Willem De Kooning Masterpiece Back At University Of Arizona Museum Of Art For Anniversary Of 1985 Theft

The Southwest’s most brazen robbery didn’t occur from horseback against a stagecoach by a gang of masked desperadoes. It wasn’t 11 dashing and charismatic career hustlers knocking over three Las Vegas casinos on fight night. An unassuming couple pulled it off the day after Thanksgiving, 1985.

With the wife using chit-chat to distract employees at the University of Arizona Museum of Art on the ground floor upon opening, her husband cut Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre (1954-1955) from its frame and tore it from a backing canvas in a gallery upstairs. The painting’s value: $160 million.

They were inside in less than 15 minutes. There were no alarms. No cameras. No leads.

That treasure was lost until owners of Manzanita Ridge Furniture & Antiques in Silver City, NM acquired it–unknowingly–in 2017 along with other art and furniture from an estate sale for a deceased couple in Cliff, NM, a remote, desolate corner of the state. Once on view in the store, customers recognized the painting, leading the new owners to call the museum.

“Surreal is the best way I can describe it. The day started off in such an ordinary way and ended with such excitement and angst,” Olivia Miller, interim director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, told Forbes.com about the day the museum was contacted with information that it’s de Kooning had potentially been found. “It was incredibly exciting, yet we felt enormous pressure to not make any missteps along the way.”

Much of the day was spent with the University of Arizona Police Department and contacting the FBI.

“The waiting was the hardest part,” Miller remembers, although she would set her eyes on the painting less than 48 hours after the museum was phoned by David Van Auker from the antique store saying he wanted to return the painting.

“We didn’t know anything about him,” Miller said. “I was worried that if too much time passed, he might change his mind and hide the painting, or try to claim ownership. Knowing what I now know about David, it seems silly that I was ever worried!”

Damage

Woman-Ochre’s return was undoubtedly a joyous occasion. Joy that would shortly after be combined with a sick stomach. During the robbery and in the possession of the thieves–more on them later–the painting had been ruined.

“When I initially saw Woman-Ochre, I could certainly see there was a lot of damage, however, my feelings about its condition were overshadowed by my excitement that it still existed and had actually been found” Miller said. “I was also living in the moment—at that point, our main priority was getting the painting to a secure location. It wasn’t until a few days later when Dr. Nancy Odegaard (Head of the Preservation Division at the Arizona State Museum at the U of A) did the preliminary authentication that I began to understand just how much damage the painting had suffered. It was quite overwhelming to see.”

Hastily cut from its frame, likely with a box cutter, the husband robber was surprised to find the painting had been affixed to an additional backing in a previous conservation. Unable to quickly hack through both layers, the thief peeled the original painting from the supporting layer resulting in terrible surface cracking and paint loss. The painting was rolled up like a poster to transport out of the museum without detection. It had been amateurishly varnished at some point while in the hands of the thieves, store-bought glue applied to the back, re-stapled into a new frame.

“Los Angeles Times” art critic Christopher Knight, who saw the painting pre-conservation, described it as a “corpse.”

“The canvas was as rumpled as last night’s sheets—a lumpy terrain whose painted image was lost in a visual muck of disheveled paint marks, yellowed varnish and all that awful, crackled damage,” he wrote.

“It was alarming; I had heard the tale and knew what to expect, but it was by far the most damaged painting I had seen,” Getty Museum conservator Laura Rivers said. “When it arrived, it came into the studio and the damage was almost all you could see.”

The painting’s condition was beyond what the University of Arizona could repair. It was beyond what almost any museum could repair. After receipt of the picture, U of A Museum of Art officials convened a group of de Kooning and art conservation experts to determine how to best salvage Woman-Ochre. They recommended sending it to The Getty Museum in Los Angeles Paintings Conservation department and Getty Conservation Institute’s (GCI) laboratories, a collective of art conservation specialists akin to the Avengers.

This was no ordinary job. It would stretch the limits of what the conservation field was capable of.

“It was hard to fathom the true extent of the damage,” Tom Lerner, Senior Scientist, Getty Conservation Institute, said.

Years were spent – uncountable hours – resuscitating the painting. Getty experts used dental tools, microscopes, spectrometers, computer mapping creating millions of data points, Macro X-Ray Fluorescence, a team of specialists with hundreds of years combined experience–expertise in chemistry, physics, nanotechnology. Meticulous labor and cutting-edge science applied toward putting the jigsaw puzzle of microscopic paint chips back together again, rebuilding de Kooning’s masterpiece.

And they did it. Free of charge.

“The Getty did an incredible job with the conservation treatment, bringing Woman-Ochre back to a state where one is first struck by the painting itself as de Kooning intended,” Miller said. “While evidence of the theft is no longer the first thing you see, upon closer and longer examination, one can see visible scars from the theft. The goal of the treatment was not to completely hide the theft—it is a part of the painting’s life.”

Before sending the revived painting to U of A, the Getty put it on exhibition this past summer along with details of its conservation. On October 8, 2022, Woman-Ochre finally returned to view at the U of A. It will be hanging there on the anniversary of its theft for the first time in almost 40 years.

‘Woman’

In 1950, de Kooning began his best-known body of work, his “Woman” series, which included Woman-Ochre. The series is considered monumental in the way that it imagines the human figure.

“Collectively, these paintings are some of his most familiar works, in part because he was working figuratively at a time when many of his peers, such as Jackson Pollock, were abandoning figural representation in their work,” Miller explains.

Woman-Ochre was gifted to the museum in 1958 by Edward Joseph Gallagher, Jr.

“Woman-Ochre was featured in significant exhibitions in the United States and around the world,” Miller said. “One of them, prophetically titled ‘The Disappearance and Reappearance of the Image,’ traveled throughout Europe, while other exhibitions took Woman-Ochre to Australia, Japan and various countries in South America.”

A critically important painting by a critically important artist.

Villains

What of the thieves? No one was ever prosecuted for the crime and the case remained unsolved for decades.

Until the estate sale for Rita and Jerry Alter, retired public school teachers. The former New Yorkers moved to Arizona in the 1970s. They were married over 50 years and had two kids. Jerry died in 2012, Rita in 2017. They traveled the world and their home–for the few people who saw the inside–was filled with artwork.

Since recovery of Woman-Ochre, the couple has been implicated and suspected of numerous other art thefts.

A documentary of their double lives, “The Thief Collector,” produced.

At the University of Arizona Museum of Art, nothing was ever the same after the painting was taken, and Miller suspects nothing will ever be the same now that it’s back.

“It feels lighter in a way. We have been waiting so long for the painting to return and now that it is finally back, there is a weight lifted,” she said. “I am still struck when I walk through the galleries and it catches my eye. I’m not sure that feeling will ever go away.”