The Record of an Object Nobody Can Produce

Four objects in this archive cannot be produced by anyone

Of 204 published records, four describe objects whose current location is unknown. Two were stolen and never recovered, one has been missing since the American occupation of Japan, and one was sold at auction for a widely reported sum and then disappeared from public view.

Every one of those four still has a working institutional record behind it. Vermeer's Concert carries a Gardner Museum inventory number, P21W27, and the Museum's legal title is undisturbed. The Honjo Masamune carries a Japanese national designation made in 1939. Van Gogh's Vase with Viscaria carries a catalogue number in the Van Gogh literature, F 324a and JH 1137. The Salvator Mundi carries an attribution argument and a sale record and nothing else.

This is the part that repays attention. The record is not a memorial. It is doing legal and practical work, and it will go on doing it for as long as the institution maintains it, which in at least one of these cases has now run to eighty years.

The Gardner keeps a catalogue of what it does not have

In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men in police uniforms told the Gardner's night guard they were responding to a disturbance, and he let them in. They restrained both guards in the basement and spent the night in the galleries. Thirteen works left the building in two trips to a car, and the thieves were gone by 2.45 in the morning. The guards stayed handcuffed until police arrived at 8.15.

The Museum's own account of the theft is precise about how each object was taken, and the distinctions matter to conservators: two Rembrandts were cut from their frames, while the Vermeer and the Flinck were removed from theirs. A Chinese bronze gu was pulled off a table. Manet's Chez Tortoni went from the Blue Room downstairs, its frame left behind.

What the Museum publishes now is not an incident report. It is a list of thirteen works, each with its artist and title, presented exactly as a collection is presented: Vermeer's Concert, three Rembrandts, a Flinck, a Manet, five Degas works, the Chinese gu, and a Napoleonic eagle finial by Antoine-Denis Chaudet. A share of the reward is promised for information leading to the return of any individual work or group of works, and a further 100,000 dollars is offered specifically for the finial. The investigation is open.

A designation can outlive the object it designates

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs runs a public register of nationally designated cultural properties whose whereabouts are unknown, under a programme whose title translates as an appeal to recover everyone's cultural property. The Honjo Masamune sits on that register.

Its entry describes it as a sword, unsigned, attributed to Masamune, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1939. The field for theft and the year it occurred is empty, which is itself accurate: in December 1945 Tokugawa Iemasa took the sword, with other family blades, to the Mejiro police station in Tokyo under the occupation order to surrender all swords, and on 18 January 1946 the police handed them to an American sergeant whose name a Japanese officer wrote down phonetically in katakana. Nobody stole it. It was handed in, receipted to a name nobody has since been able to identify, and lost.

So the designation of 1939 is still live, eighty years after the last person to see the object handled it, and the state maintains a public page for a thing it cannot produce. The record and the object have come apart entirely, and only the record is still available for inspection.

The same museum lost the same painting twice

Van Gogh's Vase with Viscaria has been stolen twice from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo. The first theft is dated 1977 by some accounts and 1978 by others; the picture surfaced in Kuwait and came back, either two years or ten years later depending on which source you read, and the circumstances of that recovery were never fully explained. The second theft, on 21 August 2010, was simpler. A thief cut the canvas out of its frame during opening hours and walked out.

The following hours produced one of the more instructive episodes in this archive. The culture minister announced that the painting had been recovered at Cairo airport the same day, and withdrew the claim the next. That retraction is now part of the record, and it should be, because a recovery announcement that turns out to be wrong does real damage to the search that follows it.

The doubt about the first recovery cannot now be resolved either. It was suggested at the time that the painting had been copied while it was gone, and that what returned might be a copy. Settling that would have required a technical examination between the recovery and 2010, and there is no published record that one was ever made. The object is gone, and so is the chance to answer the question about it.

What is actually missing, and for how long

The four unlocated records differ in almost every respect except the blank in the location field.

The Salvator Mundi is the odd one, and worth separating out. Nothing unlawful is alleged. A private owner is entitled to keep a painting out of sight, and the panel is presumably somewhere perfectly ordinary. But from the point of view of anyone trying to study it, the practical position is identical to the other three: the object cannot be examined, and the last technical work anyone did on it is the last that will be done for the foreseeable future.

The counter-case took twenty-three years

On the night of 15 to 16 April 1983 a single burglar, Naaman Diller, took 106 objects from the L. A. Mayer Institute in Jerusalem, including Breguet No. 160. It remains the largest theft of horology on record, and for twenty-three years the museum had nothing but its catalogue.

The recovery, which became public in late 2007 with the return to the museum placed in 2008, was not a police success. Diller was dead. The objects came back through a deathbed confession, a lawyer acting for an anonymous woman, and a payment by the museum, framed as a recovery rather than a ransom, with anonymity part of the arrangement. A further group of 43 watches and clocks was located in France afterwards. The commonly cited total is 96 of the 106 objects, which leaves ten still missing. Nobody was prosecuted for the burglary itself.

The lesson the museum world took from this is unglamorous and correct. What made the return possible was that the objects were individually catalogued and publicly identified, so that when someone finally wanted to give them back there was no ambiguity about what they were or whose they had been. The record was the mechanism.

Why the entry stays open

A museum that quietly deleted a stolen object from its catalogue would be doing three harmful things at once. It would weaken its own title, which in the Gardner's case is the only reason a future possessor cannot claim to have bought in good faith from someone entitled to sell. It would remove the object from the registers that a diligent buyer searches. And it would erase the scholarly record of a work that other objects are dated and attributed against.

So the entry stays open, and it acquires a peculiar status. Vermeer's Concert has an inventory number, a full catalogue entry, an established attribution and a documented condition history, and not one of those facts can now be checked against the thing itself. In this archive, a theft is recorded as an event in the provenance line, alongside purchases and bequests, because that is what it is: a transfer of possession, unlawful, but as real in the object's history as any sale.

Does that make the record less reliable? I would argue the opposite. The entry for a missing object is the one place where a catalogue cannot be corrected by looking, so everything in it has to stand on documents that were made while the object was still available. That is a harder standard than most records are held to, and it is the standard these four are stuck with permanently.

Why this archive is free to read

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