Boston’s Gardner Museum: One Classy Joint

And thoughts on the art heist of the century, 31 years on.

L ast week, after I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see its 150th anniversary Monet exhibition, I walked over to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I adore the Gardner. It’s unique. Mrs. Gardner was a visionary collector, buying supreme works by Vermeer and Titian, but she was also an artist. Her work of art was her house, or palace, evoking a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal and decorated to the nines to reflect her eclectic, eccentric, and indisputably good taste. Money and good taste are two roads that rarely converge, so when they do, the result is a national monument.

I misled you and myself last week. I said I hadn’t been to Boston in years. I’d forgotten, for good cause, a stop at the Gardner last year on the way to the airport. I saw Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, an exhibition of preparatory drawings Sargent made while he worked on murals for the Museum of Fine Arts. Sargent hired McKeller, an African-American bellhop at his Boston hotel, as a model for the murals, still at the MFA today. He later gave a portfolio of the drawings he made using McKeller to Mrs. Gardner, and the drawings lay undisturbed at the museum for a hundred years until the Gardner did Boston’s Apollo.

I didn’t like the show but paused before writing about it. I didn’t want the first thing I wrote about the Gardner to be negative. The place is too distinguished, I like it too much, and, goodness knows, it’s been through enough misery. It’s bad enough that it nearly went broke years ago but, in 1990, to add disaster to poverty, it was robbed. The 31st anniversary of the unsolved theft is this week. Later, I’ll draw on my own experience with mobsters to reflect on where this mystery is heading. Though an art historian, I do enjoy knowing a broad cross-section of humanity, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I finally dropped writing a story on Boston’s Apollo when the COVID-lockdown crisis demolished the art world, providing ample storylines. So, returning to the Gardner now, the first thing I write in this story is how much I love the place. I try to accentuate the positive, using Bing Crosby as my guide.

Still, I didn’t like the Sargent show. I don’t know whether or not Sargent was gay or had a fling with McKeller. There’s no evidence, and no amount of speculation or innuendo changes the fact that, well, there’s no evidence. “Could’ve, might’ve, should’ve, maybe, wouldn’t it be loverly” isn’t art history. The show was too PC, but this is Boston, and they’ve not only quaffed the Kool-Aid. It’s a mighty river.

We learned that Sargent didn’t affirm McKeller’s blackness, since the finished murals based on the drawings depict figures who are white, not black. Sargent exploited him. Sargent didn’t keep in touch. Sargent didn’t leave him money. A group of African-American activists in today’s Boston delivered a heap of snark about racism in Boston today. What does that have to do with art history?

Enough about Sargent and the show I said I wouldn’t review. The Gardner is singularly fascinating. Mrs. Gardner (1840–1924) was born rich, married richer, and lived an idyllic life of luxury, travel, what we’d call “home improvement,” and buying art. She and her husband, who was from Boston, were a devoted couple. Venice was her favorite place.

She had a million friends, among them Henry James. It’s tempting to find parallels between her and his characters, or to imagine her in a Merchant & Ivory drama, but the only untoward things we can pin on her are smoking cigarettes and wearing a Red Sox bandana to a baseball game in 1914. She burned most of her papers, but for every destroyed letter there’s a letter she sent. These exist and aren’t incriminating of anything other than exacting grammar. Gardner was a proper lady. The sizzle is in her impressive intelligence and curiosity.

I divided my time last week between the palace and the then-controversial but entirely successful addition to it. Gardner wanted the palace to stay as she left it, a magnificent, arcane pile in aspic, but did she, really? She wasn’t illiberal, and she wasn’t a fantasist. Nothing never changes. She didn’t want her aesthetic polluted, and that explains her ban on moving or lending art, adding art, or changing her decor. She didn’t want the likes of Florence Knoll sacking the place in favor of tulip chairs and Barcelona style.

Mrs. Gardner left her new museum well-off, but a bad investment philosophy and no fundraising kept her bequest closer to flat than flush. By the 1980s, it was change or greet a slow death. An addition, renovation of the palace’s systems, and commitments to music and contemporary art were the solutions.

The $115 million addition is ten years old next year. Does it work? I didn’t like it when it opened. The Gardner capital campaign, you see, competed with my own fundraising for the Addison among the many Andover alumni living in the Boston area. Money, money, ugly money. It twists our judgment.

The Gardner hired the boutique Italian architect Renzo Piano, though Boston is flush with great architects. He’s had some hits — the Menil in Houston, the Whitney, and the Nasher in Dallas — but the Gardner didn’t need that level of glitz. I initially didn’t like the artificially patinated copper exterior, St. Patrick’s Day green and something Gardner would, I think it’s safe to say, have loathed, too. The architect wanted to upstage the palace, which wasn’t difficult since its original entrance, the one used by museum visitors since the 1920s, was just a door.

Now that my fundraising days are long gone, though, I have to say I didn’t even notice the green copper. I think it’s either aged or been chemically altered, or, more likely, I’ve forgiven the donors who told me their gifts to the Addison “would have been bigger” had the Gardner not been scrambling for money at the same time I was.

It’s a sly thing, the Gardner addition. It grew from soil dried nearly to dust by the intense sun that is Mrs. Gardner’s memory, guarded by votives whose chants were simple: “Thou canst not change a whit.” For years, the trustees didn’t want to do anything, so the place shriveled. Of course, being Boston, part of the problem was that the trustees didn’t want to pay for anything out of their own pockets. The lady of the manor wanted the palace to stay as is but said nothing about an addition, and the museum owned the land. Lots of people didn’t want to change the mission, either. Common sense and reality won the day.

The addition and the goals behind it change the mission dramatically but do it so deftly that only an old poop could object. Walking through the Piano building, I often thought, “What would Mrs. Gardner do?” I always concluded, “She’d do exactly what I’m seeing.”

Music was one of her passions. The addition includes a concert hall. Did Boston need another concert hall? Not really, though it’s a strikingly steep, vertical cube with perfect acoustics and, in effect, front row seating for 80 percent of its capacity of 300. It’s in the round and intimate. A few years ago, I went to a chamber-music night there and felt cocooned and embraced. The new space freed the Tapestry Room in the palace from its decades as a makeshift music space. Now, the room’s restored to the splendor Mrs. Gardner knew.

Did the Gardner need a new exhibition space? No, but it’s a nice, big, flexible gallery. The Gardner didn’t need what’s called the Living Room, a space off Piano’s new entrance, but it’s both stately and cozy. The new café is lovely, not essential but not unwelcome in a university neighborhood whose eateries cater to ratty students.

There are two new artist-in-residence apartments and an artist studio. Gardner knew and supported lots of artists but was no Gertrude Stein and didn’t fancy avant-garde art. It’s the one program initiative she’d take a moment from eternity to ask “really, now?” from her grave in Mount Auburn cemetery. Does the Gardner need, or should it have, an artist-in-residence program?

The answer is “no” but “yes.” The Gardner palace is static. It’s a relic, a tomb, and a tourist attraction, and I suppose it’s got local fans craving constancy and quiet. Otherwise, you visit it once and, if you’re living in Boston, you take the family when they visit. Now, working artists give it zip. Exhibitions aren’t necessary for a museum to thrive, but the new galleries are gracious and elegant. They make boutique shows of contemporary art possible.

Was a Ouija board deployed? Seems like that might have been the case. Her palace is how she left it, as much as building codes will allow. Mrs. Gardner was not without ego. The addition and its programs make her a 21st-century marquee name. It’s a good example of taking a long-dead donor’s wishes and carefully coaxing them into a new age, all the while respecting the will of the dead. Mrs. Gardner wasn’t Dr. Barnes, which is to say she wasn’t a lunatic. She didn’t hate the public. Though hardly a flapper, she still took pride in her modern spirit.

A copious glazed enfilade-style corridor links the new building to one of the two cloisters flanking the palace’s splendid courtyard. The corridor runs through a garden. Once the visitor enters the cloisters and the courtyard, based on 15th-century Venetian palace architecture, it’s enchantment aplenty.

When I saw the Gardner palace after the addition opened, I left in a sour mood. The one thing they didn’t do was install modern museum lighting. Seeing paintings by Titian, Rubens, Raphael, and Veronese isn’t easy. Some things don’t bother me as much as they once did. Mrs. Gardner herself struggled with lighting. The palace was electrified in her lifetime. Here and there, she thought natural light worked best, and it does on a day with sun. That said, she hung precious, light-sensitive watercolors and drawings throughout the palace, often near paintings. These watercolors and drawings, alas, drive the artificial light levels, and there’s nothing we can do about that. The palace is packed with furniture upholstered with antique fabric, and that’s light-sensitive, too. The Gardner tweaks the lighting when new technology arises. If rooms feel too dark, it’s because the art demands it. It’s about the art, not any technophobia on Mrs. Gardner’s part.

I walked into Shen Wei: Painting in Motion knowing nothing about the artist, who is a dancer, Beijing opera star, choreographer, and painter who has lived in New York since 1995. The exhibition runs until June 21. Shen (b. 1968) was an artist in residence at the Gardner in 2019. Since the Gardner is a small place, and a seriously intellectual one, its residencies are intense and focused. There’s no assembly line, everyone knows the artist is there, working, and while he’s there, the artist is the in-house celebrity. The place caters to his creativity. I can’t think of a better atmosphere for creativity than the Gardner.

Shen is a polymath who paints abstract art propelled by music he’s hearing while he works. The music stimulates his body while he paints. His gestures are high-octane and fluid but purposeful and controlled, too. In his dances, he’s the choreographer, set designer, costume designer, and make-up artist, so he’s after a total look.

No. 8 , from 2013–14, is 20 by 14 feet in white, black, and brown paint. People will see mountains, flying figures, sky, or waterfalls, but Shen says he’s painting energy with no tangible subject in mind. He calls it a dreamscape. He’s a master of Chinese calligraphy and Chinese ink and brush landscape. The works in his Suspension in Blue series, from 2018 to 2020, are small-scale and show his immersion in Chinese visual tradition. Balanced against their delicate passages — long, thread-like lines and color harmonies — are splats of azure and teal paint so emphatic, so startling that Frank Kline would envy them. They don’t jar, though. His blues are too sublime, and the scale is intimate. I felt he was visualizing music by Webern or Berg.

Another series, Reflecting Elements, from 2018 and 2019 goes all over. Forms are swirling like a whirlpool. His palette is sepia. I felt I could fall into them. “Trust your eyes and follow your curiosity,” a meditation tape told me. I don’t see the point of meditation, but it’s good advice in looking at Shen’s work.

It’s a rarefied exhibition and well suited to the Gardner, a rarefied place. My taste in dance runs to Eleanor Powell at its best and the Twist at its slummiest. I watched the three dance videos, one of which Shen made at the Gardner using the museum as the set for his dancer. April, from 1998, in which Shen dances, feels like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. It’s black and white with moments suggesting birth, concealment, discovery, death, and eternity. Passion Spirit, filmed in the palace last year with views of the art on the walls, features a single female dancer switching between red and white costumes.

I’m not a dance critic. I think it’s a wonderful idea to emphasize that dance is art and that music, dance, and painting can, not must, reinforce one another. Shen, as a dancer, has extraordinary control of his body and knows its full capacity. He has brought these to painting, and the results are extraordinary and instructive.

The infamous Gardner heist happened during the very early morning hours of March 18, 1990. Vermeer’s The Concert went along with Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee and his Lady and Gentleman in Black, five Degas sketches, a Manet portrait, and a few trifles, among them an ancient Chinese “gu” used to serve wine. The art is valued at $500 million, surely too little given the $450 million the over-embalmed Leonardo da Vinci got at Christie’s a few years ago. It was the biggest theft of art ever recorded until a 2019 theft at the Green Vault, the museum that displays the Crown Jewels of the old Duchy of Saxony, topped a billion dollars in value. It’s safe to say the Dresden jewels have been sliced and diced. No one knows where the Gardner art is.

Late on St. Patrick’s Day, a day when everyone in Boston has leprechauns dancing in their heads and green beer flowing in their veins, two men disguised as cops knocked on the museum door. They told one of the two guards in the building that they were chasing someone. He needed to open the door. He did. When a museum is closed, you never open the door to someone you’re not expecting. Before long, the guards were subdued and tied to pipes in the Gardner basement. The thieves had the run of the place for a few hours just after midnight.

It’s a theft that’s launched a thousand plot lines. This week marks the heist’s 31st anniversary. The paintings were cut from their frames with a razor blade. The frames are still in place. The Gardner is frank on its website, treating the robbery in some depth. It’s an open case, and dribbles appear now and then. I think we’ve reached the end, though.

Last year, I wrote about my coffee get-togethers in the ’80s and ’90s with Art Barbieri, who ran the formidable, robustly corrupt Democratic machine in New Haven in the ’50s and ’60s. Then, the inflated tally of COVID dead made me think of Art’s vote-counting in New Haven. Archimedes had nothing on Art in making numbers bloom. COVID’s panic pushers, of course, delight in high numbers. Keeps them in clover and on TV.

I wouldn’t say I “ran the Republican machine” in North Haven, a sweet little town next to New Haven, so different from it but so like it. I “chaired a few clubs,” one of which was the Republican Town Committee, and, yes, we always won, and, yes, we were ruthless about it. Polite and proper, though, I always followed “do what I’m tellin’ ya” with “please.” I worked for the legislature in Connecticut for years, too. Connecticut government then was thick with crooks.

Art and I had so many friends and family in common. My Uncle Willie — my mother’s brother – worked for Art, “in deliveries,” I believe. Like Art, I’d retired from politics. We kept in touch while I was getting my Ph.D. at Yale.

I asked him in the mid ’90s about the Gardner theft, entertaining him with my theory that the IRA took them. He smiled. “Too exotic,” he said. “Far-fetched . . . Isn’t there any art in England?” He knew about the theft. When you’re old, you’re up on current events, even, it seems, in the arts.

Art was once well connected to crime gangs specializing in illegal gambling, counterfeiting, labor rackets, and money laundering. In the 1940s and into the ’50s, Golden Crest Ice Cream Company, which he part-owned, was a front where all of the above occurred among the chocolate swirls and coconut sprinkles.

Its refrigerated trucks shuttled cash, lottery tickets, and who-knows-what-else throughout southern New England. Art simultaneously was the Democratic boss in New Haven. In 1953, after Dick Lee’s win as mayor, Art become the city’s public-works director, leaving to others the world of loaded dice-on-ice and stacked aces-on-a-stick. Millions were to be made in urban renewal and federal largesse.

“Obviously,” he said, the pictures were taken as a swap to get someone in Boston a break, a get-out-of-jail-free card or a plea deal. They were meant to be used for an urgent, pending problem and not banked for future use, he thought. He didn’t think, even a few years after the theft, they’d ever be found. The theft wasn’t a high-level job or a conspiracy, he said. It looked low-end, and the low-end guys in organized crime don’t think strategically. Most are manic. They live in the moment. “They think from A to B.”

Either the Patriarca gang, based in Providence but active in Boston and New Haven, or the Winter Hill gang in Boston was involved — “definitely,” but “it’s not like IBM,” he said, suggesting that management wasn’t top-down but loosey-goosey more often than not. And by 1990, both gangs were gasping for air, hit by investigations, legalized gambling, and collapsed recruitment.

“They’re buried,” Art said about the paintings. “They’re gone, buried literally, who knows . . . someplace you wouldn’t think to look. . . . Wherever they are, no one knows what they are. . . . These people didn’t go to Yale.” Squealers? “Not on your life. . . . If somebody knows something, they’re not going to talk, ever . . . and these people don’t keep diaries.” And letters to burn? These guys can barely read and write.

What about the reward, I asked. It was $5 million then, and it’s $10 million now. “Do you think these guys believe they’d ever get a reward?” No gangster with an ounce of brains would trust the FBI’s promise to pay. Art thought the FBI in the Boston was not just crooked but rococo crooked, thoroughly and asymmetrically so, and with a flourish. James Comey, Bob Mueller, Andrew McCabe, and Peter Strzok all started in the Boston FBI office. These fakers were passionate about anything, it wasn’t about finding stolen art. They’re too preening and self-involved to bust gangsters. Strzok’s interest in illicit goods was surely limited to smuggling bonbons to his in-house FBI flame.

Of course, if anyone knew Boston’s crime picture in the ’90s on a micro and macro level, it was Whitey Bulger. After Bulger was captured in 2011, the police got nothing from him on the Gardner theft. The law wanted to find the Gardner art, then and now. Bulger? He was America’s “Most Wanted” after Osama bin Laden, but the FBI wasn’t looking too hard for him. Notoriously, an FBI agent protected Bulger during a gang war unfolding at the same time as the Gardner theft. Had Bulger been caught earlier, before he was a stubborn 80-year-old geezer, he might have dropped some helpful hints.

In February, Bobby Gentile was in the news, or at least on WTNH, the ABC station for Hartford and New Haven. Gentile, once mid-level in the Patriarca circuit and now 84, has been a suspect in the Gardner theft for years or, more precisely, not in the actual theft but the subsequent movement and possession of the art. He gave WTNH a long interview. Dennis House, a first-rate reporter, got the interview.

Gentile reminds me of my Uncle Willie. His modest home and yard in Manchester, a Hartford suburb, has been searched multiple times by the FBI, most recently in 2016, when police found guns, silencers, $20,000 stuffed in an old clock, and a list of the stolen art with its black-market value. Gentile said all were plants and that he owned a respectable concrete business. “Shoes, anyone?”

Only kidding. He never said that. Gentile has figured in the mix for years and is the last man still alive on the FBI’s list of suspects. He failed a lie-detector test a few years ago when he denied knowing anything about the theft. Gentile left prison in 2019 after a three-year stint for illegal weapons possession. His lawyer is Ryan McGuigan, whose father, Austin, was the chief state’s attorney, Connecticut’s top criminal prosecutor, in my day. Father McGuigan busted a battalion of crooked politicians. Gentile claims that the FBI framed him on the gun charges to get him to talk, sent him to prison, and got, as he put it, “nuthin’ but nuthin.’”

The FBI already knows who robbed the Gardner. Lenny DiMuzio and George Reissfelder were the two thieves, working for Carmello Merlino and Bobby Donati, both Patriarca underbosses. Robert Houghton was their driver. The pictures were to be either ransomed or liquidated for cash to fund Vincent “the Animal” Ferrara’s quest for control of the Patriarca gang. It was a freelance job, with Merlino and Donati hoping to curry favor with Ferrara, then in prison.

Within a year, DiMuzio, Reissfelder, Donati, and Houghton were dead — DiMuzio with a bullet in his head, Reissfelder from a drug overdose, Donati with a slit throat, Houghton, at 300 pounds, from a heart attack. Merlino went to prison for armed robbery, dying there without a peep. Robert Guarente and Gentile worked for Merlino. They got at least some of the art but didn’t know how to fence it. Calling Christie’s was out of the question. They’re provincial, not dumb. Guarente died in 2004. His widow claims he gave some of the art to Gentile.

Gentile’s interview last month shook some dust from the case, but his knowledge applies only to two of the 15 stolen objects. Ferrara, now 72, served 20 years for ordering a murder. Donati told Ferrara in 1991, early in his time in prison, that he stole the art to bargain for his release. Ferrara left prison in 2005 because of prosecutorial mischief in his case, though he seems to have completely reformed. I wouldn’t be surprised to read he’s become a priest. He doesn’t know where the art is.

Gentile is now old and feeble. Claims that he knows anything about the art are “lies, lies, lies,” he says. An old political crony told me “absolutely no usually means absolutely yes.” I suspect this applies to organized crime. “They can say what they want. . . . I don’t care,” he said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

He knows what happened to the art, or some of it. I don’t think the Gardner will ever get it back, barring a freak accident. He gave his TV interview as a last, smug, cheeky taunt. The only power he has now is the power to tease. The FBI won’t get anything from him.

I wrote earlier that the honchos at the Gardner must have channeled “Mrs. Jack,” as people called Mrs. Gardner, to get pitch-perfect design tips for the addition. Should we get the Ouija board out again? The trail’s getting cold. Reaching out in the afterlife to Whitey, Donati, DiMuzio, and company is one idea. Or get Mrs. Gardner to charm and cajole them. That’s the ultimate in going slumming. If that doesn’t work, it might not hurt to take another crack at Bobby Gentile. Get Oprah on the line.