One of the great mysteries of the Gardner heist is why this masterpiece was not stolen.
Liberty Puzzles produces very high-quality, classic wooden jigsaw puzzles. When I recently opened the box of one of their puzzles, I could smell the strong scent of freshly cut maple. This season, Liberty is making puzzles devoted to stolen art, including puzzles focused on the Gardner case. I emailed with founder Chris Wirth, who had once spent some time going through a private investigators’ file on the case.
What got you interested in art theft?
I became interested in art history as an undergraduate, and I worked for several years in the art library, learning all kinds of stuff. I don’t remember a specific case that caught my initial interest. Stolen art is always on the periphery of the art world, this strange dark underside that is really fascinating.
What got you interested in the Gardner case?
I remember the headlines when it happened. But then one summer several years later I was an intern for a private investigative firm that had worked on the case. They were no longer working on the case, but they gave me the entire file to poke through. I think they just wanted to find something for me to do. I don’t remember the investigation being that interesting, but the facts of the case sure were.
What was it like working a puzzle of these lost masterpieces?
I haven’t even had time to do one of our new puzzles of the Gardner Museum pieces. But the first one is going to be The Concert, the composition and color are really well balanced. It’s just a work of sublime beauty and genius, and I can’t wait to spend several hours putting it together.
Did you learn anything new about the paintings from the process?
When we create new puzzle offerings, oftentimes we go through an extensive color correction process on the image. Color reproductions, even those made (or contracted) by a museum, are notoriously incorrect. So we alter the image digitally until we get it as close as we can to the original. Now, what does the original look like? Short of walking into the gallery you’re never going to know exactly. And in some cases, such as this one, you can’t even see them in the gallery. So we spend a lot of time looking at images online and trying to create overall balance in the images. This color correction process is quite an intimate process with the artwork, we examine every nook and cranny quite closely, and it was a bittersweet experience going through it with the Gardner pieces, knowing that we can’t go see what the real colors are. We spent the better part of a day trying to color correct the Rembrandt Storm, and I would just die to see that painting in person. We also made a puzzle of Titian’s Europa as part of the project (“why wasn’t this painting stolen?”), and I can’t wait to visit the museum when I am in Boston next month to see the painting and how close we are to color accuracy.
Did you see any connection between the puzzle of the investigation and the puzzle of the art?
The investigation puzzle is quite different from a jigsaw puzzle. With a jigsaw puzzle, you have a finite number of pieces and you know all the pieces fit together. With the heist investigation, you have a potentially infinite number of puzzle pieces that appear before you over time, and with most of them, the pieces don’t even fit the actual case. You have all these fringe criminal types and other characters who are actively throwing you off from what really happened, because they have some agenda or like the attention. So the investigation puzzle is vastly more difficult.
This item originally appeared in The Open Case magazine.
