The New Hotness: Highlights From The National Stolen Art File

Has it really been ten years since I poked through the FBI’s National Stolen Art File? Yes, yes it has. What’s been stolen—or reported stolen—in the mean time?

a black and white and grey painting of a polaroid of a tv screen, with the rounded edges of the tv tube along the bottom and right edges, of a picture of a padded altar, with a knee bench around the base, surrounded by slightly fussy fancy white chairs and a settee. this image of a sealing room of the salt lake city temple was broadcast on belgian tv where luc tuymans saw it, photographed the screen, and painted it. then this painting got stolen in nyc in 1996. — Have you seen me? Luc Tuymans, The Heritage X, 1996, oil on linen, 33 x 74 1/2 in., stolen from David Zwirner Gallery in 1996,via FBI/NSAF

Starting with the biggest heists, believe me when I say if this 3×6 foot Luc Tuymans painting from 1996 of a stealth photo of a marriage altar in the Salt Lake City Temple had been included in the FBI database in 2016, I would have written about it.

I got thisclose to buying the Schellmann Edition photo version of the redo of this painting, Altar (2002), at Documenta 11, but decided to wait until I could figure out what Belgian TV documentary on the Mormons Tuymans had been watching in the 1990s that would have enabled him to take Polaroids of the screen. I’ve even reached out to the Church’s European communications office in Frankfurt to see if they had any idea. There’s a whole related print series, too. Still on it.

ANYWAY, it turns out this picture, which bears the most evidence of its TV screen origins, was stolen from Tuymans’ show at young David Zwirner’s gallery in SoHo. The theft has enhanced the lore of the remaining works in the The Heritage series.

Also huge with complicated imagery: a giant, 7.5 x 8-foot, two-panel Ellsworth Kelly painting from 1976 titled, Black and White. The FBI has no image, and I don’t think the CR has gotten that far yet, but I’ll look around.

[L] Nayland Blake, Untitled, 2003, graphite on paper, 12 x 9 in.; [R] Laura Owens, Untitled, 2008, acrylic, pastel, graphite on rag, 14 1/4 x 10 1/4 in., both via FBI/NSAF

These two small works on paper do feel very stealable. One is a 2003 portrait by Nayland Blake; the other is a more elaborate painting on paper by Laura Owens from 2008, which is a slightly smaller remake of a 2006 painting that went to a Belgian museum. These both have a personal feel that makes the idea of thievery sting a little bit more.

a kind of washed out photo of a roman bronze plaque with a distinctive jagged edge that was supposedly stolen, but it actually in romania now, just fine — ORLY? Stolen? The Constitution of Troesmis, 2nd Century CE, actually, bronze, 60 cm, via FBI/NSAF

One object that kind of confuses me now is more artifact than art. The FBI lists this 1st Century CE bronze plaque as The Constitution of Troesmis. Its better known as the Lex Municipalis Troesmensium, one of just two surviving tablets from a larger public installation documenting municipal law in a 2nd Century Roman city on the Danube.

two roman bronze plaques with jagged, broken edges photographed against a dark background, each inscribed with part of the laws for the city of troesmis. — Tabula B and A, respectively, of the Lex Troesmensium, 2nd century CE, bronze, at the National Museum of Romanian History

As of 2022, 2024, and last week, it seems like they’ve both been at the National Museum of Romanian History in Bucharest. Maybe the story is at the end of this Romanian National Heritage Institute listing for Tabula A: “Archaeological poacher, recovered by the Romanian state.” The objects have a classification date in 2017, so maybe they got trafficked, found, and returned. So maybe it shouldn’t be in the database anymore? Maybe the accuracy of this database is not a priority for this FBI.

a super low res photo of a very spare tea cart that looks like two aquarium frames on a skateboard, but which was designed by rudolph schindler, underneath a stolen art banner from the lapd art theft detail, which, oops, the lapd disbanded right around the time they released this notice. — #FindTheSchindlers: a Rudolph Schindler tea cart from the Samuel Freeman House, stolen from a USC warehouse in 2012, not reported, and only leaked to LAPD in 2019, via archive.org

Neither is it a priority any more for the LAPD, whose Art Theft Detail used to release epic wanted posters for stolen art and design. Apparently it was disbanded in 2019, just around the time an anonymous tip revealed that two Frank Lloyd Wright lamps and two pieces of Rudolph Schindler furniture from the Samuel Freeman House had been stolen in 2012, and USC, which owned the house, did nothing, and told no one.