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The hunt for a stolen Jackson Pollock painting
00:34:55
Decades after a brazen art theft drove Merry White’s father to despair, federal agents closed in on the missing work. For White, the search is personal.
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Hey, there. This is Martine powers. It's Saturday, January 10th. And this is Post Reports Weekend. Today you're going to be hearing a story written, reported, and read by my colleague, Post art critic Sebastian Smee. I don't want to preempt him at all because it's a really beautiful story. So I'm just going to let Sebastian take it away from here.
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Hi, I'm Sebastian Smee. What you're going to hear in a moment. Is a story I wrote. About the theft of three works by Jackson Pollock. From the home of a Harvard professor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'll be narrating the story. It's broken into chapters. And there'll be some light music to immerse you in the piece. The story's really in three parts. It's about the special friendship. Between Jackson Pollock and the owner of the works. Reginald Isaacs. Whose daughter, Mary White. Has unpleasant memories of visiting Pollock's home on Long Island. In the years leading up to his death in a car crash. It's also about the theft itself. And it's about the recovery of two of the works. It also recounts new information about the mystery of the third work's whereabouts. I guess I wanted to tell the story not because I'm especially fascinated by art thefts. Although I know a lot of people are. But because I discovered that this particular art theft. Opened out onto some incredibly complex emotional wounds. Okay, here's the story. Mary White crumpled to the gallery floor. She'd been walking around the East Building at the National Gallery of Art in 1984. When she suddenly found herself standing in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock. She recognized the work, a 1951 painting in black enamel on canvas. Splashy but not abstract. And was suddenly so overwhelmed that she felt her legs about to give way. Number 7, 1951. As the painting is titled. Is from a brief period near the end of Pollock's life. When he was experimenting again with figurative art. On the right, you can make out a female looking figure. With a face divided almost in the manner of late Pablo Picasso. Her body is crudely drawn, shaded with a welter of different sized dots. Her work's left side, meanwhile, is a thicket of tiny tilting verticals. Punctuated by drip like splotches. Not unlike the poles in Pollock's blue poles. White knew no. 7, 1951 intimately. Because her father, Reginald Isaacs, had acquired the painting directly from Pollock. It used to hang over her bed when she was a child. White, who goes by Corky because her mother was a painting student. At Washington's Corcoran Institute when she had her remembers resenting its presence there. Like any teenage girl, she would have preferred to decorate her bedroom with her own things. But her discomfort was more acute than that. The painting reminded her of the man who created it. A man whose intense anger and volatility had made family visits to his house profoundly uncomfortable. In the late 1940s and early 50s, she, her parents, and two younger brothers used to visit Pollock and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, at their home in Springs on Long Island. On those visits, Pollock was often drunk and sometimes violent. Being in the same house as him, White felt vulnerable and unprotected. But she felt she couldn't communicate this because her parents were so proud of their friendship. They dad was always interested in proximity to fame, remembers White. He wore his proximity to Pollock like a medal. So no. 7, 1951 stayed on the wall above her bed. If the painting triggered unpleasant childhood memories, it also triggered memories of the days and weeks after. An afternoon in 1973 when thieves broke into her parents apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stole no. 7, 1951, along with two other paintings by Pollock. One of those works, a combination of paint and collaged ink drawings, is still missing. Eric Gleason of Olney Gleason, which represents Pollock's estate, told the Washington Post that depending on several factors, especially its condition, the missing artwork could be valued up to $20 million. The feeling white had that day in the National Gallery was overwhelming. A guard who saw her sit down on the gallery floor walked over to check if she was all right. When she told him the painting used to hang over her bed, he looked at White, she recalls, as if she were a nutcase. But he seemed to believe her after she stood up and showed him the label, which had her father's name on it. Reginald Isaacs. Jackson Pollock continues to divide people. He's one of the most important American cultural figures of the 20th century. As influential as Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, or Frank Sinatra. Yet even today, when people stand in front of Pollock's paintings, they're often unsure about what to make of what they're looking at. One way to think of Pollock's paintings is as traces of a sequence of actions. In one sense, a painting's always a trace. It's what remains after someone applies a paint loaded brush to canvas. But Pollock dramatized this action based aspect of creation. Here's some archival audio of Jackson Pollock speaking about his process. I enjoy working on a large canvas, placing his canvases on the floor of his studio. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting. He used a stick or turkey baster to flick and drip liquid paint onto them, as if he were drawing in the air above the canvas and letting gravity do the rest. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. Because he moved his entire body as he performed these actions. The finished paintings are sometimes described as a kind of index to a physical performance. A performance that was liberated, explosive and more instinctual than intentional. When I am painting, I have a general notion as to what I am about. Pollock was treating the canvas as an arena in which to act. As the critic Harold Rosenberg put it. Of course, for detectives and criminal lawyers, a crime scene is also like a canvas. It's an arena of past actions which may have left behind various traces, what we call forensic evidence. But just as telling as the physical traces of a crime can be the emotional traces which are often undetectable. If someone grew up with a Jackson Pollock hanging above her bed, for instance, and that painting was subsequently stolen from her family home, how would she feel about the resulting absence? Would she want to dwell on it? Or might she, because of its negative associations, wished the whole episode to vanish, leaving no trace? The Isaacs family's apartment was in Riverview, a large block at 180 degree bend in the Charles river in Cambridge in 1973 when the theft took place. Reginald Isaacs was a professor at Harvard University. Though trained as an architect, he became an internationally recognized expert in regional planning. His friendship with Pollock began in the 1940s. Before Pollock's astonishing rise to fame. Isaacs had been in East Hampton visiting a friend who took him down to the sand flats to dig for clams with a neighbour. The neighbour was so self contained that Isaacs assumed he was a hired hand or a particularly gruff Long island clamor. I didn't catch his name and I didn't know he painted, Isaacs told the Washington Post in 1983. Later, we traded some clams for a few beers and a lemon and went back to his house. Isaacs glimpsed some paintings through a swinging door. I said, my God, who made those? Pollock muttered that he was the one responsible for the paintings. Accustomed by now to people mocking his work, he was surprised when Isaac said that he loved the painting he'd seen and wanted to buy it. Isaacs, the author of a massive illustrated biography of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, was open minded when it came to art. Architects in those days knew how to do watercolors, explains his son Mark Isaacs. Dad entered his stuff in shows. He was quite good when he lost to an abstract type painting. Instead of getting upset at this newfangled thing which won when he didn't, he studied them and got to like them. As Isaacs and Pollock became close friends, Isaacs went on to buy more work directly from the artist. In those days, Pollock and Krasner often didn't have enough food on the table, so Isaac's interest was good for more than just morale. He paid the works off over time, $10, sometimes $20 a month. The two men maintained their friendship, and even as Pollock rocketed to fame, no American artist before Pollock had experienced anything like the level of exposure that came to him when Life magazine published an August 8, 1949 story under the headline, is he the greatest living painter in the United States? But celebrity was a mixed blessing for Pollock. Although he craved recognition, he wasn't mentally equipped to cope with sudden fame. Nor did the renown bring instant wealth. Pollock and Krasner continued to struggle financially. Isaacs acquired more artwork. At one time, according to Mark Isaacs, he was in possession of Lavender Mist, one of Pollock's most celebrated canvases, also now in the National Gallery of Art. But he came to feel that he couldn't afford the $150 a month payments to the artist. When on a visit to Springs, he admitted as much to Pollock. The painter took Isaacs into the studio, pulled out a portfolio of works on paper, and helped his friend pick out three more affordable things to replace Lavender Mist. Isaacs and his wife, Charlotte, came to own more than a dozen original Pollocks, both paintings and works on paper. Mary Wyatt is now a professor emerita of anthropology at Boston University and an authority on food culture. She vividly remembers the chaotic and unpleasant atmosphere in the house during her family's visits to Springs, which she came to dread. By the time of the Isaacs final visit to Springs in June 1956, Pollock was creatively blocked and consistently inebriated. His greatest champion, the influential critic Clement Greenberg, had long since withdrawn his support. Every great artist has a run, said Greenberg, and Pollock's run was over. The painter recalls Wyatt would refuse to come to the table at mealtimes or else storm off. Halfway through eating, his face was lined and puffy. His marriage to Krasner, who had recently returned to the studio to resume her own art making, was foundering, and he had started an affair with 26 year old painter Ruth Kligman. Since Pollock was unable to paint at all Krasner's return to the studio made him resentful and cruel. His temper was explosive. He'd punched holes in the wall, according to White, who also said Pollock had a Jerry built sound system with speakers throughout the small house. And he liked to play Wagner at high volume. Krasner was just barely holding it together, white says of the household. On one occasion, Pollock tried to present Mark Isaacs with a gift, an archer's bow that was clearly too big and dangerous for a young boy. Reginald Isaacs had to intervene, suspecting that Pollock wouldn't remember the gift. In the morning, Pollock enjoyed playfully wrestling with other men. Two years earlier, his ankle had snapped when he fell during a tussle with his friend and rival painter Willem de Kooning. Pollock was bigger and stronger than Isaac. So when they got to grappling, the professor always thought it a great accomplishment when he managed to stay on his feet. But on this visit, as Isaacs told an interviewer, Pollock was very corpulent. I felt something was really wrong, and I did something to him emotionally by throwing him on the soft sand in an effort to get Pollock creating again. The two men had earlier agreed that Pollock would paint a family portrait of all five Isaacs. But by the third day of the visit and after the wrestling incident, it was clear that Pollock wasn't up to it. He was too involved with the bottle, recalled Isaac. He didn't even go through the preliminaries. Isaac suggested instead that the family stop at the house on their way back to Cambridge in the fall. Then I'll really be in shape to paint, said Pollock. But two months later, on August 11, 1956, Pollock died in the car crash that also killed Kligman's friend, Edith Metzger. Kligman was the sole survivor. After hearing word of the crash, Isaacs rushed to Springs. He walked down to the beach with Krasner and five or six other people who knew the couple. They all sat on the sand in a circle, trying to figure out what to do. Isaacs then walked back up to the house alone and went to the old barn, converted by Pollock into a studio, to have a final look. Any studio takes on an uncanny aura after the artist who used it has died. Pollock's studio, which is now open to the public, was where he had his most famous breakthroughs. It felt odd to Isaacs that Pollock wasn't there. There were only dim traces of his life. Just the flies, the sunshine, the usual disorder. I couldn't believe it had happened, he later remembered at the funeral. Isaacs was one of the pallbearers. Ours was a quiet friendship, he observed, and for many years I have avoided his shows. I find it emotionally devastating. In 1973, the National Gallery of Australia purchased Pollock's Blue Poles, originally known as number 11, 1952, for a whopping $1.3 million, a sum so outrageous it smashed the record for contemporary American painting and required sign off by Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The ensuing scandal fed into a narrative about his government's financial mismanagement and ended with Whitlam's downfall amid a constitutional crisis in 1975. Never had such a picture moved and disturbed the Australian public, said art historian Patrick McCackie. The sale of Blue Poles kicked off a period of dramatic increases in valuations of modern art. Pollock's works have typified that explosion. In 2015, billionaire Kenneth Griffin reportedly paid $200 million for Number 17A, a 1948 painting by Pollock. The public, not just art dealers and collectors, became obsessed with the art market's outlandish prices. Burglars and crime gangs also took notice. On November 8, 1973, Isaacs returned home from his office at Harvard University at 3pm he changed quickly into his rowing outfit and went straight to the boathouse. Sculling on the Charles was part of his daily routine. He was prone to anxiety and depression, mired in departmental complications at Harvard and bogged down in his research, so he needed a therapeutic outlet. Rowing did the trick. After Isaacs left riverview at about 3:15pm two men came into the foyer. The day guard at the security desk was away from her station, and the men were able to gain entry to the Isaacs's apartment. It's unclear how long they were there, but by 4:45pm When Isaacs returned, they had departed, most likely using the fire escape rather than coming back through the lobby. They took with them three artworks by pollock, including number seven, 1951. Two witnesses described both men as about 6ft tall and slim and watched them put the paintings into a foreign make car. According to the Harvard Crimson, what followed for Reginald Isaacs and his family was a decade of turmoil and anxiety. Isaac's peace of mind, fragile at the best of times, was destroyed by the robbery. White remembers that before the burglary, her father would frequently bring people to the family's previous home in Cambridge's Shady Hill Square to show off his collection of Pollocks. He'd invite in strays from the street, friends from college, anyone, she said. But after the theft, he was badly rattled and terrified of publicizing his connection to Pollock. He wanted his name removed from museum wall labels and art catalogues, White said. Isaacs didn't have an elaborate insurance policy. He was an academic who happened to have made friends with an artist before he became famous. Three of the works he had acquired from Pollock, having shot up in value, were now gone. For the next 10 years, Isaacs thrashed about in a snake pit of legal and financial woes relating to insurance and liability. His notes from this decade resemble the drawings and paintings of Cy Twombly, scattered with sequences of numbers and crossed out lists and half formed semi legible sentences that peter out into nothing. They look like the traces of a man struggling to cling to sanity. When his doctor told him he would likely have a delayed reaction to the burglary, a normal response to shock, Isaacs didn't believe him. But as the legal and financial issues became more and more tangled, he suffered recurring migraines and tightness in his chest. He became nervous and distractible, admitting in a letter to his lawyer, George Abrams, that he would sometimes lose his thread while lecturing. I tend to confuse pre and post burglary events, he wrote in 1980. What keeps me going at all, George, is my responsibility to my wife, children and grandchildren. The Isaacs burglary was an early part of a wave of art thefts that grew through the 1970s, some connected to organized crime in response to the art market's exponential rise. A year after the Isaacs burglary, thieves hit the nearby home of another Harvard professor named Stuart Carey Welch, a collector and curator of Indian and Islamic art at Harvard's Fogg Museum, a fine arts lecturer and a friend of Jackie Kennedy. At Nasis, they took, among hundreds of other items, antique English silver and ancient coins, a Tang Dynasty ceramic horse, a 7th century ivory hilted sword from India and a Mughal carved dagger set with gems. The pair of thefts from these two Harvard professors were not disconnected. In fact, the Welch robbery would lead directly to the recovery of the first and Most valuable of Izaak's three Pollux, the National Gallery's no. 7, 1951. In February 1975, Isaac's attorney, Abrams, who had also been retained by the Welches, received a call from Cambridge Detective James A. Roscoe, who had recovered coins stolen from the Fogg Museum. Roscoe said he had a lead in the Welch case. A man named Donald Smoothie Smoot, who had connections to the Winter Hill crime gang based in Somerville, Massachusetts, had told a state policeman at Boston's Logan International Airport that for a reward he could facilitate the Return of the Welch's stolen items. Smoot was a 43 year old high stakes gambler who later testified against the Angelo family, members of La Cosa nostra in a 1985 racketeering case. He lost a leg soon after when his car exploded. Welch agreed to put up $5,000 and Roscoe and his partner, Fidela Centrella, set up a sting. On March 5, 1975, when Daniel E. Levin, 25, and Patrick L. Dunn, 24, tried to set up a sale of some of the stolen Welch items in Smut's East Boston garage, police swept in and arrested the men. Abrams thought there was a chance the pair might also have been involved with the theft of Isaac's Pollux. So when the case went to trial, he invited Isaacs to the Cambridge District courtroom. Isaacs was reluctant to come, but when he did, he immediately recognized Levin. He waved Abrams over and said he'd seen Levin more than once around the Riverview apartment in the week before before the robbery 18 months earlier. Abrams relayed this to the judge, who said that if the defendants could provide information leading to the return of the Pollux, he would consider leniency. Two days later, Cambridge police received a tip. If they went to a specific room in a hotel in nearby Newton, they might find something of interest. When police entered the room, they found Pollock's no. 7, 1951. The work, the same one now in the National Gallery, had been removed from its lattice frame, folded and rolled up like a rug, put in a plastic trash bag and apparently buried. The bag was covered with dirt. They took the painting back to the Cambridge police station, where Isaacs confirmed that it was one of the three stolen paintings he had acquired from his famous friend. Two stolen Pollocks were still missing, but recovering them would prove far more difficult. After the Welch theft trial, Abrams hoped Dun, who had been found not guilty, might be able to lead them to the other stolen works. But that route was cut short when Dunn was found dead from an overdose. It was a suspicious death, said Abrams, but there was no determination as far as I know, whether that suspicion was justified. When number seven, 1951 had been recovered from the hotel room in Newton, Isaac sued his building's trustees and their insurer on Abram's advice, alleging that negligent security had facilitated the theft. According to Abrams, police suspected an inside job. For a long time, Isaacs dragged his heels. He wanted to drop the suit. He was afraid of publicity, stressed about money and suffering from bad migraines. But Abrams convinced him to persist. The 1980 trial resulted in a greater valuation for the work around the $1 million, more than five times the defense's estimate, and a settlement that left Isaacs and Abrams sharing $700,000 plus title to the two missing paintings, should they be recovered. Through the mid-70s, the rash of art thefts in New England continued. Even as Abrams helped Isaacs and Welch navigate their burglaries, his own home was also raided. He and his wife, Maeda, were building a formidable collection of Dutch and Flemish art. Police called him home from a summer trip to find some 17 paintings and 113 drawings vanished, many cut from their frames, some of which were left behind and spattered with blood, recalled Abrams. The culprits were two amateurish young men. The works were duly recovered. This theft was apparently pure coincidence. The next high profile break in, Abrams believes, was not. In July 1976, thieves quietly removed art from the home of Harvard's president, Derek Bock, while the Bock slept upstairs. Two of those paintings, according to the FBI, were taken to Rhode Island. Then, in May 1991, just over a year after the disastrous theft at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Connecticut lawyer representing an anonymous possessor brought a work to Christie's auction house in New York. The piece looked like a Pollock. It was a loose skein of mostly straight black lines and scattered drips in watercolour ink and lacquer on heavy white paper. Together, Christie's and the lawyer submitted it to the Pollock Authentication Board. To the board committee, the work looked dubious. It seemed to be inscribed with To Peg and Family. They assumed this to be a reference to Peggy Guggenheim, Pollock's early champion. But there was no record of Pollock having anything to do with Guggenheim's family. And Guggenheim had left for Venice two years before the work was made. They rejected it as inauthentic. Two years later, when it resurfaced at the Burt Gallery in Providence, Rhode island authenticators reconsidered. Could the Rhode island connection link it to the 1973 Isaacs theft? The scrawled dedication wasn't to Peg and Family, the committee now realised, but to Reg and Family. They also discovered an old photograph of the work in Pollock's studio. The photograph clinched it. This was the second missing work. Number 21, Untitled with Poles, 1949. The painting went into the custody of the FBI, pending legal proceedings. Unfortunately, by the time of the work's recovery, Isaacs was no longer around to benefit. In 1986, two years after the National Gallery acquired the first recovered Pollock no. 7, 1951, he suffered a massive heart attack and died. Number 21 was sold for $500,000 according to Abrams, who says he got about 40% of the money. Most of the remainder, according to Isaac's son Henry, went toward the care of Isaac's aging widow Charlotte. Now only one of the three Pollock paintings stolen from Riverview remained missing. Painting 1028, 1948. Mary White's younger brothers Mark and Henry both took up painting. Henry Isaacs is a well known Vermont based painter and both speak about the influence Pollock had on their art. Although Mary has mostly tried to forget Pollock, she inherited his record collection and very various other low value items, including letters to her father by Pollock from Isaacs. Meanwhile, she can't help but be acutely conscious that if the third work were recovered, she and her children, and possibly their children might be financially secure for life. This prospect became a distinct possibility in 2014 when a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations in Paris received a tip from a source representing an organization in possession of stolen artworks willing to return them in exchange for compensation. Homeland Security will not reveal the source, the organization or the type of compensation they sought for fear of compromising agents in the field. But according to Kate Pote, an HSI spokesperson, the organization was willing to coordinate the return of one stolen work to demonstrate their bona fides. That work was Picasso's La Coiffeuse, a small Cubist painting from 1911. It had been reported stolen in 2001 after a loan request revealed it was missing from storage at the Centre Georges Pompidou, a major museum in Paris. On December 17, Robert shipped the painting from an address in Belgium to a climate controlled warehouse in Long island city. A FedEx customs form valued the work at €30. It was actually worth $15 million, indicating in the description that it was art craft and including the words Joyeux Noel, Merry Christmas. The next day when it arrived in Newark, federal agents intercepted it. The Picasso was eventually returned to the French government at a ceremony held at the French Embassy in Washington D.C. to announce the recovery. No one mentioned the larger arrangement, but that was the plan all along. And sure enough, the source soon contacted Homeland Security Investigations again to arrange for the return of another work, the missing Pollock stolen from Reginald and Charlotte Isaac's home in 1973. The source again provided instructions for special agents to intercept the Pollock. The agents followed those initial instructions, but the source went silent. According to an HSI statement, no further actionable leads were able to be developed. And so painting 1028, 1948, the third painting stolen from the Isaacs home is still missing. Two summers ago, Mary White was visiting friends Linda Stein, a sculptor, and her wife, the Harvard Japanologist Helen Hardaker in East Hampton. How close is the Pollock Krasner house? White asked Stein. Ten minutes, replied Stein. Okay, said White. Let's go. Pollock had been an important part of her father's life in the days after the artist died in a car crash. Isaacs, finding himself alone in Pollock's studio, had stared at the paint splattered floor, dismayed by his friend's poignant absence. But for Mary, the house had always meant something different the artist's tantrums and intimidation, his chaotic presence, the sense she had of being unsafe and unprotected by her parents. As a kid, when something like that happens, you're not sure how you're feeling, she explained, sitting at a table in her Cambridge home. In the meantime, she had watched as Pollock became the most famous of all American modern artists. The subsequent theft of three Pollocks from her parents home had only added to the drama that had enveloped her family. So I have a complicated set of feelings around him, she explained now. When White and her friends drove the 10 minutes to the Pollock Krasner house, a place she hadn't visited in almost 70 years, she had armed herself against dramatic feelings. She felt calm and simply curious. As she walked around the property, White noticed a few things about the house that were different. But her strongest memories of being there as a teenage girl were sparked only when she entered the studio and looked intently at the studio floor, still spattered with Pollock's paint. When they went into the gift shop, she noticed that the only postcard for sale was number seven, 1951, the recovered painting that is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. I said to my friends, this painting was hanging over my bed in my bedroom, remembers White. Everyone gasped. Then we went to have coffee. This story was reported and read by me, Sebastian Smee and produced by Bishop Sand.
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That's it for Post Reports weekend. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday with more stories from the Washington Post.
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