Aspens by Victor Higgins
After an astonishing forty-year wait, a pair of paintings stolen from a New Mexico museum have finally been located and returned.
In March 1985, two paintings were stolen from the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico, Taos. These works, Aspens by Victor Higgins and Oklahoma Cheyenne by Joseph Henry Sharp, are early twentieth-century paintings by members of the Taos Society of Artists. This organization was founded in 1915 by a group of artists originally from the eastern United States who were drawn to New Mexico’s natural beauty. Sharp was one of the group’s founding members. Higgins, meanwhile, was part of the Harwood Museum’s board upon its foundation in 1923. The 1985 robbery seems taken out of The Thomas Crown Affair. In broad daylight, a man in an overcoat entered the museum, cut the paintings out of their frames, rolled them up, hid them in his coat, and walked out.
The paintings’ rediscovery started in 2023 with a Los Angeles-based investigator named Lou Schachter. He called the Harwood Museum, saying that there is evidence that the paintings’ theft may be connected to a 1985 heist of the Willem de Kooning painting Woman-Ochre from the University of Arizona Art Museum in Tucson. Antiques dealer David van Auker purchased the contents of a deceased woman’s house in 2017, including what he thought was a reproduction of the de Kooning. After several people asked if it was real, he brought in appraisers to verify the authenticity. Valued at $400,000 at the time of the theft, the salvaged painting turned out to be the real deal, worth approximately $160 million despite the damage it sustained. The painting was promptly returned to the museum that same year. The home had belonged to Jerry and Rita Alter, a pair of public school teachers living in Cliff, New Mexico. The Alters’ story has intrigued many since it may be baffling how a pair of seemingly ordinary people could pull off an extraordinary act. In 2022, Allison Otto directed the documentary film The Thief Collector about the Alters and their theft of the de Kooning painting, featuring numerous pictures and slides from the couple’s photo albums. In the documentary, Schachter noticed a few details that tied the couple to the Harwood theft. First, the modus operandi is identical: overcoat, slash, and roll. There were no security cameras, and the couple left no fingerprints. Furthermore, in the film, Schachter noticed a still photograph of the couple in their living room, where the Sharp and Higgins paintings are hanging on the wall.
Armed with this information, the Harwood Museum’s director, Juniper Leherissey, contacted the Art Recovery Task Force. By April 2024, the FBI had concluded that both paintings were donated to a thrift store, which sold them through Scottsdale Auction House for $93,600 and $52,650, respectively. The authorities tracked down the paintings to their buyers and returned them to the Hardwood Museum on May 12th. The museum hosted a press event on June 6th, where the museum officially unveiled the two paintings back on the walls as part of a new show called The Return of Taos Treasures.