Watching The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC iPlayer) is a hugely frustrating way to spend an hour.
At the end of an IKEA assembly puzzle of equal length, you have a piece of furniture. At the end of this documentary, all you have are the same questions that were posed at the beginning: Where are the bloody paintings, and who took them?
The show, led by veteran art journalist, John Wilson, examines the case of the most spectacular art heist in history: the theft of fourteen pictures from the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, in Boston, in 1990. Estimates are that the paintings are now worth nearly a billion dollars. Of course, these are sensationalised prices. The major paintings were cut from their frames, and probably rolled, possibly even folded. The prints and watercolours may have fared better, but the major paintings are damaged goods and have probably not been looked after in the intervening thirty years.
The circumstances of the robbery are well-documented, so I am not going into that here. I will, however, declare a personal interest in the escapade as, growing up not far from Boston, I knew the ISG Museum from an early age and well remember seeing the stolen paintings several times. [This was so long ago that there was still the odd attendant who knew Mrs Gardner, who died in 1924.]I have also visited the empty frames, and as was noted in the documentary, it was like visiting a grave.
The problem with the whole documentary is that it’s something of a shaggy dog story. Wilson teams up with a retired detective from the Metropolitan Police Art Squad, Charley Hill, who claims to have received strong information from well-known Irish gangsters with IRA connections (one is described as the person who has been “shot more times than anyone else in the Republic” and later as a “sieve” due to the number of bullet holes).
For most of the hour, attempts are made to contact the lead suspect both directly and through various underground links.
Back in the United States, there is a $10 million reward for the recovery of the paintings and the extraordinary provision that the criminal’s lawyers can handle the exchange. The Americans (Boston police and FBI) believe the theft was the work of a Italian mob an that the paintings are still stateside. Wilson and Hill believe in the Irish connection.
Ultimately, there is an interview with a “contact” who is both anonymous and unseen. He says he doesn’t know where the pictures are, who really has them, and states that if they are hidden in the walls of a house in a Dublin suburb, then they will be there for many more years.
The informant continues to say that there is one hope that
someone seeing the documentary will be moved to release some information, and,
of course, Wilson and Hill endorse that wish.
Wait a minute!
Did I just catch a whiff of fish?
A TV crew meanders across the Atlantic shooting film of anything they can think of, follow “promising leads” and try to piece together actual information from handfuls of nothing, but finally find someone who is content to say this documentary presents a shred of hope?
As a sleight of hand, this is only a gerbil coming out of the hat, but it will have to do for now, and it goes some way to justify spending the time and money on the production.
But maybe only for half an hour.
Thirty years is a long time for a collection of artworks to
be missing. None of them has been found; been reported to have been seen; or appear
to have changed hands. The statute of limitations on theft has expired.
There is a strong suspicion that these pictures were stolen to order and are in a private vault or secure art warehouse (hopefully not the one where Saatchi lost so much).
No doubt they will surface again one day, and it is good that people like Wilson and Hill follow every possibility. This just wasn’t very entertaining or informative.
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