Art That's Everlasting -- Unless It's Stolen

Courbet painted his “Landscape near Ornans” in 1865. Vermeer painted “The Concert” in 1665. An unknown Chinese artist molded the “Gu” bronze beaker in the 12th century. Assyrian artisans carved a scorpion-bird-man statue out of basalt in what is now Syria 3,000 years ago. All of these creations have something in common: They're no longer just emblems of human genius.

They're reflections, too, of man's most evil impulses.

Consider the Vermeer, with the light playing off the girl's yellow dress as she concentrates on her harpsichord. The painting was just one of 36 known Vermeers in the world. But it's not “known” anymore. Twenty-five years ago last week, it had the bad luck of being caught up in Boston's criminal underworld. The painting, along with Rembrandt's “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” the Gu bronze and 10 other works, was snatched by thieves from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum.

They've all been missing since. The Vermeer is likely “the most valuable stolen object in the world,” the museum says. Who did it? Who knows. Over the decades, suspects have ranged from career art thieves to two-bit mobsters.

The thieves were ingenious, stealing without a trace on behalf of a foreign billionaire collector. Or they were the dumbest people in the world, not knowing that they couldn't sell what they stole.

Incompetence and possible corruption didn't help the investigation. Remember, this was the era when FBI agents were working for the gangster Whitey Bulger.

But Vermeer's young lady and Rembrandt's Jesus aren't the only victims of another era. Courbet's landscape was one of countless works stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s from Jewish families in Germany, Austria and elsewhere in Europe. The US Army “rescued” it in 1946, but its rightful owner's heirs had to wait until 2011 to get it.

The mythic statue from Syria suffered across the generations, too. Held in a German museum during World War II, it was bombed by the Allies, and it took nearly half a century for Germany to put it back together again.

And consider what ISIS is doing right now: smashing up the only Biblical-era statues that weren't smuggled out of Syria and Iraq over the centuries.

It's humbling that while we don't last very long, our art certainly does — long enough to be vulnerable to the successive generations of thieves, mass murders and terrorists that also endure over the centuries. The ancient Assyrians could not have predicted beheadings on videotape, but they, too, lived in a dangerous, destructive world.

Art endures to such an extent that even 25 years isn't that long. Several of the Gardner suspects or suspected witnesses are already dead — murdered — sick or just old.

And while the crime is important, any living criminals aren't. The museum just wants its art back, no questions asked. It's offering a $5 million award, and should probably offer much more.

Will the art come back?

The world has already changed in ways that give new hope, too. Twenty-five years ago, most people outside of Boston or outside of the art world likely never heard about the theft.

But after years of trying to move on, the Gardner is now bannering the missing works on its home page. A Google streetview-style tour of the museum shows the public how and where each painting or sculpture was stolen.

Just as some people are now dead, some people are alive who weren't then — and they may know something interesting about their now-dead relatives, friends and lovers.

And there's always luck: Last month, Customs officers recovered a Picasso painting stolen from a French museum a decade ago ... at Newark Airport.

Finally, there's conscience. It's one thing to be a thief.

It's another to find yourself in the company of Nazi and ISIS thugs — destroyers of humanity itself. As Donna Tartt wrote in The Goldfinch, her 2013 Pulitzer-winning novel about one stolen painting, to have “extinguished a light at the heart of the world” is “the worst kind of immortality.”

Humanity can withstand the loss — we've stood lots of loss already, as the stories from our surviving art attest. But maybe time will wear down the perpetrators before they run out of it.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post

This piece originally appeared in New York Post