Curators and art theft

January 28, 2019 11:35 AM

Has there ever been a case of a curator at an arts museum involved in an art theft? I know of heists involving security guards and such, but I'm wondering if there were ever thefts involving higher ups. (I'm writing a mystery story and need some case histories to explore!)
posted by storybored to Law & Government (19 answers total)

Marion True, former curator at the Getty, was accused of conspiracy to commit art theft by the Italian government. She later wrote a memoir, which received a somewhat mixed reception. (First link to the Washington Post, the other two to Hyperallergic.)
posted by prewar lemonade at 11:49 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

Are rare books close enough to art?
posted by jacquilynne at 11:57 AM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is a history museum rather than an art museum, though I'd argue a lot of these pieces are also art--but in any case, David Wooley, at the time curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society Museum, stole hundreds of Native American artifacts over time, to sell and to keep. And then when he left that museum to be curator at the George W. Brown Jr. Ojibwe Museum and Cultural Center in Lac du Flambeau, he stole at least one item from there as well.

https://archive.archaeology.org/0111/newsbriefs/wooley.html
https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/stolen-artifact-returned-to-historical-society/article_926bd540-af64-503c-8372-002469a5bf2c.html
http://www.nathpo.org/News/Legal/News-Legal_Issues12.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2010/2/22/rmw-002-missing-artifacts-wisconsin-historical-society/
posted by theatro at 11:58 AM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

I should add that museums around the world are riddled with cases of suspected theft like mold through bleu cheese, but it's generally the "institution acquired items through shady means or outright appropriation" stealing from others kinda theft rather than the "sexy heist turns out to be an inside job" kind...are you looking just for the latter?
posted by prewar lemonade at 11:59 AM on January 28, 2019

Response by poster: Any and all kinds of purloining, shady acquisition and double dealing welcome!
posted by storybored at 12:09 PM on January 28, 2019

Reminds me of the Colin Firth film, Gambit.
posted by terrapin at 12:11 PM on January 28, 2019 [1 favorite]

Smithsonian Curator Pleads Guilty To Stealing Museum Artifacts
Thief was an assistant curator (Karl S. Schneide) at the Air & Space museum; thefts included "painted aviation fabrics that were once displayed on World War I airplanes." The neat backstory involves a tweedy American History professor:

The trail that led to Mr. Schneide twisted like the plot of a Hitchcock film. It began with a Pennsylvania dealer in World War I artifacts, moved to the archives of an expert in military aircraft fabrics in Washington State, and then went to a Smithsonian warehouse in suburban Maryland from which most of the objects were stolen. [...]

To try to gauge the value of the objects, Professor Hall telephoned an expert in aviation fabrics, Alan D. Toelle, in Bellevue, Wash. Mr. Toelle said the pieces were exactly like ones he remembered seeing several years earlier when he was researching World War I fabrics at the Smithsonian's storage buildings in suburban Maryland.

"Of all the people John Hall could have called, he happened to call me," Mr. Toelle said in a recent interview. "That was unfortunate for Schneide. Nobody else had that information at their fingertips. I'm the only one who had ever catalogued this stuff in the sense of being able to swear on a stack of Bibles this is what it is."

Professor Hall alerted the FBI, and he wound up wearing a wire in the crucial sting operation. (NYTimes)
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:14 PM on January 28, 2019 [5 favorites]

I'm too tied up to flesh out my memory, but my vague recollection is that there's at least been suspicions of insider participation in the Isabella Gardner heist -- though nothing reaching the level of legal jeopardy. Still, reading up on that one might be fun.

It's definitely my favorite art heist. (Doesn't everyone have a favorite art heist?)
posted by uberchet at 12:19 PM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

I can't recall the name right now, but I remember reading about a curator in a museum in China who began stealing paintings from the museum and replacing them with his own forgeries.

Then noticed someone else was stealing his forgeries and replacing them with other forgeries.
posted by lharmon at 12:19 PM on January 28, 2019 [8 favorites]

Here's the story about the Chinese curator who's forgeries were forged.
posted by OrangeDisk at 12:23 PM on January 28, 2019 [10 favorites]

Some local coverage on the library/rare book theft mentioned above:
June 29, July 20, July 20 - 2nd, August 2.
posted by librarianamy at 12:32 PM on January 28, 2019 [2 favorites]

but my vague recollection is that there's at least been suspicions of insider participation in the Isabella Gardner heist -- though nothing reaching the level of legal jeopardy.

The theory of insider participation in the Gardner heist has to do with the security guards, not with the curatorial staff. See the Boston Globe's recounting of six theories of the heist.
posted by Jahaza at 1:59 PM on January 28, 2019 [4 favorites]

When I was in college, one of my favorite professors came across press coverage of the prosecution of one of his graduate profs, who stole pages of an illuminated manuscript -- from the Vatican.
posted by pixiecrinkle at 2:41 PM on January 28, 2019

I cobbled together a post on rare book theft a while back, and there are bunch of links to inside jobs, particularly the Girolamini Library thefts, where the library director had stolen from it quite extensively, if ham-fistedly: More than one blown cover.

Travis McDade, who follows such thefts quite closely, had this to say:

On Sunday, the New York Times reported on the wholesale looting of the prestigious Girolamini Library in Naples, Italy, by its director, Marino Massimo de Caro. He seems to have treated the place as his own personal collection, stealing and selling hundreds — maybe thousands — of rare and antiquarian books during his 11 month tenure. This has provoked the normal amount of head-shaking and hand-wringing. But what is most striking — aside from the embarrassing appointment of the unqualified de Caro to the job in the first place — is how terrible a thief he was.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:45 PM on January 28, 2019

Oh! And there was this great post about the Giolamini thefts previously:

The dark side of the moon

posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:47 PM on January 28, 2019

No specific examples, but YES. Thing is though, most larger museums these days it's not the Curator in direct charge of the art/objects. It's a Collections Manager or even maybe a Registrar. The Curator is the content expert, but often they're not the person who takes care of things like legal paperwork, maintaining documentation, knowing where the things are stored etc. A Curator may not even be allowed to keep keys to storage, or have after hours access to galleries. As a Collection Manager, I am always very careful to instill in interns that we have to be super transparent about documenting what we do, because if something goes missing, we're the first one suspected. We had easiest access to both the stuff and the paperwork about it.
posted by AliceBlue at 3:18 PM on January 28, 2019 [3 favorites]

Yes, I once knew a guy who did this. He sort of disappeared after his sentence, so I can't tell you anything.
posted by mumimor at 4:22 PM on January 28, 2019

I don't think this ever made the papers, but the largeish state historical society where I once worked had an incident where a collections manager got pulled over for a traffic violation, acted weird, and when the state patrol searched his car they found a bunch of valuable antique guns in his trunk that he'd swiped from the historical society.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 7:55 AM on January 29, 2019

At Iowa's Effigy Mounds National Monument, the park's then-superintendent Thomas Munson "stole the remains of 41 people from the museum's collection. Munson and another employee loaded two boxes containing more than 2,000 bones into his car. He brought them to his home in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and he stored them in his garage [...] To thwart the [Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act], Munson decided to remove skeletal prehistoric human remains from the museum collection in an attempt to maintain possession of any associated funerary objects that might otherwise follow the human remains back to a tribe."
posted by nicebookrack at 8:36 PM on February 3, 2019