30 Years Later
As the title would suggest, we’re going to talk about a painting today that was stolen in 1988, recovered in 2018, and the long, winding road it took to finally get it back.
The Painting
For some context, the painting we’re talking about today is Marc Chagall’s Othello and Desdemona, painted in 1911, depicting a scene from the Shakespeare play, Othello. Truthfully, that’s all you really need to know about it.
The Heist
In 1988, Ernest “Pick” Heller and his wife Rose “Red” Heller lived in an apartment in New York City filled with paintings, Othello and Desdemona included, sculptures, and other art objects, including jewelry and silverware. After a lifetime of collecting the couple owned “21 paintings and 12 sculptures in all, including works by August Renoir, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, and Edward Hopper” (Cascone, 2018).
Then aged 85 and 88, respectively, the Hellers returned from their annual two-month trip to Colorado to find their apartment had been completely looted. They lost carpets, paintings, jewelry, and silverware in the heist and while they loved it all they were especially devastated to loose Chagall’s 1911 Othello and Desdemona. At the time the stolen property was collectively worth around $600,000, which would come out to around $1.3 million today. The couple had an alarm system installed in their apartment but there were no signs of a break-in, so from the beginning it seemed like an inside job done by someone with regular access to the building, alarm systems, and knowledge of when the tenants were going to be away.
The Recovery
The recovery process for this painting was slow but considering that in the beginning no one thought anything stolen from the Hellers would be found, it’s better than nothing!
The journey starts in the late 1989s or early 1990s when “Person 1” approached “Person 2” (that’s how they’re referred to in the court documents) to get some help selling the stolen Chagall to people involved in a Bulgarian organized crime ring. The deal ended up falling through after Person 1 tried to cut Person 2 out of the deal that they helped orchestrate. Later, Person 1 accused Person 2 of stealing Othello and Desdemona from them, as Person 2 was in possession of the painting before the deal fell through.
Person 2 then stored the painting in a homemade box in his attic, labelled “Misc. High School Artwork”. In 2011 and again in 2017, Person 2 brought the painting to a gallery in Washington D.C. and both times the dealer said they could not help sell it without proof of ownership and provenance (which of course Person 2 didn’t have). The gallery encouraged Person 2 to contact the police in 2017.
At this point in their life, Person 2 had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and because of this and the gallery’s encouragement they reached out to the FBI in 2017.
The painting was seized in a civil forfeiture, meaning that the government can “seize stolen property without starting criminal proceedings against a suspected guilty party” (Cascone, 2018). This doesn’t mean charges will never be filed but they were just focused on getting the painting back.
At this stage, the FBI hadn’t connected the painting to the Heller’s robbery from 1988. After taking it into their possession they discovered a label on the back listing Mr. + Mrs. E.S. Heller as the owners from when they lent the painting to a Chagall exhibition in Switzerland. From there, investigators tracked down news articles about the original robbery and got in contact with Alan Scott, the lawyer for the Heller’s estate, who confirmed it was their property (Ernest Heller died in 1998 at 95 and Rose Heller died in 2003 at 105).
The Heller’s will primarily benefitted the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a contemporary art residency, so the proceeds from the painting’s sale will be split between them (80%), and New York’s Columbia University (10%) and NYU Medical Center (10%). Normally insurance companies would claim the entire proceeds in cases like this but because the money is going to charity, the company agreed to take just their pay out and nothing more so the Hellers will receive $100,000 for charity from the robbery of the painting.
The painting hasn’t yet sold, but because it has a strong provenance, Ernest Heller’s father purchased it for $50 in 1913 and it’s been in the family ever since, and with the robbery it’s a piece of history, estimates range from $300,000 - $900,000 which is a nice chunk of change for charity.
As for the people involved, the statute of limitations has expired so no charges can be laid against Person 1 or Person 2, though Person 1 (the man suspected of stealing the painting in the first place) has already been convicted of crimes “related to the theft and sale of other works of art stolen from other apartment buildings” (Holland, 2018). So there’s some justice.
Works Cited
Cascone, Sarah. “The FBI Has Cracked the 30-Year-Old Case of a Stolen Marc Chagall”. ArtNet. 2018. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/fbi-recovers-stolen-marc-chagall-after-30-years-1263023
Holland, Oscar. “FBI Recovers Stolen Marc Chagall Painting 30 Years After Heist”. CNN. 2018. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/fbi-recovers-stolen-chagall-painting/index.html