Nearly forty years ago, Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre was snatched from a museum. A few years ago it resurfaced. An intriguing documentary sheds light on the beguiling story.
There’s a scene in The Thomas Crown Affair in which the character played by Pierce Brosnan—a billionaire “finance geek” with a penchant for stealing art—admires a painting by Claude Monet. But he’s not at a museum. Instead, he’s in his lavish Manhattan mansion, experiencing a moment of solitary bliss as he stares at San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk—the fruits of his brazen robbery.
The plot is of course fiction, replete with a steamy love affair between him and the woman tasked with investigating the case. But as Mark Twain famously said, “life is stranger than fiction.”
In the case of a stolen Willem de Kooning painting, which vanished off the walls from the University of Arizona Museum of Art over three decades ago, the story may not be stranger than fiction, but it’s certainly on par.
In a short but engaging 2017 documentary titled Discovering the de Kooning (produced by WFAA, a news station in Texas), this bizarre story of a stolen painting is brought to life.
The day of the heist was November 29, 1985. A man and a woman entered the university museum in Tucson, Arizona. While the woman distracted the guard for a few brief minutes, the man cut the painting, Woman-Ochre, from its frame. The couple then exited the building, hopped into a two-door car and took off.
Unlike today’s world, where security cameras are ubiquitous, there were no such devices inside the museum. A detailed composite was made of the two suspects, but the illustration did not result in any tangible leads. The case went cold.
Who had robbed the museum of a precious piece of art, donated in 1958, and painted by one of America’s most revered abstract expressionists?
It would be over thirty years before the mystery started to unravel, and when it did, it occurred at an unlikely location: a consignment shop in Silver City, New Mexico.
Inside the walls of Manzanita Ridge Furniture and Antiques, a particular painting caught a customer’s eye. To him, it looked very much like William de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre. He informed the store owners what they potentially had in their possession. After doing some research of their own, the owners decided to phone the University of Arizona.
For Olivia Miller, curator of museum exhibitions, the call was a deliciously surreal moment: “It sounds crazy, but I had daydreams of getting that phone call.” Not wanting to get her hopes up, however, she kept a healthy amount of skepticism. After all, there are countless copies and studies of paintings, not to mention forgeries. But there’s only one original.
After being sent close-up photos—and confirming certain details, like the painting’s dimensions—her reservations started to fade. And before long, the museum had an exciting announcement: William de Kookning’s Woman-Ochre had been found.
Yet many questions remained. How had de Kooning’s painting ended up in a consignment shop, some thirty years after it had been stolen?
Unlike many other elements of this bizarre story, this part is straightforward: the shop came into possession of the painting when a man named Ron Roseman had the shop liquidate his late aunt’s estate, located in Cliff, New Mexico.
His aunt, a woman named Rita, was the wife of Jerry Atler (who passed away five years before she did). The couple moved from New York City in the 1970s, settling in the sparsely populated town of Cliff, New Mexico. He was a retired school teacher, and she took a position as a school speech pathologist when they moved out west.
Despite moving to such an obscure location, the Atlers cherished travel and exploration. They visited all seven continents and well over 100 countries. And their lovely home, situated on 20 acres, was full of all types of wonderful art from their travels. An interesting couple, to be sure, but also a somewhat mysterious one?
How did they have the financial means to indulge in such a life? It evidently wasn’t owing to their very respectable, but hardly lucrative, jobs.
When asked by a WFAA interviewer where the money may have come from, the nephew—who comes across as sincere and who has never been even slightly implicated in any wrongdoing—nonetheless replies with a puzzling remark: “Well, I don’t know. I guess we always figured they were very frugal.”
It would be nice if eschewing restaurants, morning coffee habits, and other superfluous expenses meant that one could travel the globe, but the math hardly adds up. Even after all their excursions, there was apparently a million dollars left in the couples’ bank account at the time of Rita’s death. But, who knows, maybe it comes down to something as mundane as a large inheritance that they preferred not to talk about.
The ultimate question about the Alters concerns not dollar bills but Woman-Ochre: Were they the ones who snatched de Kooning’s painting off the wall? The circumstantial evidence is strong: they owned a car that matched the description; the couple looks strikingly similar to the two individuals in the composite; they enjoyed other works by William de Kooning.
Many other details seem to give credence to the idea that they very well may have been the ones behind the theft. And if they did steal it, did the globe-trotting couple nab other precious pieces of art during their lifetimes?
With the theft of the de Kooning now nearly 40 years past—and both the Atlers deceased—many questions are unlikely to be resolved. But at least one thing is certain: Woman-Ochre is once again on the wall of its original home, available for all to see.
Spectatio 