Whitney/Parrish Murals Theft
Here we go again, this week we’ve got another crime that’s on the FBI’s list of top 10 art crimes. This one’s a bit of a head-scratcher involving the Whitney family and the highest-paid commercial artist during the 1920s.
Maxfield Parrish and the Murals
I know what you’re thinking, maybe, you’ve never heard of Maxfield Parrish. Well in the early 1900s, he was one of the most popular and well-known artists and illustrators in America. It’s estimated that one in every five households in the US had a Parrish on display during the 1920s and, as I said in the intro, he was the highest-paid commercial artist during that decade.
He’s best known for his dreamlike, whimsical style and around the turn of the century, he became the go-to artist for things like magazine covers, calendars, posters, etc. He was also a painter who produced works of fine art and he could count Normal Rockwell and Andy Warhol among his fans. In his works, he typically incorporated imagery and icons from mythology such as columns, urns, draped gowns and fabric, but he drew inspiration for figures in his paintings from the people from his own life and placed them in more modern settings, familiar to him.
In 1914, nearly two decades before she would found the Whitney Museum of American Art, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney commissioned Parrish to create a series of murals for her studio at her home on Long Island. He took four years to complete the task, finishing the collection in 1918. He delivered six large-scale murals as well as three additional transom paintings. This series of murals was done in his classic style, and the theme for this series was a Florentine celebration in a garden and courtyard but he swapped out an Italian villa with buildings that looked like his client’s home. He also used his own friends and family members as inspiration for the figures in the paintings.
Parrish was excited by this opportunity to create these murals, which was a chance to do more of what he wanted and stretch his talent. He wrote to Whitney in 1912, “It is tremendously interesting to have the chance to revel in colour as deep and as rich as you please” (McNearney, 2019). The artist considered this group of paintings to be among the finest he ever created, a masterpiece.
Fast Forward
Fast forward to closer to the present and Texas-based art collector J.P. Bryan purchased the series of murals when the Whitney estate put them up for sale. He had been a fan of Parrish since he had seen his mural in the St. Regis Hotel in New York and jumped at the opportunity to own some of his work. However, after he purchased them he realized they didn’t really fit with the rest of his art collection so he decided to restore them and put them back up for sale. He listed them with the Edenhurst Gallery in LA in 2002.
One day in July of that same year Bryan received a call from the FBI, the agent on the line told him that two of the paintings had been stolen from the Edenhurst Gallery three days before.
The Crime
Sometime between Sunday, July 28 and Monday morning, July 29, 2002, the paintings had been stolen. A thief, or thieves, had climbed down into the gallery through a hole in the roof, cut two paintings from the series out of their frames, rolled up the canvasses, pushed them back up through the hole and made off with them. It’s estimated that the value of the two paintings is somewhere around $4 million.
There are a lot of very strange things about this crime though, not least of which is the big question; why did the thieves hone in on (and only take) panels 3A and 3B, leaving the rest? All of the panels would be worth millions and they weren’t touched. “The break-in is mystifying, authorities say, not only because the odds of successfully reselling such widely recognized works are slim, but also because the two canvases are part of a larger series that many collectors would want together or not at all” (Reynolds, 2002). There are a few theories here, maybe because of the sheer size of the canvasses (measuring around 5’x6’) the thieves simply ran out of strength to lift them all through the roof, or they were told to only get those two, or those two panels just caught their eye and they didn’t realize it was a larger series. However, most police believe it was a targeted robbery, these two panels were specifically requested.
Bryan, for his part, thinks the panels are long gone. He said, at the time of the robbery, that there was a Parrish feaver happening in Asia and that he wouldn’t be surprised if the panels were in the private collection of someone in Japan or China.
The police said they collected evidence at the scene but didn’t reveal what it was and over time the case has gone cold. These two panels have never been seen again.
So, What Then?
Well, after the robbery Bryan made an attempt to auction the remaining panels but to no success so he removed them from the Edenhurst Gallery and they’re now on display at the Bryan Museum. “We decided that they sat in storage long enough, let’s get them out and let people see the wonder of them and what magnificent works, because, as you probably know, Maxfield Parrish said that those paintings changed his entire career” (McNearney, 2019). So I guess all we can do at this point is keep our fingers crossed that someone sees them and reports them, or that they eventually fall into legitimate hands and they are reunited with the rest of the series.
Works Cited
McNearney, Allison. “The Thief Came At Night. The Target: Maxfield Parrish Murals Worth $5 Million”. Daily Beast. 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-thief-came-at-night-their-target-maxfield-parrish-murals-worth-dollar5m
Reynolds, Christopher. “A Case of Whydunit”. Los Angeles Times. 2002. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-03-et-reynolds3-story.html