Details add to picture about heist of painting
$100 million de Kooning stolen from UA in 1985
Thirty four years ago this week, a valuable Willem de Kooning painting was taken in a daring heist from the University of Arizona Museum of Art.
Now, new clues have emerged about the alleged thieves. The people who took the painting and damaged the masterpiece in their haste to flee, are also the same ones who likely tried to repair it.
A conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, who is restoring the famous oil painting known as “WomanOchre,” revealed to The Arizona Republic how someone touched up, varnished and attempted to patch a tear in the canvas after the painting was taken from the Tucson museum.
The new details provide a fuller picture of the New Mexico couple in whose home the painting was found and who may have been involved in the theft.
Ulrich Birkmaier, senior conservator of paintings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, said he did a “double take” when he spotted a layer of varnish that appeared to have been sprayed on the painting’s surface.
An analysis revealed the varnish was Damar, a professional-quality product.
“It would indicate to us the thieves had some sort of basic knowledge when it comes to materials and paintings,” he said.
Their painting skills, however, left something to be desired.
Someone tried to fill in the horizontal creases caused when the painting was rolled and snatched from the art museum in 1985. But the paint color doesn’t match.
“It’s off by quite a bit,” he said. “It’s definitely sort of an amateurish attempt.”
The brazen theft took place on the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, when a man and a woman entered the museum shortly after it opened. The woman distracted the lone security guard. The man wandered up to the gallery on the second floor. Police say he cut the canvas from its wooden frame, rolled it and stuffed it under his blue winter coat.
The couple fled with the art work, which was valued at $400,000 at the time. Over the years, works by the Dutch-American artist de Kooning exploded in value. A similar painting titled “Woman III” sold for $137.5 million in 2006.
“Woman-Ochre” was missing for more than 30 years before being discovered 225 miles away in rural Cliff, New Mexico, where it was part of the estate sale of a recently deceased couple.
Who took the painting? The FBI hasn’t closed the case and hasn’t commented on the investigation. But many clues points to the couple who owned the home, Jerry and Rita Alter.
The Alters were New York City schoolteachers and world travelers who would have been familiar with de Kooning. A photograph taken by relatives places them in Tucson for Thanksgiving dinner the year the painting was stolen. The photo shows them smiling with plates of pumpkin pie in front of them, their faces bearing an eerie resemblance to a police composite sketch of the thieves.
After the Alters died, antique store owner David Van Auker bought the contents of their home in August 2017 for $2,000. He discovered the painting hanging in a cheap, gold frame in their master bedroom.
Dust covered the frame, indicating the work had been there a long time.
His first thoughts were, “wow, great, cool mid-century painting.”
He decided to keep the painting for himself, not recognizing the work as a masterpiece. When he temporarily stored the painting at his antique store for the day, visitors quickly took notice.
“I think that’s a real de Kooning,” one of them said.
After a bit of sleuthing on the internet, Van Auker found a story on azcentral.com about the stolen painting and called the art museum. Days later, “Woman-Ochre” was back at the university, where its return attracted national attention.
The Getty Museum is restoring “Woman-Ochre” in exchange for being able to display the masterpiece for a few months, beginning in fall 2020. Then, the 40-by-30-inch painting will go back to the university.
Tom Learner, head of science at the Getty Conservation Institute, is overseeing the conservation project along with Birkmaier, the senior conservator of paintings at the Getty Museum.
The science and conservation teams used microscopes, X-rays and infrared imaging to assess damage and determine the painting’s composition.
Birkmaier said de Kooning used some unconventional materials, such as house paint, on “Woman-Ochre.”
In other places, the artist applied oil paint, then used a charcoal stick before
adding more oil paint on top. The presence of charcoal will make removing the surface varnish tricky, he said. They will have to customize the cleaning mixture that removes the varnish so it doesn’t smear the charcoal.
Two layers of varnish must be removed: The top layer added by the alleged thieves and a bottom layer, applied in 1974, when the painting was loaned for display to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
“Woman-Ochre” also has a large tear in the lower left portion, caused when one of the thieves ripped the canvas from the frame. Someone — presumably the thieves — patched the tear with a 16-inch-by-22-inch piece of canvas. Conservators will have to carefully and slowly remove the patch.
Laura Rivers, the Getty’s associate conservator of painting, has been working to minimize the horizontal creases that were made when the thieves rolled up the painting. Using a microscope, she “sets down” tiny paint flakes that have lifted off the surface. This step alone is time consuming, having taken three months with another month of anticipated work.
Once that is finished, conservators will re-touch areas where paint is missing. They are hoping to “re-unite” the torn edges of Woman-Ochre with the original canvas. But how that will be done has not been finalized, Birkmaier said.
The conservation process is “a little bit like a very, very long operation,” he said. But he predicts the result will be worth all the effort.
“It’s always satisfying to see a painting come back to life,” he said.