Theft
of confidence
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Bruni
said the theft is a black eye when the museum seeks items on loan. (Bonnie
Weller / Inqurier Staff Photographer) |
By Edward J. Sozanski
INQUIRER ART
CRITIC
WILMINGTON - The theft probably took no more than a few seconds, and getting out of the museum and away from the scene not more than a few minutes.
The thief's prize was a roughly cylindrical, colored-glass vessel about eight inches high that probably wouldn't bring more than a few thousand dollars, if it could be sold at all.
Yet the shock waves generated by the Good Friday theft at the Delaware Art Museum, the first in the museum's 87-year history, have been profound. When a museum is victimized by a thief or robber, more than art is lost.
Innocence, trust, collegiality and public confidence all are wounded. And the psychological wounds can take a long time to heal, depending on how quickly the crime is resolved.
The shock and embarrassment were especially acute in this case because the stolen object, Terracotta Basket With Blanket Shard, didn't belong to the museum. It was lent to a special exhibition by Dale Chihuly, the internationally known glass artist who made it.
The Delaware museum isn't the only area institution to learn these sad truths. Both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, also in Philadelphia, have been victimized in recent years. In those cases, the stolen objects were recovered, but the trauma lingers.
The reason is simple. According to Special Agent Robert K. Wittman of the Philadelphia FBI office, 90 percent of all museum thefts that are resolved turn out to be inside jobs.
Inside, according to Wittman, includes not only employees but also recent former employees and anyone else who had legitimate access to the museum's collection, such as scholars and curators at other institutions.
No museum director wants to believe that one of his or her employees is a thief. Stephen T. Bruni, who has been in charge of the Delaware Art Museum for 14 years, didn't want to believe it, either.
"The thing you hate to do most is suspect the staff," he said. "But you need to let the staff know that 90 percent of thefts are staff thefts."
That, in fact, was the case at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In late 1997, Kristen Froehlich, artifact collections manager, discovered that three ceremonial swords and a long rifle were missing.
"At first I couldn't believe it," she recalled. "I thought they had been misplaced."
But they had been stolen. And the thief turned out to be Earnest Medford, a longtime custodian whom Jonathan Cox, the society's vice president for collections, described as "congenial and well-liked." Medford was convicted of stealing "culturally significant historic artifacts" and sentenced in July 1998 to four years in federal prison.
"I and a lot of other people felt a sense of betrayal and violation, not just because it was done inside, and by someone we all worked with and knew. This is someone I trusted, and who had been here for many years. He was a member of the family," Cox said.
The FBI eventually discovered that Medford had been practicing his illegal sideline for at least 10 years, and that over that time he had removed at least 200 artifacts from the society's storeroom.
Winterthur, the decorative-arts museum north of Wilmington, has been hit twice by insiders since 1987: Phillip Curtis, an assistant curator, was convicted in 1987; John Q. Feller, a professor at the University of Scranton who had access to the collection as a scholar, was convicted in 1991.
Cox put his finger on another reason why thefts traumatize museums. Even large institutions like to think of themselves as families. They hold valuable art objects in trust for the public, whom they trust to respect the conditions under which the objects are made available.
When an object is stolen, this unspoken bond of trust is shattered. The director wonders about his staff, staff members wonder about one another, and everyone wonders about the people who visited the museum that day.
"A theft is devastating both to the museum and the public," Bruni said. "The violation is the strongest shock; I was really deeply angered and embarrassed."
Anne d'Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a veteran of several thefts over the last 15 years, agreed with Bruni's assessment.
"In a way, everybody is fair game for scrutiny," she said. "Our staff as a whole is loyal and devoted, but it's still a major strain on the institution. That strain dissipates much more rapidly if the thing is settled quickly."
That's what happened in the Historical Society case. The FBI got to the perpetrator within a matter of weeks. It was also the case with a 1988 armed robbery at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, in which a gunman stole a sculpture that was quickly recovered.
But consider the alternate scenario, a 1984 incident in which a small painting by William Michael Harnett, a famous 19th-century American artist, disappeared from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
That painting, a realistic rendering of a $5 bill, stayed missing until 1993, when someone took it in to a Philadelphia dealer, who called the FBI.
The art was recovered, but the theft wasn't resolved. "That's still an open case," Wittman said. "We got the piece back, but we weren't lucky enough to determine who to prosecute."
Delayed resolution is common in museum thefts, Wittman said, but "sooner or later, stolen things pop up."
Wittman declined to comment on the Wilmington case, except to say that "an aggressive investigation is ongoing. We're following every lead, and all appropriate art registry people have been notified."
The FBI interviewed all museum staff members and volunteers who were in the building on the day of the theft. The museum has about 35 full-time and 30 part-time staffers, Bruni said.
The vessel, a unique object that the artist made in 1980, is about six inches in diameter. It's colored terra-cotta, with a blue-green rim and a triangular "blanket" design. It has a black base and white tip on one side.
On the Chihuly price scale, it's not a particularly valuable object. His prices generally start at about $10,000 for small pieces, although editioned works can be less.
Philadelphia dealer Rick Snyderman estimated that the vessel could bring $3,000 to $5,000 on the open market, although he noted that there might be factors that would make it worth more.
Jerry Raphael of Clifton, N.J., a nationally known appraiser of studio art glass, placed the value in the same ballpark, $4,000 to $5,000.
The museum declined to disclose the piece's insurance value, which is believed to be considerably higher than those estimates.
However, as with the swords stolen from the Historical Society, the monetary value is secondary to its historical value. As an early example in the Basket series, it represents an important moment in Chihuly's career.
The vessel was taken during the day on Good Friday, April 2, two weeks after the museum opened an exhibition of Chihuly's basket forms. (The show continues through June 20.)
Ironically, the artist himself made the thief's work easier by specifying that his pieces not be covered with clear plastic hoods, as is often customary with valuable or fragile art objects. He wanted his work to be displayed in a way that maximized its brilliant color.
"In all my years here, I can't think of a time when we've had a lender who insisted on less security [than normal]," Bruni observed. The special-exhibitions gallery is equipped with video cameras, but Wittman declined to say whether the tapes provided any useful information.
"The biggest tangible black eye you get from this involves loan forms," Bruni said. "When you go to borrow something from another museum, you're asked whether you had a theft in the last five years."
But as d'Harnoncourt said, "Embarrassment is not as important as the loss to the public."
Oddly, the theft apparently has had an upside. Bruni said that his staff was "more inclined to scrutinize what's going on in the building" than before. "At least in the short term the staff isn't allowed to look at someone, particularly visitors, in the exactly the same way."
Froehlich, of the Historical Society, observed that a theft "has a lasting effect on the way you perceive your institution."
"It's not until you go through a theft that you see where your weaknesses are," she said. "I think we did that, and we improved. We treated it like a learning experience."
To which Cox added, "We not only applied what we learned to our own situation, we felt a sense of professional obligation to share with our colleagues at other institutions what we learned. They realize that the same thing can happen to them."
http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/May/25/magazine/CHIH25.htm