Dali House

“Jamaica” George Bailey of Florida, who has a terrific Dalí tribute site, is looking for any information about this crucifixion, which I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Net. But it’s not the Dalí crucifixion that this post is about. (UPDATE: Issue resolved in embarrassing fashion. See the Dorseyland comment below.)

Somewhere … there’s a place for us, a time and place for us. Hold my hand and I’ll take you there, somehow, someday, somewhere. I imagine it will be a large, creepy, wind-rattled mansion in the forested hills overlooking a famous city.

The fireplace illuminates a sizeable, bookcased room and a comfy old chair that’s waiting for the homeowner to finish supper elsewhere, an old man lonely but for his millions and his minions. On the walls in the flickering gloom hang masterpieces that only he will see. In his absence the paintings mull their destiny.

Who’s been in my drawers? Dalí’s as-yet-unstolen “Kneeling Figure: Decomposition” from 1951.

Salvador Dalí’s 1965 sketch “Crucifixion” is alone able to be cheerful. It owns a better fate, a better frame and, even unseen by all but one man, considerably more fame than it had before, when it hung for 40 years in a prison canteen.

Less given to mirth are Picasso’s “The Dance”, Monet’s “Marine” and Matisse’s “Garden of Luxembourg”. They were together for Carnival in Rio in February 2006, enjoying the festive spillover into the Chacara do Ceu Museum. Then four men with guns and a hand grenade, taking a moment between sambas, burst in, yanked them from the wall and stuffed them in a bag with another Dalí work, “Two Balconies”. The thieves still had time to beat up five tourists and a couple of guards before rejoining the teeming mamboing masses outside.

The Matisse later invited offers up on a Russia-based Internet auction website (bidding starting at $13 million), but it’s still here waiting.

I’ve been unable to find an image of the Dalí sketch — you’d think it would be on milk cartons or something — but I learned that it’s not to be confused with “Crucifixion (Dedication: For Gala Queen of the Divine Dali)”, seen here and also made in 1965, or the “Crucifixion” from 1954, or “Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus)” of that same year, seen below, or “Christ of St John of the Cross” from 1951, which was the bird’s-eye view.

On August 30, 2004, Timothy Pina, 45, a guard at New York’s Rikers Island jail, admitted to police that he’d helped steal Dalí’s $250,000 “Crucifixion” during a fire drill the previous year. For his honesty he was thrown out of jail and told to be nice for at least five years.

Rikers’ assistant deputy warden Mitchell Hochhauser was ordered to remain in jail, having pleaded guilty to the same crime shortly after it was committed. He was given an alternative view of cell bars for three years, while his fellow assistant deputy warden walked free, somehow absolved of helping trim the five-by-four-foot gospel scene from its fame and replacing it with an almost lookalike.

The sketch, now believed to have been destroyed, was Dalí’s gift to the men’s prison in lieu of a personal appearance there. He was supposed to give an art class to the inmates in 1965 but cancelled due to illness. He donated the then-new gouache-ink-and-pencil sketch, specifically “For the dining room of the Prisoners Rikers Island”, as he inscribed it. And he sent some encouraging words for the boys: “You are artists. Don’t think of your life as finished for you. With art, you have always to feel free.”

So in the cafeteria it hung until 1981, when a prisoner threw a cup of coffee at it and it was moved to the front lobby, out of reach of the inmates — and where only prison staff could steal it. One day “something didn’t look right about it”, a prison official said. It looked “too new and too bright”.

As of early 2004, Art Loss Register reported, Dalí was #4 on art thieves’ hit list. Some 231 of his works had been swiped, far fewer than Picasso (551) and no threat to Miro or Chagall. Rounding out the top 10 were Renoir, Durer, Rembrandt, Warhol, David Teniers and Matisse.

Dalí was prolific, to be sure, but 231 artworks stolen?! Who else has been a busy boy, then?

Amusingly, it was revealed in 2004, he’d done some time on the inside himself: 21 days in 1924. The crime wasn’t explained, but the revelation does explain his once-cryptic remark that, “You can only create marvellous things from inside a prison.”

Let the hoodlums behind the Dalí heists find out for themselves — if they’re ever caught. There have been a few dastardly crooks nabbed:

* In May 1985 a gallery in Newport Beach, California, managed to get back 18 Dalí paintings worth $500,000, including “Adolescence”. Cops found them in a guy’s bedroom and chucked him in jail for being an asshole. (The following year French art shipper Pierre Marcand, mugshot here, rattled off thousands of copies of “Adolescence” and made a tidy bundle as part of the so-called “Great Dalí Art Fraud”.)

* In October 1996 an unspecified drawing stolen 13 years earlier from the Dalí museum in St Petersburg, Florida, turned up when a New York City dealer got a call about someone trying to buy it.

* The FBI is on the lookout for this study called “Woman - Lion - Horse”, explaining helpfully on its website that it was “recently stolen” from a private owner in Great Bend, Kansas.

* The police in Alamogordo, New Mexico, recovered a painting “believed to be” Dalí’s “The Judgment of Paris” in October 2006. It had been stolen from a private residence. That crook was also found in possession of the loot and given a new home. There are two Dalí creations titled “The Judgment of Paris” kicked around on the Net, further confusing the fact that every artist in modern history did a version. The more famous one is on the left below.

* Also in 2006, “Homage to Gaudi”, a 14-inch-tall, limited-edition Dalí sculpture from 1963 worth $12,000 was taken from an Austin, Texas, gallery, a local university student unable to resist the temptation. He brought it back the next day.

* The most famous recovery of a scarfed Dalí came in April 2003, when police found “The Motionless Swallow” in a Madrid antique shop. It had gone AWOL four years earlier from a home in Catalonia’s Girona province, close to Figueres, the artist’s Spanish hometown. One of the five suspects had tried to sell it the year before at Sotheby’s auction house in London.

But for every Dalí returned to the bosom of its depleted owner there must be dozens that run away never come home again. But two examples:

* Another Dalí sketch priced at £30,000 was abducted from a house in in Sherborne, Dorset, England a few years back. It was a copy of the painting “A Spanish Knight” drawn on the back of a menu card from the Cervantes Figueres Hotel.

* In 2003, when Disney finally dusted off “Destino” — the six-minute animated film that Uncle Sal made for Uncle Walt in 1947 (Dalí showed up for work at the studio promptly at 9.30 every morning!) — it did so after much of the artwork had been stolen and sold on the New York art market. I see there are a couple of clips from the film at the NPR website, by the way, and YouTube has a “trailer” (a trailer for a six-minute flick?).

Where then does all this stuff go when it’s not at home? The experts are agreed that you can’t just pawn masterpieces. Most likely they’re handed around by shady fences and skulking collectors. The Independent once cited proof that the artworks were stolen specifically to be used as “get-out-of-jail-free cards”. Criminal gangs filch them and stash them away as insurance for the next time they get busted. Then they can trade them for a plea bargain or a more lenient sentences.

What else is part of that private gallery in our wind-rattled mansion in the hills? Is Jan Vermeer’s “The Concert” among the hoard? It was part of the $300-million booty from history’s biggest art disappearance, the March 18, 1990, swoop on Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Eleven masterworks gone.

“The Concert”, though, was the prize, one of only 36 surviving paintings by Vermeer. The figures depicted are hopefully somewhere still playing their instruments and singing, but for now they’re tending to their tunes and we’re not invited to listen.

Also vanished in the Boston heist were Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” and Degas’ “La Sortie du Pelage”, below. The scalliwag in the Manet looks like he could have been a suspect in his own demise. Maybe the cops should drop round Tortoni’s place. And in the Degas pieces, those nags are racing off somewhere, but they shouldn’t be hard to track.

Renoir’s “Jeune Parisienne” was stolen in 2000 from the National Museum in Stockholm. Some call the painting kitschy, but the thief knew his art.

Once owned by Hermann Goering, Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr Gachet” hasn’t been stolen, but the Guardian made it a nice addition to its 2003 survey of art theft. Christie’s sold it in 1990 to Japanese industrialist Ryoie Saito for what was then a record $82 million, and Saito promptly put it in storage and threatened to have it cremated with him when he died. He was only kidding, he said later, but no one’s seen Vincent’s close friend and physician since the collector did pop off in 1996.

Gachet, van Gogh said, wears “the heartbroken expression of our time”.