Stealing Rembrandts

Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists by Anthony M Amore and Tom Mashberg, 203 pages

In 1990, thieves stole three Rembrandts from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  When he became the head of security at the museum in 2005, Anthony Amore set out to solve the crime, and in addition to analyzing that specific theft, also embarked upon a study of the thefts of other Rembrandts around the world.  Unsurprisingly, there are many - Rembrandt combines a large body of work with a household name and headline-making prices at auction.  As Amore relates, museums are easy targets - designed for exhibition rather than protection, with security more accustomed to providing directions to the bathroom than thwarting thefts.  Also unsurprisingly, however, art thieves are unlikely to ever earn anything close to the value of the works they steal, as there does not exist a real market for recognizable, stolen art, and the biggest paydays seemingly come to those who ransom their loot back to the rightful owners.

In their book, Amore and Mashberg compile a list of over 80 Rembrandt-related thefts over the course of a century.  Only a fraction of these receive much attention in the text itself, but each one proves to be unique in its methods - from an elaborate operation involving car bombs and a getaway boat to a pair of criminals casually boosting paintings in full view of unconcerned museum goers lulled by their nonchalance and matching windbreakers - and remarkably diverse in their motivations - from simple greed to political ideology to an attempt to leverage the loot into a lighter sentence for another crime.  The matter is fascinating, but unfortunately the presentation is somewhat lacking - the authors' flat writing seems contrived to diminish the drama rather than accentuate it.  Worse, they repeat themselves frequently - the International Foundation for Art Research is introduced twice in the span of twenty pages.