaven' is the title of several pieces here, each of them tethered to the unknown depths of the sea. '#3,' with its undulating frame of what might be desiccated seaweed, glitters with rivulets of aquamarine studded with tiny shells; '#2,' beside it, cradles an opaque turquoise pool in its delicate embrace. Fabiola Jean-Louis, 'An Entry Point to Heaven #1,' 2024. ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Passageways are important to Jean-Louis, a notion she returns to again and again; a pair of sculptures towers at odd angles in the main gallery, almost like guardians for 'Lwa,' just beyond. Patterning them with shells, she imagines them as undersea sirens, beckoning to the other side. She calls them 'Mermaid Portals,' a loose term for figures that are only semi-human. They're stunning and enigmatic, much like the vision she's crafted for her homeland. In the Vodou faith, spirits of the ancestors — lwa , writ large — dwell in the deep sea, surfacing when called forth by the living for guidance — or vengeance. The abyss is their home; it calls to us all, eventually. Jean-Louis proposes a choice: Where it leads — to the endless deep, or somewhere beyond it — is a matter of faith, or lack thereof. WATERS OF THE ABYSS: AN INTERSECTION OF SPIRIT AND FREEDOM Advertisement Through May 25. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way. 617-566-1401, Murray Whyte can be reached at
Boston Globe
27-01-2025
- Boston Globe
‘It's gutting.' A local artist says a thief in a ski mask stole his painting from a Somerville gallery.
'It's gutting,' said Adam Leveille, whose painting, an oil-on-linen depiction of the now-closed Nissenbaum's Auto Parts near Union Square, was one of two lifted in an apparent heist earlier this month at Somerville's Prospect Union Square building. 'I want people to have my artwork. To have somebody just be so brazen in taking it, that's the real violation,' he said in an interview. The theft is still unsolved. Somerville Police Captain Jeffrey DiGregorio said he couldn't comment on an active investigation but confirmed the department received a report that two pieces of artwork had been stolen just before 3 a.m. on Jan. 7 at that address. Jenn Libby, the building's general manager, said she couldn't comment on the investigation but was 'deeply disheartened by the recent theft of artwork.' The painting, called 'Nissenbaum, midday,' had been part of Advertisement The exhibit, called Visions of Somerville, featured a roster of more than a dozen Somerville artists and was set to run from Jan. 6 to April 1. When it launched, one painting from each artist was strung up from the ceiling by wires in a publicly accessible hallway near the building's lobby, people involved with the exhibit said. Related : Leveille said he was told by staff at the building who viewed security footage of the incident that it showed an apparent thief enter the building wearing a ski mask, slice the wires holding two paintings aloft with a knife, and then run off. Libby declined to discuss or share the purported footage and wouldn't comment on whether there was, indeed, a ski mask-wearing thief, but said in a statement that building management remains 'committed to fostering a vibrant and inclusive arts community in Union Square and will do everything in our power to ensure such an incident does not happen again.' Advertisement To protect the other artworks, the gallery was promptly taken down, said Peter Belford, who sits on the board of directors for Somerville Open Studios. 'It's disappointing. It's horrible,' he said. 'We're working to help local artists, feature local artists, and put their art into public spaces. For one person to do something that prevents us from doing that is very unfortunate.' Related : Plans to open a new gallery in the building are now in the works, the building manager and Belford said. 'We won't let this stop us from trying to bring arts to the community and support local artists,' Belford said. Why someone would steal these particular paintings is a mystery to Leveille. While he said he is proud to have a following of patrons who support his work, the painting itself likely would have sold for around $2,000. A decent amount of money, sure, but the Gardner Museum heist it was not. 'You're not running off with a Sargent painting,' he said. Building management has offered to compensate him for the value of the artwork, which he appreciates, but the painting also had significant sentimental value. Leveille said he chose to paint the decommissioned salvage yard, which closed in 2022, because he has fond memories of visiting it with his grandfather, who sourced car parts there. 'It feels personal,' he said. 'It's something that I spent a lot of time with. I put a lot of energy and emotion and hours into it.' Related : Allen Nissenbaum, who owns the auto parts property in the painting, said in an interview he hadn't seen the artwork before it was stolen but was 'honored' Leveille had created such a loving tribute. How did he feel about it being stolen? 'Pissed,' he said. Advertisement The fact that this theft happened so soon after the gallery launched and that the thief targeted his painting so quickly, Leveille said, suggests perhaps that he was being targeted. He just can't understand why. If it was someone who liked the painting but was on a budget, he said, he would have been happy to work something out with them. He's done so in the past with other potential buyers, either by offering discounts to people with limited means or by helping fans find smaller and less expensive paintings they can afford. This was different. 'It's not a conversation. It's not a negotiation. It's just literally brute force,' Leveille said. While there is no evidence yet the incidents are related, the theft has drawn comparisons to For his part, Leveille doesn't expect to see his painting again. 'Unless somebody gets busted doing something else and there's my painting on the wall,' he said. Still, he feels compelled to speak out publicly about what happened and has asked on his Instagram account and on Reddit for anyone with information about the heist, or who might have seen his painting appear somewhere, to come forward. If anything, he just wants to let potential area art thieves know they can't steal from local artists with impunity. Advertisement 'I want whoever stole it to hear that people are looking for it,' he said. 'It's not one and done, and you got away with it.' Adam Leveille posed for a portrait at his home studio in Somerville. Erin Clark/Globe Staff Spencer Buell can be reached at
