A few weeks ago, my husband alerted me to an interesting documentary about the 1911 theft of the ‘Mona Lisa’ from Paris’s Louvre Museum by Italian immigrant Pietro ‘Vincenzo’ Peruggia. This 2012 documentary is titled The Missing Piece: The Truth About the Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa.
At first, I loved this documentary. The director, Joe Medeiros, had done his homework: Medeiros travelled to Italy to interview the daughter of the thief, Celestina Peruggia, and actually employed a team of researchers and translators to scour Italian and French archives for information on the case.
What impressed me even more was that Medeiros showed sensitivity to Celestina’s feelings about her father: he seemed genuinely concerned that his research may prove her dad’s motivation was not patriotism, as the 80-year-old Celestina passionately claimed. Was Medeiros a documentary maker who went out of his way not to be exploitative?
However, as the documentary progressed, I noticed that Medeiros brushed over two important details which ran contrary to his argument that ‘Vincenzo’ Peruggia, a simple-minded house painter with a criminal record, was a lone thief. First of all, Medeiros seems remarkably naive about the art world circa 1911; he brushes over the very serious criminality of theft-suspect Guillaume Apollinaire and his shady business partner, art dealer Paul Guillaume. Medeiros also downplays the significance of Peruggia being given an audience with another preeminent art dealer of that time, Sir Joseph Duveen (First Baron Duveen). Peruggia tried to sell the Mona Lisa to Duveen during this meeting in London which happened shortly before Peruggia turned in the painting in Florence, Italy. Were these ‘downplays’ the innocent mistakes of a documentarian who doesn’t understand the art market?
I wanted to give Medeiros the benefit of the doubt, but on watching the documentary for a second time, my conclusion is that Medeiros is not the folksy, nice-guy he initially comes across as. He presents his viewers with a false choice: either accept his thesis that Peruggia was a lone villain, or you’re a fool who believes sensationalist, poorly-researched stories like the ones William Randolph Hearst published in his newspapers. Whoa.
It’s remarkable that a work-a-day Italian guy from Philly would start throwing stones at William Randolph Hearst, because by doing so Medeiros involved himself in a fight that is both before his time and out of his league. Here’s the nut: William Randolph Hearst was an art collector in competition with men like J. P. Morgan and Alfred Barnes. (Remember the name Alfred Barnes, readers.) Hearst was also in political opposition to these men, as Jennet Conant remarks in her book The Irregulars, only Hearst publications declined to join the FDR/British Security Coordination propaganda campaign designed to smear Americans who opposed British or Roosevelt interests.
William Randolph Hearst, J.P. Morgan, Alfred Barnes and a small group of other American mega-millionaires all bought their art from a small band of European dealers, preeminent among this band were Joseph Duveen and Paul Guillaume. Alfred Barnes and Paul Guillaume were particularly close, to the consternation of other European art dealers. This is how Christine Biederman describes Duveen and Guillaume for the Dallas Observer:
“The honors started rolling in [for Paul Guillaume]: Thus the former tire dealer and man who helped remove much of France’s cultural heritage to America received the Legion d’Honneur and was appointed to prestigious posts, including the Conseil Superieur des Beaux-Arts. But for the French Revolution, he would, like his crooked British contemporary Joseph Duveen, undoubtedly have been knighted by the King.”
(Biederman’s article on Paul Guillaume, his creepy wife and her legal battle with the Louvre is exceptional and is the best I’ve found on this topic.)
Paul Guillaume’s business associate was Guillaume Apollinaire who, when the Mona Lisa was stolen, had already established a history of selling art stolen from the Louvre, not all of which he had returned when the famous portrait was stolen. Medeiros’ strident claim that one lone Italian guy stole the Mona Lisa smells off to anyone familiar with the art market during this period. Why would a film-maker take such an incredible stance?
Researching the theft of the Mona Lisa is a dangerous hobby, readers, because in doing so you’re liable to blow the lid off shady dealings which built a famous art collection that is now controlled by The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s benefactors. You’re liable to put the provenance of this collection into question, which may expose the Philly museum and its partners to massive lawsuits, lawsuits which may even impact the ongoing lawsuit between the French government and the heirs to Paul Guillaume’s estate.
You guessed it, readers. Medeiros’ documentary was funded, indirectly, by the ‘education wing’ of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who along with other Philly cultural leaders and their partners in Philadelphia’s local government, were shamed in 2009 by another documentary, The Art of the Steal, because they collaborated to dishonestly wrest control of Alfred Barnes’ art collection. Barnes had purchased much of his collection from Apollinaire’s business partner Paul Guillaume.
A real art-lover would never be so arrogant as to say “It’s my way or you’re an idiot” about a crime like the theft of ‘La Gioconda’. I propose that a ‘third way’ is possible, a ‘third way’ which Medeiros is desperate to distract his viewers from. Peruggia may have been hired to steal the poorly-guarded painting because of his temporary access to the Louvre’s collections. Peruggia may have been hired to steal the painting for a rich collector who never intended to exhibit the painting again– or at least not show it to anyone who would recognize the painting/ dare to tell authorities!
Rich American art collectors often did illegal things to grow their collections; even the Boston benefactress Isabella Stewart Gardner boasted of duping Italian export officials to outfit her museum. (This unsavory, but widespread, practice was criticized in Henry James’ The Golden Bowl.) Ironically, Gardner’s museum was brazenly looted in 1990– a crime which was never solved and is a sore spot for the FBI, considering their cooperation with Whitey Bulger and suspected organized crime ties to the theft. So if, in the future, scholars recognize that Paul Guillaume was a fencer of stolen goods as well as a preeminent art dealer, no one ought to be surprised.
Such a revelation could put the provenance of works Guillaume sold to Americans into question. Given recent international legal precedents established by the return of art stolen during Nazi occupation, you can see why the Philadelphia Museum of Art might want to put any rumors like ‘Vincenzo Peruggia didn’t act alone’ neatly to bed. If Guillaume’s name is associated with a high-profile theft, what other ghosts may rise? What stars of Philly’s newly acquired Barnes Collection might face legal action from Europe?
There’s also an ‘intelligence community’ angle to this story. Guillaume Apollinaire was not just any old art promoter and journalist. He was given special access to France’s National Library to catalogue its restricted pornography collection ‘L’Enfer'; the catalogue was completed before his death in 1918. This is huge, readers, because Apollinaire’s research opened up the writing of the Marquis de Sade to social control researchers like Aleister Crowley and his handlers at British Intelligence. Apollinaire is how U.K. spooks learned of Revolutionary France’s methods for social control.
Apollinaire’s spookiness doesn’t end there. Apollinaire’s wingman, Pablo Picasso, an outspoken Communist, was useful to Soviet agitprop campaigns yet became a multi-millionaire thanks to the Western art market. The CIA would latch on to another Apollinaire-friend named Jean Cocteau during their anti-Stalin leftist ‘culture war’ in the 1950s and 60s: The Congress for Cultural Freedom. (You can read about Cocteau and Kenneth Anger’s connection with the Congress in my post Ken Anger in Context.) In 1953, just as the Congress and MK ULTRA got going, the first English translation of de Sade was made by American literary golden-boy Austryn Wainhouse. Wainhouse worked in Paris in the early 1950s just like Kenneth Anger, and also like Kenneth Anger at that time, Wainhouse was interested in bringing pornographic novel The Story of O to English-speaking audiences. Amy S. Wyngaard, Syracuse University professor of French, says this about Wainhouse:
“Mr. Wainhouse’s work in fiction and translation was at the cutting edge at a pivotal moment in American literary history. The archive is of particular importance in illuminating the processes behind Mr. Wainhouse’s translations of de Sade’s works, which transformed the face of publishing and literary studies in the 1960s.”
So you see, Apollinaire was ahead of the curve on topics which were useful to social controllers.
What I’m trying to express is that while Joe Medeiros appears to do his homework, he’s very selective in what he chooses to share. For instance, Medeiros tries to dismiss French investigators’ interest in Picasso and Apollinaire as xenophobia and classism by including this snippet from art historian Pierre Paix, who talks about Apollinaire’s arrest after the Mona Lisa heist:
“We see a poet, but the police see a foreigner and they are convinced that Apollinaire is part of an international gang that stole the Mona Lisa. And Picasso is defending himself saying that he has nothing to do with the case. In order to settle it they had to give the stolen sculptures back to the Louvre, which they did.”
Stupid French cops, right? Not so fast–what “stolen sculptures”?!
Here’s the context that Medeiros left out. Picasso was in possession of two Roman statues stolen from the Louvre in 1907, he used them as models for his 1907 painting ”Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon”– was the great artist thumbing his nose at French authorities? Picasso didn’t return the stolen figures to the Louvre until 1911, four years later, to secure the release of Apollinaire who the police were questioning about the Mona Lisa.
‘Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon’– originally titled ‘The Brothel of Avignon’. The Roman figures inspired the faces on the right. What message was Picasso sending?
This is how art historian Robert Shattuck describes Picasso and Apollinaire’s criminality:
In August of 1911, however, disaster struck Apollinaire’s flourishing career… One of Apollinaire’s acquaintances from poorer days, who had worked briefly as his secretary, an itinerant Belgian named Géry Pieret, had twice stolen small statuettes from the Louvre out of pure bravado. He sold the first lot to Picasso and left some with Apollinaire.
Shortly after Pieret’s second escapade, the theft of the Mona Lisa, on August 21, made sensational headlines all over the world. Pieret proceeded to sell one of the stolen statuettes to the Paris-Journal, which used it for publicity purposes to taunt Louvre officials about the laxness of precautions against theft. Apollinaire and Picasso, both of them suddenly terrified of arrest and deportation as undesirable foreigners, packed Pieret out of Paris, debated throwing the remaining statuettes into the Seine, and finally turned all the goods over to the Paris-Journal for anonymous restitution. In reality, Pieret was innocent of the Mona Lisa theft. Nevertheless, the Sûreté uncovered Apollinaire’s name, searched his apartment, cluttered with all kinds of statues and paintings, and arrested him on September 7th…
But imprisonment was by no means the worst blow. During the hearings Apollinaire listened in astonishment while Picasso, under questioning, denied having any part in the affair and finally even denied knowing his friend. [ From The Banquet Years, Robert Shattuck 1955)
TIME magazine (the CIA front) has an even less flattering account of Apollinaire’s/Picasso’s role in the Louvre thefts, according to this 2009 article by
“Soon the man showed up at the newspaper’s offices with a small statue, one of several that he claimed to have stolen four years earlier from the Louvre. The anonymous thief turned out to be a bisexual con man named Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret. He had once served as “secretary,” and perhaps other roles, for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and art-world polemicist who was Picasso’s constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press. Before long, Pieret had implicated Apollinaire in the thefts. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that Pieret had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the cops then dragged Picasso before a magistrate for questioning.
Picasso, who at 29 had just begun the transition from bohemia to the haute bourgeoisie, was terrified. He was a foreigner in France; any serious trouble with the law could get him deported. And this could have gotten serious, because the accusation was true. Four years earlier, he had bought from Pieret two of the pilfered sculptures, Roman-era Iberian heads whose thick features and wide eyes he would introduce into the great painting he was then just about to embark upon, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Though he would deny it in court, he almost certainly knew at the time that both heads were lifted from the Louvre. He may even have pushed Pieret to take them in the first place. But prosecutors couldn’t build a case that either Picasso or Apollinaire had stolen the heads, much less the Mona Lisa, and both of them went free.”
(Richard Lacayo also appears in Medeiros’ documentary; in his interview he seems to support Medeiros’ thesis about Peruggia being a ‘lone thief’.)
So much for poor immigrant victims of law enforcement bigotry. But what about Medeiros’ other big ‘downplay': Peruggia’s meeting with art-world-Goliath Joe Duveen?
Medeiros interviews one art crime expert from the FBI, Robert Wittam. (The FBI doesn’t have a great track record with finding stolen art, as the Isabella Stewart Duncan museum knows well.) You’d think that FBI Agent Wittam would have explained to Medeiros that the hardest part about stealing famous artwork is selling it later, but if the agent did explain this, Medeiros edited it out of the film. As it stands, Medeiros fails to recognize the importance of Peruggia’s meeting with Duveen, especially as the meeting was confirmed by a third party, Duveen’s nephew.
Peruggia tried to sell the Mona Lisa to Duveen by making a trip to London and engaging an audience with the lofty art-dealer. Peruggia, on his own, would have about as much chance of getting an audience with Duveen as I would have of getting one with the late Jean Paul Getty.
Art historian Peter Wraight credits Duveen with setting up the modern art market: manipulating scarcity to raise and sustain prices, mostly as a hedge against inflation and currency manipulation for very wealthy people. (See Wraight’s fantastic 1974 book The Art Game Again!.) Duveen is supposed to have opined that “Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money.” Whether he said this or not, the quip aptly describes Duveen’s business practices.
The art market caters to the very rich, and attracts the very unscrupulous– it’s no coincidence that items looted from Iraq’s national museum turn up in London. Fans of Roald Dahl will know that after he became disillusioned with spy-work, the 25-year-old writer made money in the murky world of art dealing:
He [Roald Dahl] still had some of his inheritance invested in the stock market and art was in his blood. It had fascinated him since childhood, while his wartime relationship with Millicent Rogers had begun to open his eyes to the way the art market worked… At twenty-five, Roald had been able to access the GBP 5,000 in his trust fund… he purchased two other Matthew Smiths, some watercolors by Smiths’s great friend Jacob Epstein and a small portfolio of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists… He gave one Epstein to Millicent Rogers and sold another at a good profit… “Each time I sold a short story,” he later wrote, “I would buy a picture… In those days, fine pictures were inexpensive. Many paintings that today could be acquired only by millionaires decorated my walls for brief periods in the late forties– Matisses, enormous Fauve Rouaults, Soutines, Cezanne watercolours, Bonnards, Boudins, a Renoir, a Sisley, a Degas seascape and God knows what else.” [From Storyteller by Donald Sturrock]
Dahl, the BSC boy, was in the right place at the right time to cash in on the post-war art boom, which Robert Wraight put at the feet of Joe Duveen and viewed with such disdain. (Quite rightly, imho.)
My point is, Duveen– who died in 1939– was a connected player. Peruggia was a no-name house painter from an Italian backwater; Duveen’s nephew describes Peruggia as a “seedy-looking foreigner”– not the typical Duveen fare. As anybody with an ounce of street-smarts knows, the audience with Duveen was arranged for Peruggia when the initial buyer for ‘La Gioconda’ fell through.
Who was that initial buyer? We’ll probably never know because both Paul Guillaume and Guillaume Apollinaire are dead– but the French police suspected that it was a rich American, and the behavior of rich American art collectors supports such suspicions. Duveen doesn’t appear to have alerted the British police to the fact that a “seedy foreigner” tried to sell him the Mona Lisa.
Sir Joe Duveen with lady friends. Duveen was also involved in selling Vermeers which turned out not to be Vermeers…
There are other clues that Peruggia was acting as part of a team– he used a false name during the period in which he stole the Mona Lisa- ‘Vincenzo’ Peruggia. After serving a brief jail time for the theft, Peruggia returned with his wife to Paris under his real name Pietro, got a job doing something and spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he was buried in a high-demand cemetery.
While his fellow Italians back home in Dumenza are ashamed of Peruggia, Peruggia himself showed no self-consciousness. Pietro made a point of taking his wife to the Louvre on his return to France and bragged: “The shingles on this building will rot, but my name will remain famous.” Narcissism, anyone?!
Why would Joe Medeiros make this dishonest film? To answer that, I look to who funded the project:
1) The Greater Philadelphia Film Office was the fiscal sponsor for Medeiros’ film. This is how the Film Office describes itself:
GPFO, first established in 1985 as a part of Philadelphia city government, continues to reside within city offices. In 1992, we became a regional economic development agency, incorporating as the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, a Pennsylvania non profit corporation, in July, 2000.
The GPFO are part of the same cabal who benefited from moving the Barnes Collection to Philly’s ‘museum mile’ against the wishes of Alfred Barnes.
2) Medeiros’ grandparents Angelo and Jessie Mestichelli provided funding, as did Tom and Anne Caramancio, who I couldn’t find anything about.
3) The Pacific Pioneer Fund, which is an organization that funds ‘independent’ documentaries gave Medeiros $5,000; the PPF gets its money from the estate of San Fransisco lawyer Peter Sloss. The Independent magazine describes the board of the PPF:
“Who makes up the staff of the Pacific Pioneer Fund?
Peter Sloss, president; Nancy Sloss, vice president; Hillary Sloss, Dan Geller and Ellen Bruno, board members. Half of us are filmmakers. Ellen and Dan are past grantees whom we’ve had as filmmaker consultants for individual panels and really liked their sound judgment so we invited them to the Board.
What does the Sloss family’s philanthropic footprint look like? According to Peter Sloss’s obituary in ‘JWeekly.com’:
“Sloss devoted himself to the local Jewish community in multiple ways, serving with the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, the Osher Marin JCC, Mount Zion Hospital and the JCL, among others.”
Apart from his Jewish causes, Sloss also served on the board of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
4) The film’s largest (and first) funder has a philanthropic footprint which is very similar to the Sloss Family’s, but is based out of the Philadelphia area. The Daniel B and Florence E Green Family Foundation gave Medeiros $26,000.
The Green Family Foundation has given some money to the Philadelphia Theater Company, but most of their charitable work seems to be for specifically Jewish projects through the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia is associated with The Honickman Foundation, which overseas a large part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s public education program:
The Education Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, co-chaired by Lynne Honickman and Marta Adelson, was convened to advance education within the Museum and the Greater Philadelphia region.
Of course, Lynne Honickman and Marta Adelson are trustees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as leading employees of the Honickman Foundation. The Honickman family money seems to come, at least in part, from Pepsi Cola & National Brand Beverages, LTD and Canada Dry Delaware Valley Bottling Company.
(L-R)Harold Honickman, Jon Bon Jovi, Lynne Honickman and Leigh Middleton attend the “Coming HOME” 20th anniversary gala for Project H.O.M.E. at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown on September 23, 2009 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Green Family Foundation’s big charitable endeavour was for Federation Housing Inc– you need a password to read who sits on their board. Thank you, zimbio.com.
I dare say that getting the Greens to fund Medeiros was a nice way for the Philly Art Museum to get their message out while hiding their involvement in the documentary. (The Greens don’t seem to have funded any documentaries before Medeiros’.)
So you see, a certain group of people who benefit from burying the unsavory history of the Barnes Collection have *likely* teamed up to spare the reputation of Paul Guillaume, the art dealer who made the Barnes Collection possible, by blaming one of the most high-profile art thefts ever solely on a simple Italian peasant.
