A Boston Theft Reflects

In its way, the sensational heist of old-master paintings, including a Vermeer and two Rembrandts, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston last week showed that there is still some respect for the law. All the thieves needed was two rented cops' uniforms and some flimflam at the security entrance on a Saturday night, and -- presto! -- in they walked. They ) immobilized the two night guards, ignored the museum's security system (which was not connected to the police precinct) and then spent two hours pulling paintings off the walls and out of their frames. Then exeunt: a clean getaway.

At most, only two of the works stolen from the slightly frayed but beloved museum, built as a re-creation of a Venetian palace in 1903, have real significance in art history. Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee is his only seapiece, and the Vermeer Concert is, well, a Vermeer: a sublime patch of silence and visual harmony washed in pearly light, one of only 32 known works by the master. The other "Rembrandt" painting, of a husband and wife, is probably by one of his pupils; the French works -- one by Manet and several by Degas -- vary from slight to trivial. It seems quite clear that the thieves had very little idea of what to go after, since the glory of the Gardner Museum is its Italian paintings, starting at the top with Titian's Rape of Europa, regarded by some as the greatest single Italian Renaissance canvas in the U.S. and bought by the formidable "Mrs. Jack" Gardner for what seemed to her and everyone else an enormous price in 1896: just under $100,000.

The morning after the theft, there were outbursts of fantasy about a supergang of ultraprofessionals, specialists in pinching masterpieces for some Dr. No in a remote art bunker outside Osaka, Bogota or Geneva. Even the museum's director, Anne Hawley, suggested that the robbers had been following a "hit list" given them by a mastermind collector. But it seems unlikely. Apart from a Greek plutocrat who tried, and failed, to commission some heavies to lift a Raphael from a museum in Budapest in 1983, no trace of this glamorous fiction has ever been found in real life. This was more like the Gang That Couldn't See Straight -- which soothes no anxieties about the fate of the heisted artworks.

The Gardner paintings would be worth a tidy sum on the legitimate art market, though nowhere near the ridiculously exaggerated figure of $200 million or so that was trumpeted all last week on the front pages and TV. The Vermeer could be worth $70 million, the Rembrandt seapiece $15 million and the rest a lot less: the five Degas being trivial and the Manet not much better. So why the inflation? It is a standard police technique to increase publicity and make fencing more difficult for the thieves, who are apt to get their notions of value from press reports. (If one fence will not pay, the reasoning goes, the villains will try others, increasing their exposure each time.)