Detour: Did the Alters steal more?
And can AI help my investigation?
Part of what drew me back to Silver City, NM, a month ago was the chance to learn more about Jerry and Rita Alter. I spent the afternoon in the antique store where the de Kooning was discovered.
The dealers’ enthusiasm for solving the mystery of the Alters pulled me back into the investigation. I took pictures of the couple’s travel journals and family photos. I also met Julie Enos. She belonged to the garden club that auctioned the two paintings I recently discovered were stolen. Julie is a professional photographer and shot all the items donated from the Alter estate. I learned that most were auctioned locally; only a few went to the Scottsdale auction house.
Back home in Palm Springs, I started my investigation with a photo of a sculpture: an alabaster bust of a young woman. I quickly determined that it was either by or in the style of Giovanni Pinotti Cipriani, a late 19th-century sculptor. His work is widely available, and his pieces are worth only about $600. I could not find a recorded theft of any of his works.
I also investigated what seemed to be a Shona stone sculpture from Zimbabwe, but I could find no evidence of theft.
Julie shared photographs of every Native American blanket or rug the garden club auctioned. I found an excellent website documenting missing Native American artifacts but couldn’t find a match. The database seems to have started in the late 1990s, and if the Alters’ items were stolen, it was before that.
One lingering mystery is what happened to one rug in the background of an Alter family photo from the 1980s. It was not among those auctioned, which suggests it was no longer in the house when they died.
I’ve been assuming that the Alters stole artwork and then sold it to fund their lifestyle. If so, some pieces they once possessed would not have been in their estate. This rug was the only one that fit those parameters. But, searching its image, I could find nothing about it. The rug could have come from Turkey, Morocco, Albania, or the United States.
I still expect to link the Alters to another theft, but I haven’t done so yet. This week I gained some helpful assistance. A friend of a friend here in Palm Springs is an expert in artificial intelligence. He believes we can deploy AI to accelerate the process I use to find recorded art thefts and match images and descriptions.
Peter and I are going to work together this summer to train GPT to do what I need. We’ll see what happens. On my first day, I discovered that using AI is like housebreaking and training a new puppy. It needs to learn your environment and habits. It doesn’t instinctively catch Frisbees.
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