The Missing Masterpiece
Part 3: I Play Detective
Strong evidence suggested that Jerry and Rita Alter swiped de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985. But despite a lifestyle well beyond their schoolteacher means and a million-dollar estate, nothing indicated they’d stolen anything else. The FBI cleared the artwork in their house that was sold at auction after their deaths.
When I met Dave Van Auker, one of the three men who found the missing de Kooning in New Mexico, I talked to him about the Alters. If they stole the de Kooning, I asked, and all the evidence suggests they did, isn’t it odd that no other works of art in their estate were stolen?
Van Auker responded with a twinkle in his eye. What the FBI said, he reminded me, was that none of the works sold at auction were listed in its stolen art database. That didn’t mean they weren’t stolen. Van Auker suggested that an institution might not have wanted to report a theft, or the works might have come from a personal collection and not been entered into the database.
That made me wonder about the three pieces from the Alters’ estate that were auctioned. Maybe, I told Van Auker, I’ll explore their provenance a bit. He asked me to keep him posted on anything I found.
On my drive from Silver City, New Mexico, to Scottsdale, Arizona, I pondered the auctioned artwork. Could it, too, have been stolen? I’d read that much effort went into tracing a valuable Navajo blanket found at the Alters’ home to a theft at a museum outside Tucson. But the Alters’ blanket turned out to be different from the stolen one, and that gambit proved a dead end.
Obviously, the auction gallery would have checked the provenance of the three items they sold, right? But it seemed worth looking into. I found it hard to believe that the Alters had stolen only that one painting. I didn’t have an inventory of the Alter home, but The Thief Collector documentary included images of the auctioned items.
In the movie, a garden club volunteer describes the auctioned works and mentions their artists: Joseph Henry Sharp, Victor Higgins, and R.C. Gorman. The film shows the three pieces but doesn’t provide their titles. I’m not much of a detective, but I’m a good researcher. I don’t mind wandering the dark alleys of cyberspace, where you need not binoculars and a gun but rather the patience of a great blue heron and the eyes of a tawny owl, enduring hours of tedium while remaining ever ready to spot a glint of camouflaged prey.
I searched online for auctions featuring all three artists and found one in Scottsdale in 2018. The web page showed paintings by Sharp and Higgins that perfectly resembled those in the film, as did the sculpture by Gorman. Together, the three items sold for $150,000. I searched the listed titles on the web but couldn’t find any indication they’d been stolen.
Googling the ‟FBI stolen art database,” I found a site with the outdated, text-heavy look typical of government agencies. A form promised the ability to search the database, but the links were all broken. Going back to Google, the second hit brought me to an updated site with all the modern aesthetics of HTML5. This database was easy to search but returned no hits for Higgins, Sharp, or Gorman.
The auctioned Gorman work, Seated Woman, sold for just $3800 and seemed to me to be a maquette — an early model of a planned larger sculpture. I found a large version of the same sculpture on display at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe.
Tracing that work, I discovered something curious: starting in 1996, classified ads in the Arizona Republic offered a Gorman bronze called Seated Woman for $5000. In 1997, the ads moved to the San Francisco Examiner, and the price increased to $7000. Some ads listed a second daytime phone number I tracked to a New Age crystals shop on Nob Hill. That number offered up a bewildering range of items in the San Francisco classifieds between 1986 and 1997: a year-old BMW, an older Datsun 200SX, other cars and trucks, an expensive telescope, video equipment, and a private art collection containing works by Miro, Picasso, and Dali. Whether the Seated Woman in the Phoenix and San Francisco ads was the Alters’ piece is impossible to know, and this was a dead end.
Searching by artist and title for the two paintings yielded little. Perhaps their names had been changed? After all, painters typically don’t write titles on the backs of their work. More likely, titles consistent with others the artist used were applied when the works were auctioned.
I captured a picture of what had been sold in Scottsdale in 2018 as Fall Landscape by Victor Higgins and dropped it into Google Lens. Staring back at me were dozens of images from the auction site. But one linked to an art poster company, and on that page, the painting was called Aspens. I found two versions of Aspens, one of which was larger than the Alters’ and had been sold at auction in 2007. In a coffee-table book of Higgins’ work in the Internet Archive, I found the smaller painting, which the book said was owned by the Harwood Foundation in Taos.
Then I checked whether that painting had ever been stolen. Indeed, the Harwood Foundation reported a theft of Aspens in 1977. That same thief also absconded with a picture by J.H. Sharp called Indian Boy in Full Dress. I couldn’t find an image of that work, but the title could have described the Sharp painting sold at auction as Indian in a War Bonnet. The figure in the picture is a young man.
Subsequent articles said the stolen works were quickly recovered, and the thief was arrested and convicted. I couldn’t find anything linking that man to the Alters.
But were these paintings now at the Harwood? Did they ever get returned? Was there, perhaps, a second theft? I went to the Harwood Museum’s collection website, but it was down, so I couldn’t check. I emailed their service provider and gave up for the day.
Mercifully, the Harwood website was back up the following morning, and I searched for both paintings. Neither was there. A third painting also stolen in 1977, Leon Gaspard’s Taos Indians, was still part of the museum collection, though not currently on display. I stared out the window above my desk and looked at the planes taking off from Sky Harbor in the distance. Could the paintings have been recovered after the theft but, somehow, not returned to it? Were they lost in an FBI warehouse? Were they later sold? Why weren’t they back at the museum?
I pounded at the keyboard, searching alternatives of ‟Harwood Museum Theft” in newspapers, working from the present back to 1977. Historical newspaper sites return hits for any digitized page with the search terms, even if they don’t appear in the same article, so the process was tedious.
Web sleuthing is like mineral prospecting. Hours of tedium are occasionally rewarded by a ‟Eureka!” A 1988 article in the Albuquerque Journal touched on security issues at the Harwood Museum. Misspelling Sharp’s name, it noted in passing that four years earlier, paintings by Joseph Sharpe and Victor Higgins ‟were stolen when someone walked in, pulled the paintings off the walls and walked out with them.” It was the same M.O. as the de Kooning theft.
‟The paintings have not been recovered,” the article said. That would explain why they weren’t listed in the online database. With that lead, I looked for hits from four years earlier. I found many articles describing other matters at the museum with the word ‟theft” elsewhere on the page, referring in one case to a robbery at a Sears store and in another to a police blotter report.
Then I came across a four-paragraph article in the Taos News from 1985. Eight years after the 1977 theft, the Harwood was robbed again. A man in a black raincoat ripped two small paintings from the wall: Victor Higgins’ Aspens and a painting by J.H. Sharp entitled Oklahoma Cheyenne. Were these the two paintings later found in the Alters’ home?
Aspens matched the painting found at the Alters and then auctioned in 2018 to benefit the garden club. Its dimensions conformed to the size of the auctioned picture. I couldn’t locate an image of Oklahoma Cheyenne, but it was likely the J.H. Sharp painting also auctioned in Scottsdale in 2018.
It seemed I’d answered the question no one else had been able to: Had the Alters stolen other artwork? Yes, they had. But what should I do now?
I was excited and didn’t know what to do with my adrenaline. Whom should I tell? I wanted to call Dave Van Auker because I knew that, of everyone, he would grasp the significance and share my enthusiasm. But did I have a duty to report a crime? The FBI stolen art website offered ways to share tips, and I knew the names of the agents who investigated the Alters. But I imagined being sidelined as they worked on active cases, and I didn’t look forward to interactions with a government bureaucracy.
I thought about alerting the auction gallery, which was within walking distance. But their first instinct might be to protect themselves, and if they warned the buyers, that could complicate a recovery. I considered emailing one of the many reporters who covered the case. Van Auker mentioned that one is writing a book on the theft. Then I realized that the right thing to do was to alert the victim, the Harwood Museum, and let them take the driver’s seat.
I decided to go right to the top. At 10:30 a.m. that Monday, I emailed the president of the Harwood Museum, Juniper Leherissey. I tried to be succinct and not sound like a nut. It reminded me of how Dave Van Auker felt when he first contacted the U of A museum about finding the de Kooning.
Leherissey responded within 30 minutes. She expressed appreciation and noted that the information was interesting. She, of course, had not been at the museum 38 years earlier when the Higgins and Sharp paintings were stolen and wasn’t familiar with the case. But she promised she’d look into it.
I knew that process would take time, so I decided to walk to Old Town Scottsdale, which houses a ton of galleries and hosts a weekly art walk. The Scottsdale Art Auction building contains three affiliated businesses: the auction house, an extensive gallery of Western art, and, improbably, a bookstore I’d visited many times. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, other than the off chance that one of the two auctioned paintings was hanging in the gallery, perhaps for resale. Of course, that wasn’t the case.
Then I waited as Leherissey and her governing board decided how the museum should respond. The Harwood Museum is now part of the University of New Mexico, and academic institutions move slowly.
My patience ran out after four months. Though Leherissey was gracious and communicative, it seemed like a year might pass without much progress. She has confirmed to me that the Harwood Museum wants to recover the stolen paintings. Other than that, she declined the opportunity to comment for this piece. I feel for the people who bought the stolen artwork at auction and the garden club that received the auction’s proceeds.
So where does that leave us? It’s now clearer that the Alters stole multiple pieces of art. They likely sold some to finance their travels and their land purchase. The Alters’ possession of the stolen Higgins and Sharp pieces adds to the certainty that they took the de Kooning from the Tucson museum.
Researching a book I’m writing on corruption among politicians and police officers in Los Angeles in the 1930s, I’ve learned a lot about what triggers honest people to engage in malfeasance. At the individual level, it’s almost always because a person feels cheated out of something they think they deserve. That chagrin provides them a license to transcend conventional morality.
Jerry Alter felt cheated out of renown as a musician and, perhaps, as a writer and painter. He complained to his relatives about how schoolteachers were underpaid and his work wasn’t appreciated. Ultimately, people who feel cheated cheat the system, and Jerry’s frustrations led to at least three art thefts. He stole from society because, he apparently felt, society had demeaned him, and he could not find a way to vent those frustrations more constructively. As one of Rita’s coworkers later told a reporter, ‟Rita may very well have gone along with it because it was Jerry, and she adored him, and I know people are capable of anything.”
The art system both decries and perpetuates theft. Museums abhor the stealing of artwork they own, and they go to great lengths to install security systems to prevent it. The Tucson and Taos museums were, unarguably, the owners of the works involved in this case. Nevertheless — more broadly — art museums, auction houses, galleries, and dealers allow pieces with less than clear provenance to be bought and sold. Many museums consider themselves the rightful owners of art that has been plundered, often in the wake of war, from less powerful cultures and individuals. These days, we’re seeing some of that art get returned.
