The Missing Masterpiece
Part 1: Who Snatched a $100 Million Painting?
I’d never seen anything like it: an empty frame in an art museum. Sitting between modern masterworks was a blank backing canvas. The painting was missing.
It was 2014 and I was on a road trip through the Desert Southwest. I’d needed a break from my fulfilling but intense job. For decades, I’ve launched road trips — alone, with my partner Wayne, or with friends — to explore the nooks and crevices of America. Wayne would reliably ask, half-jokingly, “Are you going to gather your thoughts?” and sometimes I did organize my priorities or make decisions. But usually, it was less a process of collecting and ordering ideas than of dramatically reducing the noise, turning down the volume on the ten thousand things that ricocheted around my head on a workday.
Tucson felt like a Colorado town dropped into southern Arizona: people dressed as if they’d been hiking the nearby mountains all morning. Circling the city was an endless forest of saguaros, the cartoon cactuses of the southwest. Tucson’s extra-wide streets channeled its Native American, Spanish Colonial, Mexican, and Anglo cultures into congested intersections.
I was visiting the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Small museums, I’d learned from earlier driving adventures, often revealed surprises. This museum delivered stunning pieces by Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, and Georgia O’Keeffe. But the real surprise this time was the empty frame.
A card explained the oddity: On the day after Thanksgiving in 1985, a couple entered the museum as it opened and headed directly to Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre. The man sliced the painting from its frame, hid the rolled canvas beneath his coat, and fled with his companion, who had distracted the lone security guard. Composite sketches showed a dark-haired, mustachioed man wearing aviator glasses and a woman whose light hair flowed from her head scarf. A small photograph showed the missing painting, a dynamic abstract from the mid-1950s depicting a woman in an earthy yellow hue. The placard noted that ‟the painting has never been found.”
The empty de Kooning frame haunted me and bounced around in my head. Who stole the painting? And why? How had they gotten away with it? My desire for escape fueled my curiosity and propelled me down this odd rabbit hole.
At my hotel, I looked up newspaper articles on the case. After the 1985 theft, the University of Arizona police and the FBI interviewed witnesses. A security guard saw the thieves enter a red or maroon sports car with black louvers on the rear window. Detectives failed to find any fingerprints on the frame. Without decent leads, local police and the FBI eventually halted their investigation. By the time of my visit, other paintings in de Kooning’s Woman series were selling for north of one hundred million dollars.
My strange fascination with the de Kooning theft would eventually prompt me to revisit Tucson and the charming mining town of Silver City, New Mexico. I never expected that I would become part of the story and solve a piece of the mystery.
The Painting Reappears
Three years after my trip, a New York Times headline jumped off the page: ‟STOLEN DE KOONING RESURFACES MORE THAN 30 YEARS LATER.” The Tucson museum had recovered the painting. A stream of newspaper and magazine articles and a 2022 documentary called The Thief Collector later detailed the investigation.
I learned that in 2017 a man hired an antiques shop to clear out his aunt’s house in Cliff, New Mexico. Rita Alter had recently died at 81. Her husband, Jerry, had passed away five years earlier. The shop sat in nearby Silver City and was owned by three men, Dave Van Auker and Buck Burns — who are a couple — and Rick Johnson.
As the trio entered the Alter property, they realized they were stepping into something strange. The yard sported a pyramid and obelisk covered in colorful mosaic tiles and a circle of classical pillars topped by busts of artists including Beethoven, Moliere, and Shakespeare.
‟It was a very creepy feeling,” said Van Auker. Inside there were a ton of photos of Jerry and Rita. ‟You definitely got the sense that these were kind of really cool, hip, beatniky people who were really with it. You know, he was a sax player; it looked like she modeled. These people were world travelers.” One room was filled with treasures from the couple’s trips to Africa.
Artwork hung on every wall, even in the bathroom. Most were Jerry’s colorful geometric fantasias, ‟the most hideous paintings you’ve ever seen,” Van Auker commented. The men split up, and Van Auker entered the main bedroom. Behind the door, where no casual visitor would glimpse it, was a painting that caught his eye. It was a provocative abstract of a female figure, something he thought he and Burns might hang in their guest house. Burns’ first reaction was how cheap the frame was. Johnson thought it was ugly. Casually appraising the home’s contents, the men offered Rita’s nephew $2000, which they hoped to recover by selling its midcentury modern furniture.
The trio returned the next day, stacked as much as their truck could carry, and drove the thirty minutes over the Continental Divide back to their shop. They unloaded their cargo and moved the painting into the store. ‟It had probably been in the store maybe ten minutes,” recalled Van Aulter, ‟and a gentleman walked in the door, and I heard him say to Buck, ‘Is this real?’” The customer was an artist himself and noticed the de Kooning signature in the corner of the canvas. He told the men he thought the painting was a genuine de Kooning. Familiar with the artist’s work, he offered Van Auker $200,000 for it. Van Auker thought it was a joke, but the customer said he should research it; it could be worth much more than that.
Stolen!
Googling the painting, Van Auker located a three-decades-old Arizona Republic news story about the theft. Without a moment’s hesitation, he called the University of Arizona Museum of Art. ‟I think I have your stolen painting,” he told the student receptionist, who connected him to Olivia Miller, then the museum’s curator of exhibitions and now its director. Van Auker worried that Miller would think he was a lunatic.
He explained how he purchased the painting at an estate and felt it matched the image posted online. Miller asked him to email him photos of the canvas and its dimensions. When she reviewed Van Auker’s reply, Miller texted one of her colleagues, ‟Holy shitballs. This painting will be back in its home after 32 goddamn years.”
Then something strange happened. Van Auker waited for a follow-up call or message, but nothing came. Just silence. ‟It went crickets,” Van Auker observed. He and his partners had to decide what to do with the artwork.
The Overnight Wait
The university police warned Miller not to have any more contact with Van Auker. Fearing he might keep the painting, sell it, or hold it for ransom, they told her not to confirm its authenticity.
Most of Silver City heard about the discovery, and many locals popped in to see the painting. Worried about a robbery, Van Auker and Burns moved it to the bathroom, behind the store’s only lockable door. At closing time, fearful of leaving it unguarded, they took the painting home with them.
The whole town knew where they lived, and Van Auker worried a desperate meth-head might have heard they had the valuable artwork. He stayed up all night, his Colt .38 on his lap, a 9mm handgun on the coffee table, and a .22 Smith & Wesson by the door. ‟It was terrifying, said Burns, very terrifying.” Worried he might not hear back from the museum, Van Auker contacted the FBI.
The following day, an attorney Van Auker didn’t know called and recommended that he hold onto the painting while considering his options. It was worth a lot of money. He called Miller and got her voicemail. He explained how people were trying to get him to sell the painting. ‟I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do this. All I want is for that painting to go back where it belongs, and I’m just freaking out because I’m not hearing from you guys, and someone might cut my throat for a de Kooning painting.”
Restoration
Later that day, Miller got approval to pick up the stolen artwork. Upon seeing the painting in Silver City, she again exclaimed, ‟Holy shitballls.”
Van Auker, Burns, and Johnson had never considered anything but returning the stolen artwork. ‟People ask us all the time how you just can do it so easily, but it was like, how could you not?” said Van Auker. ‟That should be the question,” added Burns. The three men refused the museum’s $10,000 reward. ‟What it felt like to me was that Woman-Ochre was kidnapped from her home, and she was shackled in this ugly frame for thirty-one years,” said Van Auker. ‟She was degraded, and now she’s free. I know it’s an object. I know that. But that’s what I truly felt. She was alive to me.”
Police brought the painting back to Tucson in a convoy. When the thieves sliced the canvas from its frame, they’d torn it, and flakes of paint chipped off when they rolled it up. Restored by the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, the painting went back on display in Tucson in 2022 in a gallery renamed to honor David Van Auker, Buck Burns, and Richard Johnson.
Now, the kidnapped painting was home, but a giant mystery still lingered: How had the Alters wound up with it? Answering that question inadvertently dropped me into the story.
In Part 2, I travel to Tucson, Cliff, and Silver City to unearth the curious life of Rita and Jerry Alter. Read Part 2 here: https://medium.com/@louschachter/the-missing-masterpiece-03deac00bea3.
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