The landscape is intentionally blurred and indistinct.  Fast-moving swirls of green, purple and pink and a splash of white mimic the motion of the water and the wind.  The viewer glimpses the river through a scrim of shrubbery, while something gray and vertical looms on the far bank.

Photo by Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images

"Paysage Bord du Seine" (On The Shore of the Seine), an oil on linen napkin, measuring 5 1/2" by 9" with no artist signature had been purchased for $1,000 in Paris and valued at $2,500 in 1951 when it was exhibited at the BMA in the show "From Ingres to Gaugin".  Mrs. May told the museum that 'Renoir painted this landscape for his mistress, at a restaurant on the Seine - thus the linen napkin.'  The museum index card noted that this Renoir landscape was stolen from the Gallery on November 17, 1951 and had been replaced by a Degas "Self Portrait".

In a box full of Saidie May's letters and artwork receipts lay one major clue: records showing that she had lent the painting to the museum in 1937.  The discovery startled museum officials, who had already said the flea-market Renoir never entered their institution.

Art work by Franz Kline stolen and recovered

The photos were absolutely a help to the investigation.  As for the reward that was offered by the victim, that may have played a role, but at this stage in the investigation, I cannot speak to that.

Recovered art work by Philip Guston (1950)

Star bond trader Jeffrey Gundlach said his $10-million collection of art, which was stolen this month, has been recovered safely. 

Two suspects have been arrested by Santa Monica police, he said.  Gundlach had offered a near-record $1.7-million reward for the collection's safe return. 

Composition (A) En Rouge Et Blanc by Piet Mondrian

by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

"Green Target" by Jasper Johns

On September 14, 2012, officers responded to a residence located in the 500 block of 12th Street on the report of a residential burglary that had occurred sometime between September 12th at 3 p.m. and September 14th at 8 p.m. 

"Cathedral Tours" by Guy Rose, 1916

The victim had just returned home from a trip and discovered that his residence had been burglarized.  Numerous high-end paintings and two wooden box art pieces had been stolen from various rooms throughout the home.  Also stolen was the victim's 2010 red Porsche Carrera 4S, which was parked in the garage, several expensive watches, wine and a small amount of U. S. currency. The estimated loss at this time is believed to be in excess of 10 million dollars.  Preliminarily, the the estimated loss is between 20 and 39 million dollars.

Today the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a press release adding a stolen Renoir painting, "Madeleine Leaning on Her Elbow with Flowers in Her Hair", to its list of Top 10 Art Crimes and advertising a reward for up to $50,000 to be paid by a private insurer for information leading to the picture's recovery. The 1918 painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir was stolen on September 8, 2011. According to the FBI:

The homeowner was watching television when she heard a loud noise downstairs. When she went to investigate, she was confronted by an armed man in a ski mask. ...The painting was taken with its frame intact from the stairwell where it hung. The masked robber, who forced entry through the back door of the home, is described as a white male, 18 to 26 years old, who weighs about 160 pounds and is approximately 5’-10” tall. He was armed with a large-caliber, semi-automatic handgun.

This painting by Rembrandt was stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts  in 1972 and remains missing.

They said they saw two long-haired men, about five feet, six inches tall, and wearing ski hoods and sports clothes.  One spoke French, the other English.  But they heard another French voice of a man they never saw.

There was a sea of broken frames and backings, and smashed showcases.  Upstairs in the room where the major theft took place, it was just devastation.  They'd cleaned it out completely. 

For the second pile, they'd gone around selecting from various rooms.  I shudder when I think what might have been if they hadn't opened that door ... With what they'd proposed to remove, if they'd been undisturbed -- it was just like they meant a general clear out of the museum.

In 2008 the Sureté du Quebec, in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, established the first national art crime investigation team in Canada’s history. The four-man team is now led by Jean-Francois Talbot, who has worked since 2003 with Alain Lacoursiere, an art historian and retired member of the Montreal police. Lacoursiere, who has been nominated for an ARCA Award, helped in the development of an art crime team in Canada and a system called Art Alert, which is an email bulletin sent out to 25,000 subscribers in 75 countries, largely members of the art community and police departments. Between 2004 and 2008, a combined force of agents from the Sureté du Quebec and the Montreal police department investigated around 450 art crimes, made 20 arrests, and seized over 150 stolen or forged artworks, with a total estimated value of around $2 million. The newly-established art crime team handles an average of 90 art crime cases per year. ARCA interviewed the art crime team, including Alain Dumouchel, to learn a bit more about art crime and investigation in Canada.

I know that my family were Jewish, of course, and I know they were staggeringly rich, but I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business, writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss…. And I’m not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago.

I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers – hard and tricky and Japanese – and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it – if they thought about it. I want to know what it has witnessed.

Unfortunately the merest scratch of Japanese character is the only clue to the artist’s name, so I am unable to say who conceived, and in creamy ivory executed, the hold man horribly embarrassed by a cuttle-fish; the priest who made the soldier pick up a deer for him and laughed to think that the brisket would be his and the burden his companions…

I pick one up and turn it around in my fingers, weight it in the palm of my hand. If it is wood, chestnut or elm, it is even lighter than the ivory. You see the patina more easily on these wooden ones: there is a faint shine on the spine of the bridled wolf and on the tumbling acrobats locked in their embrace. The ivory ones come in shades of cream, every colour, in fact, but white. A few have inlaid eyes of amber or horn. Some of the older ones are slightly worn away: the haunch of the faun resting on leaves has lost its markings. There is a slight split, an almost imperceptible fault line on the cicada. Who dropped it? Where and when?

Carry is not quite the right word for having a netsuke in a pocket. It sounds too purposeful. A netsuke is so light and so small that it migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget that it is there.

I realize how much I care about how this hard-and-soft, losable object has survived. I need to find a way of unraveling its story. Owning this netsuke – inheriting them all – means I have been handed a responsibility to them and to the people who have owned them. I am unclear and discomfited about where the parameters of this responsibility might lie. 

I know the bones of this journey from Iggie. I know that these netsuke were bought in Paris in the 1870s by a cousin of my great-grandfather called Charles Ephrussi. I know that he gave them as a wedding-present to my great-grandfather Victor von Ephrussi in Vienna at the turn of the century. I know the story of Anna, my great-grandmother’s maid, very well. And I know that they came with Iggie to Tokyo, of course, and were part of his life with Hiro.

Thierry Lenain is a Belgian professor of art theory at Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is the author of Monkey Painting (Reaktion, 1997) which, as the title suggests, is about what happens when monkeys are given painting materials, and the recent Art Forgery: the History of a Modern Obsession (Reaktion, 2011). We chatted with Lenain, who also has an academic article published in this issue.

Thierry Lenain: There is indeed a link with my previous topics. If we leave out a book based on a PhD dissertation, pertaining to the question of play in Nietzsche’s philosophy, those topics all dealt with things whose inclusion in, or exclusion from, the category of artworks is problematic and an object of controversy. Such was, typically, the case of monkey painting. To most, the results of the graphic or painting plays of non-human primates have strictly nothing to do with art: only a misleading resemblance with action-painting could prompt someone to think otherwise, they say. But to others, those plays should indeed be regarded as reflecting the very pre-human roots of art and, in that measure, should certainly not be excluded from the category of art (this category rather must be extended so as to accommodate “animal art”).