Educational Media Reviews Online

In the largest art heist in recent history, thirteen priceless paintings were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on St. Patrick’s Day 1990. The treasures included five works by Degas, three Rembrandts, one Manet, and one Vermeer (“The Concert,” considered the world’s most valuable purloined painting). Stolen chronicles the fascinating 15-year effort to recover these paintings, while also delving into the life of the museum’s namesake who originally collected the works. Part detective story, part art lesson, it explores the reverence that great art elicits -- and the difficulty art lovers often have accepting that these treasures aren’t immune to the indignities of common theft.

At the center of the story is Harold Smith, a colorful character considered by some the world’s greatest art detective. Despite age and illness – he’s 75 and has been battling skin cancer for 50 years, a condition that has left him severely scarred – he’s a model of patience and persistence. Low-key and likable, Smith cheerfully admits he’s obsessed with the case. He travels to Boston, New York, London, Ireland, and Venice, following leads, seeking information, and interviewing a gallery of unique characters ranging from a reserved Scotland Yard retiree to a bombastic English art thief-turned-informant nicknamed “The Turbocharger.” Irish-American gangsters and the IRA, among others, are implicated in the thefts. It gets even stranger. Myles Connor, an American art thief who was in prison during the robberies, believes former associates took part, two who have since died. “Of natural causes?” asks Smith -- and for a moment it’s like we’re watching a scripted thriller. Only one died of natural causes, Connor says; the other was decapitated after being stabbed multiple times.

The bizarre twists and turns continue, Smith interceding between informants seeking deals and law enforcement seeking sentences. A United States attorney in Boston admits he must be willing to ask a difficult question: “What’s more important: the art work or a criminal prosecution?” For the numerous art historians, curators, and critics interviewed, the answer is clear. They speak elegantly, and sometimes with great emotion, about what the paintings mean to them. They take the loss personally and don’t consider it an ordinary theft – words like “hostage-taking”, “a scar”, and “an unconscionable crime” are used. The Gardner Museum, says one, “is now touched with evil.” Such strong rhetoric, we learn, could have come from the museum’s founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Gardner looms large over the film, and while Stolen deals primarily with Smith’s search for the paintings, key sections explore Gardner’s fin de siecle acquisition of the art. One of the 19th Century’s Grand Dames, Gardner (1840-1924) has been called the first great American art collector, and her museum is the only one in the world founded, bought, and designed by a woman. Through spoken correspondence between Gardner and her European friend Bernard Berenson (read by actors Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott), we experience Gardner’s great passion. Collecting art was her life’s work, and when her son died at a young age, she threw herself into it even more. As biographer Douglass Shand-Tucci notes, art offered Gardner the kind of permanence life could not. She saw her museum as far more than a mere collection; a reflection of her obsession, it became as a whole her work of art -- to such a degree that her will stipulated nothing be added to the museum or moved following her death. Smith too is obsessed, though apparently more with the hunt than the art itself. While he never expresses deep feelings for the paintings, his devotion to cracking the case is obvious. He died on February 19, 2005, working the case until the final week of his life. The paintings still have not been recovered, but rumors abound as to their whereabouts.

With its quirky characters and convoluted plot, Stolen sometimes plays more like a Hollywood thriller than a documentary, but that’s one of its charms. An entertaining mix of art appreciation and whodunit with broad appeal, Stolen is recommended for school, public, and academic library collections.