Picasso and the Boston Airport
In early 1969 a crate arrived from Paris at Boston’s Logan International Airport, bound for Milwaukee, where it seemed to vanish. Until it made a sudden and puzzling reappearance on April Fools Day of the same year.
Back to the 1950s
In order to understand the events as they unfolded in 1969 we need to go back to the 1950s when the Rummel boys, Bill and his younger brother Whit, were growing up in Waterville Maine. Their father had married and served in WWII before settling down in Waterville where he was seemingly the only person able to control his two sons.
Bill and Whit were always getting into trouble, “if one was looting parking meters for his coin collection, the other was pilfering pens from Woolworth’s. If one was stealing radios from junked cars, the other was racing his car so recklessly that it seemed destined for the junkyard” (Barry, 2023). Their father was quick to lay down the law with them and keep them out of serious legal trouble, he became known as thew fixer. Once Whit was caught stealing from a department store and he was forbidden from entering any store for an entire year, his mother had to bring clothes outside to him to try on on the sidewalk. Both boys knew to follow what their father said.
Now we can return to 1969
At this point in the story Whit and Bill had grown up and outgrown their criminal ways; Whit went to Tulane University and Bill served in the Coast Guard in Michigan and then married and settled down in Boston. When he and his wife moved to Boston and he exited the Coast Guard, in 1968, he took work with Emery Air Flight, then the largest cargo airline in the US. He worked nights at the company’s loading dock at Logan International Airport.
At this same time Pablo Picasso had completed a painting, Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer. The artwork was to be shipped from Paris to the Irving Gallery in Milwaukee. The owner of the gallery, Irving Luntz, had purchased the painting from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a prominent Paresian art dealer. Since the deal took place on Luntz’s 40th birthday, Kahnweiler agreed to sell it for $40,000. A steal.
But the painting never arrived in Milwaukee and Lundtz contacted Emery Air Flight to complain but the cargo company had it’s own problem, what would come to be known in New England as the 100 Hour Storm.
While a huge amount of snow fell on Boston the city, and the airport, were immobilized. At the freight section of the airport, crates were all over the place along with other boxes and packages. Emery executives demanded a decluttering of the dock to try and expedite things and, under pressure, Bill’s boss pointed to a crate without a label and told him to just take it home. So Bill wedged it into his Chevy Impala and did just that.
Once he got home with the crate and got it inside the house he pried it open to find Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer, unfortunately it wasn’t to his taste. After realizing the painting was a Picasso, Bill and his wife hid the painting in a closet under their stairs and decided never to talk about it again.
However, someone else was talking about it. Luntz had now been waiting for this important delivery for weeks and Emery was seemingly no closer to completing the order. So he contacted the FBI who began looking into this case. As you can imagine this greatly unnerved Bill and his wife. So who did they call? The fixer. Bill’s father.
His father listened to their story and offered his son two options:
“1. They could bury the Picasso in the foundation of a Waterville restaurant under renovation that his father co-owned. (Its name, The Silent Woman, seemed apropos.) Unearth the painting in 30 years and maybe sell it for a small fortune.
Or:
2. Return it” (Barry, 2023).
Bill asked his father what he should do and was told this was a decision he had to make for himself. Ultimately, he decided that he wanted to return the painting. The family snapped into action, his brother Whit bought fancy stationary and wrote a note with his right (non-dominant) hand and mailed it to Bill. His father rubbed the painting and crate down with vaseline, for reasons that aren’t known, and attached the note. Then he put on a trench coat, wide brimmed hat, and gloves and called a taxi. Bill and his father loaded the painting into the taxi and have the driver $20 to deliver it to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They then threw away the disguise in a nearby trash can.
Soon the media was running stories about the recovered Picasso complete with a photo of the note which said “Please accept this to replace in part some of the paintings removed from museums thruout the country. Signed “Robbin’ Hood” (Barry, 2023). A few days later the painting was back in its crate and on the way to the Irving Gallery in Milwaukee.
So all seems right and good, right? Well, kind of. A few years later Whit wanted to make a movie about this whole thing so he wanted to find out where Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer ultimately ended up. He found an exhibit catalogue for a 1971 exhibition called “Picasso in Milwaukee”. Among the works on display: Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer, courtesy of Sidney and Dorothy Kohl.
Sidney Kohl is part of the Kohl family that own Kohl’s department stores. He is a known art collector and in 2012 eight pieces from his collection were sold at auction but the Picasso wasn’t one of them. The family have not responded to repeated inquiries about weather or not Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer is still in their personal collection. So just one more mystery.
Works Cited
Barry, Dan. “Case of the Stolen Picasso: How and Why Robbin Hood Returned the Painting”. The Telegraph. 2023. https://www.telegraphindia.com/world/case-of-the-stolen-picasso-how-and-why-robbin-hood-returned-the-painting/cid/1945710
Murphy, Bruce. “Milwaukee and the Stolen Picasso”. Urban Milwaukee. 2023. https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2023/06/19/murphys-law-milwaukee-and-the-stolen-picasso/