From the Mixed Up Files of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
By Sydney Sheehan
citation: Sheehan, Sydney. “From the Mixed Up Files of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, September 3, 2021.
Like many Art Historians before me ( ha! so presumptuous ), my love of the museum actually began with a children’s novel that I was assigned in elementary school: From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Now that I think about it, I don’t actually remember visiting or even thinking about museums before I read the book. When I visited the Met on my own for the very first time (9th grade, I decided to do an exhibition review for the school paper), I couldn’t help but consider hiding away until the last door was locked so that I could frolic, undisturbed, throughout the museum. I just wanted to sleep in the State Bed in one of the period rooms like Claudia. I approached writing my exhibition review the same way that Claudia and Jaime pieced together their own art puzzle, like I was solving a great and terrible mystery. In many ways, Konigsburg’s book cemented within me a style of research that sticks with me today. I work on new research projects the way old school detectives would a murder case, establishing timelines with haphazard sticky notes covering the walls while connecting the dots with literal red string (seriously).
Ever since the Mixed Up Files (and let’s also not forget another great, Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliet), I have been not-so-secretly waiting to solve one of my own museum mysteries. There has always been one in particular that captivated my attention and sent me reeling back to my childhood: the Isabella Stewart Gardner theft. When Netflix released it’s docu-series about the theft, I planned my whole week around watching it. I settled in to watch This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist as I have with most other true crime docs - a glass of wine (red...always!) in hand and my two dogs on either side of me. I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new; I had, of course, already listened to multiple podcasts about this case, and yet I was hooked right away anyway. The case is both disturbing and comical in its sheer simplicity. On March 18th, 1990, two men arrived at the front door of the museum and announced themselves as police responding to a call. The overnight security guard lets them in (without a fuss I might add...suspicious??? I think YES) and they proceed to tell him “This is a Robbery.” The two men steal 13 works of art, varying in value and medium, one of which is Rembrandt’s only seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The stolen artworks were never found, and no one was ever arrested.
The Isabella Gardner Museum theft is one of those mysteries that keeps people wondering. It was almost like everything had to come together perfectly for these individuals to walk into a museum, take valuable and culturally priceless works of art, and then disappear without a trace. The fact that these pieces have never really resurfaced (there have been claims here and there that they are on the “black market”) adds even more mystery. Does some James Bond-esque villain have them hung up in a secret lair somewhere?
Unfortunately, with this case there are more questions than there are answers: Were these specific pieces taken for a reason or was it random? Were the guards in on it? Was the Mafia involved? What did we miss? And while documentaries and books create a world where the museum is steeped in mystery and the secrets of the Illuminati are hidden throughout renaissance paintings (that's a DaVinci Code reference for anyone who is not a fiction reader), the reality of these institutions is far less mysterious. Instead of mystery, they are steeped in politics. Instead of secrets hidden throughout, there’s hours of labor from frontline staff to make the museum viewing experience as seamless as possible for their guests. And while there are less mysteries than we think in these places (way less than I had hoped for- but we can’t all be Harriet the Spy), they do still fill us with a sense of wonder like that of Claudia and Jaime on their first night.
Mysteries, whether they are fictional like the Mixed Up Files or very, very real, like the Isabella Stewart Gardner theft, allow us to consider just what it is we are looking at when we’re in a museum. They give us the tools to ask the right questions, the “whats, whos, whys, wheres, and hows” that make art visual culture. From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler showed me the mystery that art could be, if you looked at it just right, and I never looked back.