Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt
Videos spread all over social media last week allegedly showing FBI agents seizing a painting right off the walls of a Manhattan gallery. However, it all turned out to be a stunt.
Last week, I received messages from people asking me about a Rembrandt painting confiscated by the FBI right off the walls of the gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. I looked at the videos, and nothing seemed right. The videos appeared to have been taken at a gallery opening with many people assembled. Meanwhile, three men in navy blue FBI windbreakers came in, took the painting off the wall, and walked out. Several users posted videos of the incident on social media platforms like Instagram, most notably David Ma.
First red flag: the FBI doesn’t just come in with a few guys. They come in with the cavalry, shutting down the location and removing the confiscated art completely packaged and sealed. The FBI’s 2021 raid on the Danieli Galerie in Palm Beach is a good example. In the posted videos, these alleged agents simply entered the gallery before a crowd and walked out with the painting. But then there was the other red flag. The work they seized was easily recognizable as Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt. There’s only one problem, though – Storm on the Sea of Galilee was stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Rembrandt was one of thirteen works of art stolen in that heist, along with The Concert by Johannes Vermeer, Chez Tortoni by Édouard Manet, and several sketches by Edgar Degas. Collectively, the stolen works are valued at $500 million, and the Gardner Museum still offers a $10 million reward for information leading to its recovery. Even in recent years, different clues and pieces of evidence have surfaced, bringing greater clarity or confusion to the tracking down of stolen art. I suspected, therefore, that these recent videos were not showing us a legitimate FBI seizure but something entirely different.
From what I could find, the only publication to look into this incident is Observer, which revealed the incident as a work of performance art. An organization called 13 Masterpieces set up a gallery show starting last Thursday, March 13, at the Chelsea Walls Gallery on 10th Avenue. The promotional material very cryptically advertised that the show would feature “legendary artworks that have not been seen by the public for 35 years — until now.” It seems the show consisted of reproductions of the works stolen in the Gardner heist. The organizers were thorough in their attempts to conceal their identities. However, some suspected that the production company DVRG may have been involved. Observer eventually confirmed that the staged raid was organized by DVRG in collaboration with the film Any Day Now, a fictionalization of the Gardner Museum heist set to come out later this year.