Billion Dollar Heist/BBC 4
The difficulty with this BBC4 Programme broadcast on Monday is that at the end of it you had no clear idea as to the whereabouts of the Vermeer and Rembrandt paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston or who committed the theft.
The FBI agent believed them to be in Boston. Charley Hill, art investigator extraordinary, believed them – after a tip off from a major Irish gangster – behind a wall in Dublin.
After 30 minutes of supposition it all got rather tedious. I was curious to see John Wilson, who often presents Front Row on Radio 4, in the flesh. He resembles his father the ex-Arsenal keeper Bob Wilson.
If it was an arts programme then there should have been an expert informing us of the importance of these pictures. As is often the case they concentrated on the value.
However, a stolen Vermeer is not worth $1 billion for the obvious reason that with no provenance you cannot sell it for that.
If it was a crime programme then it needed another expert in retrieving stolen art. The fact is that almost all art works are now recovered. They are difficult to steal and even more difficult to sell.
We discussed the programme at our art course yesterday in which we studied Paul Gauguin.
More than any other painter there is a cult view of Gauguin based on the fact that he turned his back on bourgeois respectability, his rich Danish wife and his 5 children for the sexual delights of Tahiti.
Unfortunately it does not fit the facts. Gauguin always had wanderlust. He worked on the Panama Canal. He tried his hand in his wife’s family business and hated it.
At the time he left for Tahiti he was bust. Nowadays his relationship with a 14 year old Tahitian girl has him cast him as a paedophile.
One has to understand more Tahitian society when young girls married very young.
Like many a master he is difficult to classify, being in that group with Degas and Manet who one could loosely call post-impressionists but – unlike Cezanne – he was less of a technician.
Whatever view you take of Gauguin, in terms of blocks of vivid colour and naive art he was a leading light.
