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New York Times
18-07-2025
- New York Times
The Familiar Fingerprints of a Forgotten Art Heist
When Lou Schachter visited the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 2014, he appreciated the flowers by Georgia O'Keeffe, the cityscapes from Edward Hopper and the signature splatter of Jackson Pollock. But he was most intrigued by the empty frame on one of the gallery walls. A small plaque nearby explained that in 1985, someone had cut Willem de Kooning's 'Woman-Ochre' from the frame and made off with it. No one had seen the painting since. Schachter, a corporate consultant with a homespun interest in unsolved mysteries, was fascinated by the story of one person distracting security while another took the abstract oil painting of a nude woman. He loved to write and took notes with the intention of digging into the theft someday. The de Kooning turned up before he got around to it. In 2017, it was discovered hanging behind the bedroom door of Jerome and Rita Alter, retired public schoolteachers who had died. Valued at $400,000 when it was stolen, the painting is now considered worth more than $100 million. After the painting's long restoration process, Schachter got back in his car and drove hundreds of miles from Palm Springs, Calif., to Tucson, Ariz., to see 'Woman-Ochre' where the empty frame had once been. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Beauford Delaney's Luminous Watercolors, Color Flirts With Line
I didn't go to 'In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney' expecting to see a love story. A mentor to James Baldwin, a friend to Henry Miller and the subject of five separate Georgia O'Keeffe portraits, Delaney (1901-1979) is remembered as a prolific painter of many styles. In a career that included appearances in the Harlem Renaissance and the Greenwich Village scene, 26 years in Paris, and debilitating bouts of poverty and mental illness, he produced busy, jigsaw-puzzle street scenes that Miller called 'mad with color'; glowing, somewhat sentimental portraits; and a broad range of colorful abstractions. Like Baldwin, Delaney was the gay Black son of a preacher, in Delaney's case one who traveled around the south from a base in Knoxville, Tenn. After studying art in Boston, with the help of an older painter, he made his way to New York, where he was robbed twice on his first night but determined to stay. There he made loving, slightly fantastical portraits of friends, acquaintances and important Black cultural figures. But though he drew them with confidence and care, you can see him yearning to ornament and exalt his subjects rather than just transcribe them. The 81 works and eight original sketchbooks in this extremely beguiling show demonstrate that whatever was happening elsewhere in his life, the pulsing heart of Delaney's work was the intimate, tantalizing, constantly deferred flirtation of color and line — something on clearest display in his drawings. There's plenty of background information in the wall labels and catalog essays, but the emphasis here isn't on biography or even on art historical argument, which is all to the good. It leaves more room to follow what's actually happening on the paper. Start with the line. Its confidence is unwavering, from the 1964 self-portrait in oil that opens the show to the pair of stunning self-portraits in ink on the second gallery's back wall. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
