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Stolen

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft doc follows its own leads

By PETER KEOUGH | May 9, 2006

3.0 Stars

Stolen
Famed art detective Harold Smith

By buying up her favorite artworks and displaying them for posterity in her museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner removed them from the sphere of commerce and preserved them for the enjoyment of all. That is, until 1990, when thieves broke in and made off with 11 canvases, including Jan Vermeer’s The Concert. Rebecca Dreyfus’s documentary calls on famed fine-arts detective Harold Smith to solve the theft. None of his leads pans out, so Dreyfus follows a few of her own, tapping some experts to explain the genius of Vermeer and chatting with others about Gardner, whose turn-of-the-century letters to Bernard Berenson and his replies are read by Blythe Danner and Campbell Scott. The result is a pile of loose, if edifying, ends.

On the Web
Stolen:http://www.stolenthefilm.com/

Related: Gardner growing pains, Road trips, Lighting history, More

Gardner growing pains
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will is explicit: the experience she choreographed for visitors to her museum must continue in perpetuity.
Road trips
In the fall of 1883, Isabella Stewart Gardner — more than a decade before she would develop her museum on Boston’s Fenway — traveled to China.
Lighting history
On January 1, 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner invited 300 guests to a private concert by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the opening of her new museum on the Fenway. After performances of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, the mirrored doors of the first-floor concert room rolled open to reveal an extraordinary vision.
Now on tape
Spending a rainy Saturday night curled up in front of Dodgeball or the first season of Six Feet Under is great and all, but what if you want to find Michael Auder’s “Polaroid Cocaine,” a five-minute, 1993 video montage of images that “dwell on the themes of death, destruction, and desire,” accompanied by cabaret music?
Time out of mind
Luisa Rabbia created a slow-moving video work that offers a kind of travelogue of her own journey through Isabella Stewart Gardner's historic scrapbooks.
People get ready
Fourteen New England artists/artist teams hook up to produce a variety of interconnecting installations.
Solved?
In the wee hours of March 18, 1990, two men posing as police officers gained entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tied up the two security guards, and stole 13 pieces of art.
Ruling the waves
The Dutch emerged at the dawn of the 17th century as a pre-eminent military and commercial power on the sea. They were in the midst of throwing off Spanish rule and developing a shipping empire that would reach from the Americas to South Africa to Asia.
Vanishing Boston
The Boston we live in today will be gone someday, but there's still time to get to know it in all its uniqueness.
Tiny heavy animals
The traditional way of being seated in ancient China, prior to the introduction of Western-style furniture, was on a floor mat, possibly anchored at its four corners by decorative weights.
Three's company
The show's American curator, Frederick Ilchman, has snagged an improbable number of pairs and trios from the world's famous (and not so famous) museums.
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Topics: Reviews , Campbell Scott, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Harold Smith, More

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Watch the trailer for Stolen (QuickTime)

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

REVIEW: SAFE HOUSE | February 15, 2012
Daniel Espinosa's over-edited but engaging spy thriller delves into edgy territory untouched by any of the numerous movies it imitates: it has Brendan Gleeson do an American accent.

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The most touching love story and best children's movie in a long time, Hiromasa Yonebayashi's adaptation of Mary Norton's book The Borrowers employs old-fashioned animation techniques to create a world that is familiar, uncanny, and luminous.

REVIEW: RAMPART | February 15, 2012
The rotten cop flick has become a mini-genre of sorts, a subset of noir, going back at least to Orson Welles's Touch of Evil .

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The films in this program contain some of the most powerful images to be seen on the screen this year.

REVIEW: JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND | February 07, 2012
I liked the tiny elephants and the Rock bouncing berries off his pecs, but Brad Peyton's sequel is as bad as the 2008 original.

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