I've been researching art heists recently. Today, I came across this poem by John Updike.
The New Yorker published Stolen on April 14, 2003. Updike suggests how treasures taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum might feel about their plight:
Stolen by John Updike
Please go on being yourself.
—From my last letter from William Maxwell, July 28, 2000What is it like, to be a stolen painting—
to be Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee”
or “The Concert,” by Vermeer, both burglarized,
along with “Chez Tortoni” by Manet,
and some Degases, from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, in Boston, twelve years ago?Think of how bored they get, stacked
in the warehouse somewhere, say in Mattapan,
gazing at the back of the butcher paper
they are wrapped in, instead of at
the rapt glad faces of those who love art.Only criminals know where they are.
The gloom of criminality enshrouds them.
Why have we been stolen? they ask themselves.
Who has benefitted? Or do they hang
admired in some sheikh’s sandy palace,
or the vault of a mad Manila tycoon?In their captivity, they may dream of rescue
but cannot cry for help. Their paint
is inert and crackled, their linen friable.
They have one stratagem, the same old one:
to be themselves, on and on.The boat tilts frozen on the storm’s wild wave.
The concert has halted between two notes.
An interregnum, sufficiently extended,
becomes an absence. When wise
and kindly men die, who will restore
disappeared excellence to its throne?
The New York Times describes my novels as “money porn,” “a red-hot franchise,” and “glittery thrillers about fiscal malfeasance.” Through fiction I explore the dark side of money and the motivations of those who have it, want more, and will steamroll anybody who gets in their way.