Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners

Sandy Nairne

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781861899606
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

In 1994 two important paintings by J.M.W. Turner—then valued at twenty-four million pounds—were stolen from a German public gallery while on loan from Tate Britain. In this vivid, personal account, Sandy Nairne who was then Director of Programmes at the Tate and became centrally involved in the pursuit of the paintings and the negotiations for their return, retells this complex, 8-year, cloak-and-dagger story, which finally concluded in 2002 with the pictures returning to public display at the Tate. In addition to this thrilling narrative, Nairne unravels stories of other high-value art thefts, puzzling what motivates a thief to steal a well-known work of art that cannot be sold, even on the black market. Nairne also examines the role of art theft within the larger underworld of international looting and illicit deals among art and antique collectors. The art heist, of course, is a popular theme of crime novels and films, and Nairne considers these depictions as well, investigating the imaginative construction of the art thief, the specialist detective, and the mysterious collector. Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners is a compelling, real-life detective story that will keep both art and mystery lovers eagerly turning pages.

Part One

one

Loss

July 1994

On Friday, 29 July 1994, I was woken early. A call came from Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate, to tell me that two important late Turner paintings had been stolen while on exhibition in Germany. Sabine Schulze, curator at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, had rung in the night, in a distraught state, trying to contact someone. She got through to the 24-hour security office at Millbank, and a call was made to a Turner curator, David Blayney Brown, who in considerable shock had then passed on the dreadful news to Nick.

‘Bring your passport with you’, was Nick’s instruction to me. I was one of his two deputies appointed at the start of that year to boost the Tate’s senior team, since the planning for creating Tate Modern was stepping up a gear. I was now in charge of all the exhibitions and programmes, but had also worked with Nick twenty years previously at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. We trusted each other completely, and I suppose I was in line for unusual requests.

An early meeting in Nick’s office – facing the Thames above the front of the Gallery at Millbank – led quickly to decisions about a draft response for the press, and who to call: the Department of National Heritage, the Foreign Office and the British Consulate in Frankfurt. It was clear that because this was such a serious loss, I should take the next flight to Frankfurt. With the help of the Tate’s senior paintings conservators, Alexander Dunluce and Roy Perry, I hastily assembled a Turner catalogue, an envelope of black-and-white photographs, conservation reports (crucial material for the identification of paintings), contact numbers – and my passport. The two stolen paintings were Shade and Darkness – The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, numbers 531 and 532. They might have the superficial appearance of strange, semi-abstract swirls of paint, but the loan file revealed that they were valued at £24 million, and because they were on loan to an exhibition organized by the Schirn Kunsthalle, they were fully insured with a reputable insurance company.

In mid-flight the shock of the theft began to sink in. I tried to think ahead – I knew little about art theft, but I wondered whether this might be a political move. Could the paintings have been taken as a form of kidnap to support some protest or cause? Why would two Turner paintings, however valuable, be a specific target? And of course the obvious question circled in my mind as to how there could have been such an appalling lapse in security. I was familiar with Frankfurt as a city to visit for viewing exhibitions of contemporary art, but now it felt very different – more than a little hostile. The process of preparing to ask so many difficult questions was strangely numbing.

At the Schirn Kunsthalle I was greeted by the head of security, with obvious embarrassment. ‘I am so sorry’ was well meant but somewhat inadequate. I learned that a small painting by Caspar David Friedrich lent by the Hamburg Kunsthalle had also been taken. I toured the main part of the building – a rather plain late modern piece of architecture tucked into the historic centre of Frankfurt – before seeing the special exhibition area in which the exhibition, Goethe and the Visual Arts, was hung and to which the Tate’s two Turner paintings had been lent. We started with the front entrance door of the Kunsthalle, locked by the night security guard at 10.10 p.m. the previous night after the last of the evening visitors had departed. We followed the route by which the guard, after seeing out the public and dispatching the fourteen gallery security staff – all employed by Eufinger, a Frankfurt security firm – had picked up the cash from the ticket desk till and gone upstairs to lock it away. I saw the onward route taken by the guard, surrounded, so it appeared to me, with places where thieves might hide after closing time – the back stairs? Behind partitions on the mezzanine? An entry point from the sister institution, the Music School? Any of these seemed workable as places from which to launch an internal attack. It was already clear that this theft was of the kind known as a ‘stay-behind’.

We viewed the place where the guard was actually attacked and held, near the entrance to the exhibition, tied up in a cleaning cupboard. Walking into the top-floor exhibition space itself, there ahead of me was the empty end wall with a poignant pair of blank spaces. Nearby was a smaller space from which Caspar David Friedrich’s Nebelschwaden had been stolen. These areas of wall looked very bare, like exclamation marks, stark and shockingly blank, giving nothing away about who had been there and why. It is an image that has not faded in my mind.

The thieves had entered the gallery towards the end of the day, staying behind after hours and overcoming the night guard. But how did they get out again? It seemed by using the guard’s keys, unlocking the back entrance area and opening the big doors, so gaining access to the goods lift and from there to the loading bay. This might have been fairly straightforward, but, crucially, it was possible only with knowledge of the security system and the internal layout to execute the operation swiftly. While removing the paintings, the three men (two thieves and the waiting driver as it later emerged) would have been listening to the guard’s radio, connected to Eufinger’s headquarters. This was their way of knowing whether any suspicions had been aroused.

Did the thieves have a more ambitious plan? Had they been commissioned to take more works? Did they also intend to take a painting by Jacques-Louis David or a Claude Lorrain, or even the large and hefty – and hugely valuable – Raphael painting hanging only 15 feet away? Had they in fact been surprised? Was the gallery more vulnerable during evening hours? And how did they actually get away from the building? The exit route within the Kunsthalle building was clear: down and out through the goods lift and straight into a van alongside the loading bay. Such a city-bound building has no perimeter fence, no contained defensible space and no specific physical barrier surrounding it. Looking at it on that Friday afternoon either the security system or the personnel, or both, were compromised. Though highly risky, a theft was quite possible – just unbelievably bold.

Later, I was given the timing by the Frankfurt police – the minutes and seconds of what was discovered at the start of the police investigation – 22.10 the front doors were locked; 22.51 an alert was raised at Eufinger’s head office; 22.55 the police had been called, who then contacted the gallery staff; 23.15 Dr Schulze, the Kunsthalle’s curator, arrived with the acting director, Helmut Szeemann, and his head of security. When they realized which works were missing, a call was made to the Tate in London. There was undoubtedly a delay while Tate security staff tried to make sense of a confused-sounding woman from Germany saying that two Turner paintings had been stolen.

I questioned the Schirn Kunsthalle staff, all of whom were over-wrought and quietly apologetic – how could they make excuses for ‘letting’ a £24 million theft take place? – but they had very little information. Then I was taken to the office of chief investigator Herr Bernd Paul at the nearby Frankfurt police headquarters, accompanied by Szeemann, a woman from the city cultural department (which owns and runs the Kunsthalle) and Michael Hall, the British consul. Sitting in a swelteringly hot office, the stolid Herr Paul set out what he had done so far, and what he was about to do: ‘We will be accumulating every possible piece of evidence of what happened last night in and near the Kunsthalle. And we will be pursuing the many contacts we have in the Frankfurt underworld, to find out who may have planned this.’ It emerged that he was a specialist in blackmail and ransom work, and turning calmly to me he said: ‘Your pictures have been taken hostage.’ I guessed that he was probably right, but I had no experience against which to compare it.

His proposition implied that it was a spontaneous theft, and unlikely to have been commissioned by a ‘hidden’ collector of the kind so often imagined in the media, or undertaken by political extremists trying to embarrass or pressurize the German government. Herr Paul elaborated on the work to come: sifting information from cameras at the nearby underground car parks in central Frankfurt; trying to contact anyone visiting the Kunsthalle and arts complex that evening and interviewing all of Eufinger’s present and past staff. I was trying hard – in the oppressive heat – to think of the main questions, and trying to convey fully to this calm, polite man that these were precious, national treasures. I wanted to explore whether he thought that they had already been shifted to an international black market (remembering occasional half-read Sunday supplement articles about stolen art). How could I convey a sense of urgency, that the very best efforts of his staff needed to be redoubled to find the paintings before they disappeared beyond the reach of police investigators? ‘These are two of the most important works by Britain’s single most important artist’, I said. ‘They are literally irreplaceable and priceless.’ The consul backed me up politely, but I was not sure that Herr Paul took in his importance. It all seemed curiously out of time, as if we were setting in train an investigation to be carried out by a classic sleuth from the pre-war period, a Hercule Poirot.

After registering my contact details with the police, the Consulate and the Schirn Kunsthalle, there was no more to be done and I flew back to London that evening feeling very pessimistic. I rang Nick from Terminal 3 at Heathrow and gave him a quick update. We spoke again on Saturday. Having known Nick for so many years, I was able to speak frankly about the difficulties that the Tate faced: ‘We are in the hands of police and investigators who appear to see the importance of this, but who may not be able to marshal sufficient resources.’ The theft might be highly embarrassing for the city of Frankfurt, but losing two outstanding Turner paintings was a major loss for the Tate, and for Britain, never mind that it was not directly the Gallery’s own fault. At least Nick was used to dealing with information that was unexpected or unwelcome.

I telephoned Helmut Szeemann over the weekend, to get an account of the visit of Mark Dalrymple, the loss adjuster from Tyler & Co., employed by the insurance syndicate from Lloyd’s. Dalrymple had spent the whole of Saturday in Frankfurt and had gone over everything in great detail. Szeemann offered me further details about what might have taken place, which were subsequently confirmed by Dalrymple:

We think there was an interruption during the process of the theft. The third man, the driver, seems to have been holding the guard while the other two unscrewed the paintings from the wall of the exhibition room. I wondered if there was a connection with the poster for the Goethe exhibition. The chosen image was one of the two paintings by Turner.¹

He told me that on Monday evening the police were planning a reconstruction. Perhaps this would provide more information and uncover some witnesses, although it was not clear that anyone had actually seen anything happening that was out of the ordinary that Thursday evening. As I mused on what we knew – on the use of inside information, the apparent planning of the operation – it brought me no nearer to who might have been this determined. But maybe the motive was simple: to make money out of taking very high-value paintings, whether by ransom, or as collateral. How could we find out?

On the Saturday morning I gave an interview to Radio 5 over the phone from home. Eric Shanes, then President of the Turner Society, was in the studio. Luckily, he was quite low-key about questions of responsibility and the vetting of venues taking loans from national collections, and I said my piece about the tragic loss and tried to convey an emphasis on the criminal act. Even as I was questioned about the theft it was apparent to me that a romantic narrative could be pervasive: distorting information and absorbing some of the shock of such a large-scale loss. I soon learned how easy it was for even well-informed media presenters to focus on the ‘difficulty’ of the break-in (or out, as in this case), from the possible ‘outsider’ position of the thieves, from the general sense of excitement surrounding the idea of an investigation, the thrill of the chase and the contrast between the large art institution and the bravery of an intrepid individual thief. Not that six minutes on Radio 5 Live could really explore this territory; nor could it convey anything of the real importance of Turner or these two specific paintings.

J. M. W. Turner and his Legacy

Introduced today to the man who beyond all doubt is the greatest of the age; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, in every branch of scenic knowledge; at once the painter and poet of the day, J.M.W. Turner. Everybody had described him to me as coarse, boorish, unintellectual, vulgar. This I knew to be impossible. I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered, matter-of-fact, English-minded-gentleman: good-natured evidently, bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of his mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.²

– John Ruskin, June 1840

The two paintings stolen that Thursday night in Frankfurt, Shade and Darkness – The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, are critically important paintings by Turner. The influential art critic Ruskin would have recognized them as part of the defining experimental character of his genius. They sit within the later phase in Turner’s work, creating canvases highly regarded subsequently for their semi-abstract and proto-modern effects.

Although throughout his career there had been ambivalence about Turner’s more innovative work when it was first exhibited, his reputation was still immense. On the day after his large-scale funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral in 1852, The Times surmised:

J.M.W. Turner, Shade and Darkness – The Evening of the Deluge, oil on canvas, 78.7 × 78.1 cm, exhibited 1843. Tate Collection.

Long ere his death he had the felicity of knowing that his name and his works were regarded with that reverential respect and estimation which is given to other artists by posterity alone . . . Even those who could only sneer and smile at the erratic blaze of his colour . . . lingered minute after minute before the last incomprehensible ‘Turner’ that gleamed on the walls of the Academy.³

Turner’s exceptional status as a British artist involved in the nineteenth-century European Romanticism movement, who also reinvented landscape painting, made the theft of these paintings a calamity not only for the Tate. It was also a massive loss to the nation and arguably to art worldwide. The fact that these two paintings were part of the Turner Bequest – those works he regarded as his most important paintings that he retained or re-purchased in order to assemble the most significant gift by any artist to the nation – added further significance to the loss.⁴

J.M.W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, oil on canvas, 78.7 × 78.7 cm, exhibited 1843. Tate Collection.

However abstracted to twenty-first-century eyes, the paintings were intended as depictions of biblical events and as a riposte to the ideas of the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as Turner understood them through his reading (and annotation) of a recent translation of the Theory of Colours. When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1843, and viewed by the young critic John Ruskin, the two paintings were regarded as both controversial and visionary. They allude to ideas of cataclysm and renewal represented by the biblical event of the Flood and the morning after, and are rich with symbolic connotations. They refer to those who are saved and those drowned; the idea of Moses writing the account of the birth of man; and the position of the serpent as the embodiment of evil but containing the medical power of healing. Such allusions are magnified by Turner’s addition of his own poetry to the works when first exhibited, extracted from his poetic compendium The Fallacies of Hope. The idea of painting being linked to poetic lines was not unusual. With Shade and Darkness were the lines:

The moon put forth her sign of woe unheeded;
But disobedience slept; the dark’ning Deluge closed around,
And the last token came: the giant framework ...