'This Is A Robbery,' World's Biggest Art Heist, Gardner Museum Boston: Netflix Series

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- Documentary trailer.
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- This Is a Robbery: a Netflix series examines the world’s biggest art heist. - A new series takes a deep dive into one of the most confounding mysteries in the art world: $500m of art stolen from a Boston museum in 1990. The Guardian, April 7, 2021.

In 81 minutes during the early hours of 18 March 1990, two thieves posing as Boston police officers absconded with $500m in art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. It was the most expensive art heist in history, one of the art world’s most enduring unsolved mysteries made all the more confounding by its three decades of publicity. In the years since, leads for the missing works by such masters as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet dead-ended or disappeared in a quicksand of hearsay, suspects died and detectives retired, faint trails ranging from sensational (IRA weapons deals) to more mundane (local mobsters) went ice cold. Despite a reward offering of $5m, none of the works have been recovered, and no arrests were ever made.



- The Storm On The Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt, 1633. Stolen 1990, missing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storm_on_the_Sea_of_Galilee

Almost exactly 30 years on, the staple of Boston lore is getting the Netflix docuseries treatment with This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, a four-part series, directed by Colin Barnicle and named for the line reportedly delivered by one of the thieves to guard Richard Abath the night of the heist. The project, five-plus years in the making, takes a comprehensive a look at a case barely thawed in 30 years; it consults crime scene photos and evidence logs, interviews key journalists and legal figures, and studies several theories for a deep dive that, like other media investigations such as the 2018 Boston Globe and WBUR podcast Last Seen, arrives at plausibility in lieu of certainty.

Thousands upon thousands of police documents, multiple FBI investigations and theories taken up and dismissed – wading into the Gardner sprawl was “almost like archaeology, trying to find the edges of something”, Barnicle told the Guardian. Such digging was years in the making; Barnicle and his brother, Nick, Boston-area natives long fascinated by the case, began investigating in 2014 and shooting in 2015, a process which involved years of combing the local web of investigators and plunging into rabbit holes of theories.

The series briefly touches on the museum’s aloof relationship with the community at the time of the robbery. Inward facing and apathetic about updating security, the Gardner museum – a Venetian-style palace meticulously erected by the eponymous, singular art collector in 1899 – was somewhat of a sitting duck for an art heist in 1990. (Longtime director Anne Hawley, who served until 2016 and is one of the series’ principal interviewees, was only six months into her tenure when confronted with the double devastation of robbery and explaining said vulnerability to the press.)...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/apr/07/this-is-a-robbery-netflix-art-heist

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1. I just finished episode one and it's fascinating.

I definitely recommend it.

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2. I saw parts of it & have to start watching again.

Will the mystery ever be solved, puzzles around the unseen video, the guard, the Boston gangs?

Many years ago I visited the Gardner, I remember it like yesterday. Seeing its treasures influenced my decision to study art history and museum education.