A week ago Sunday, somebody broke into the Tartell Gallery at the Methuselah Bar and Lounge in downtown Pittsfield and stole two paintings by local artist Edward Pelkey.
It was hardly the biggest art heist in history. That record was set just down the Pike in 1990, when two men dressed as policemen walked into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made off with $500 million worth of works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and other masters. Still, any theft of a cultural object is a tragedy.
And part of a modern epidemic. The FBI says $4 billion to $6 billion worth of artworks are stolen every year. The toll appears to be climbing as collectors pay ever greater sums for the beauty of an artist’s genius.
Prices have consistently outraced inflation in recent decades, making art a killer investment — and a burglar’s dream. Art theft has become the world’s biggest crime category after drug trafficking, money laundering and arms dealing.
What is it about art that enchants us, connoisseur and criminal alike? That question leads to a bigger one: What is art?
Centuries of great thinkers have broken their pens on that one. I like the attempt by Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote a whole (nonfiction) book on the subject in 1897. “Art,” he concluded, “is the activity by which a person, having experienced an emotion, intentionally transmits it to others.”
That definition would embrace not just the highly emotive paintings of Edward Pelkey, but also poetry, music and stand-up comedy. The format doesn’t matter. It’s the emotion that counts.
The emotive power of art sometimes strays into politics. Perhaps the most best-known caper in history was the 1911 taking of the “Mona Lisa” from the Louvre in Paris. The perp was an Italian who worked at the museum. He thought the painting belonged in Italy, where his countryman Leonardo da Vinci had painted it 400 years earlier.
The nationalistic notion that some works are essential parts of a country’s cultural heritage — and should stay there — is very much in the news these days. Museums in powerful countries are under intense pressure to return objects spirited away from weaker ones during periods of conflict or colonial domination. Greece, for instance, has been trying for years to reclaim the Elgin Marbles, which once adorned the Parthenon in Athens. They were purchased under hazy circumstances in the early 1800s by the Seventh Earl of Elgin, then the British ambassador, and they how reside in London’s British Museum. News broke last week that talks are underway.
In similar fashion, rightful owners of works confiscated by the Nazis in World War II have waged legal fights to reclaim the treasures, often with success. History could soon repeat itself, as Russian forces loot museums across occupied Ukraine.
For me, art theft is personal. After my father’s business burned to the ground, he took up painting as a distraction from his battle with insurance companies. He was a terrible artist, and his grim canvases reflected his inner turmoil at the time.
Somehow, he talked a hotel-owner friend into hanging one of those masterpieces in the building’s lobby. Within weeks, my dad’s painting went missing. He was doubly devastated.
He could have taken solace in the Mona Lisa case. Mass-market newspapers were thriving when that lady’s portrait was stolen, and her enigmatic smile was on global front pages for months. Leonardo’s then relatively unknown painting quickly became the most famous in the world. Still is.
Such publicity helped lead to the thief’s arrest, two years later in Rome. He was trying to sell the canvas to an Italian museum when a sharp-eyed art dealer called the cops.
My father’s painting was never recovered. He also never got enough insurance money to reopen his business. But he did receive a settlement from the hotel’s theft policy. That helped finance a mail-order course in computer science, which ultimately led to his satisfying second career as a data expert.
Edward Pelkey — who, ironically enough, once worked as a guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum — is offering a $1,000 reward for his stolen paintings (edwardpelkey@gmail.com). The FBI says only about 10 percent of such works are ever recovered. Even the high-profile items taken from the Gardner remain missing.
Some stolen art ends up in the hands of secretive collectors — or “gloaters,” as they’re known in the trade. Other works are hidden until their notoriety dies down and a discrete sale may be possible. Still others are destroyed when the thieves realize that day may never come.
Doesn’t sound good for Pelkey’s missing paintings. Nonetheless, he should not despair.
As my father and Leonardo da Vinci could attest, the act of creation has its own rewards, theft is the sincerest form of flattery — and sometimes the artist comes out ahead.