PHOENIX — A Willem de Kooning painting was stolen in 1985 from the University of Arizona and found more than 30 years later in the home of a New Mexico couple after they died.
The painting, “Woman-Ochre,” is now worth more than $100 million and is safely back at the university museum.
But there’s a lot of stolen art from Arizona that is still missing.
The ABC15 Investigators got an exclusive list of nearly 90 pieces of Arizona art in the FBI’s National Stolen Art File.
The stolen items include paintings, sculptures, historical documents and pottery. Some of the thefts date back at least four decades. The art was swiped from art galleries, museums, homes, businesses and even vehicles.
Police reports and interviews with museum officials, gallery owners and artists give a deeper look at four notable thefts:
Six-figure painting taken during smash-and-grab burglary
A painting by the famous artist Marc Chagall was taken during a smash-and-grab burglary on January 30, 1987, from a downtown Scottsdale gallery.
Scottsdale police say someone used an 8-foot wooden pole to smash out a rear window of the Masters Gallery.
Police have only released a grainy, black-and-white photo of the painting titled “Oiseau et Bouquet,” which means “Bird and Bouquet.”
A police report gives further details, describing the painting’s colors as “blue, green, yellow, red, gray, black, white and pink.” The artist signed the work in the lower, right-hand corner. A custom, gold frame held the painting.
Scottsdale police found fingerprints at the crime scene. But the prints lacked enough detail for comparison.
Police followed up on several tips – some anonymous – to try to connect the stolen painting to people in southern California, Beverly Hills and Phoenix. They even searched a storage locker near Scottsdale and the closet of a Phoenix home.
But the trail went cold.
The Russian-born Chagall made the 19.5-by-24.5-inch painting in 1949. He used a painting method called gouache, which is more opaque than watercolor.
The painting was valued at $495,000 when taken. Chagall paintings have only increased in value since then. One Chagall recently sold for $7 million.
Bob Wittman, a former FBI senior investigator who founded the FBI Art Crime Team, believes the stolen Chagall is out there. It just needs to be publicized.
“At this point, whoever has it probably has no idea that it’s stolen property,” he said.
7-foot sculpture swiped from gallery
The giant bronze sculpture vanished from O’Brien’s Art Emporium in downtown Scottsdale in 1989.
Mark Lundeen, a sculptor from Loveland, Colorado, was inspired to make the statue after reading the famous poem, “Casey at the Bat,” by Ernest Thayer. He eventually made more than a dozen statues of various heights, showing a baseball player standing and waiting for the next pitch.
He called the statues “Mighty Casey.”
Statue No. 10 was for sale outside a gallery in Scottsdale.
One day, Lundeen got a call that the seven-foot statue was gone.
“I was young and just getting started,” Lundeen told ABC15. “Money was hard to come by in those days. And they are quite expensive to make.”
Lundeen believes the theft may have been the work of four or five people because the statue weighed about 600 pounds. It’s possible they loaded the Mighty Casey into the back of a truck.
This was before video cameras were widely used in galleries. There’s no video of the theft.
Lundeen heard the statue was spotted in Las Vegas, but witnesses refused to talk to law enforcement.
The statue was valued at about $18,000 when stolen, he said. The last one he sold in 2002 went for six figures.
His other Casey statues are on display across the country, including at the Little League Baseball World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
He said the Florida Marlins pro baseball team bought two statues. Another Mighty Casey was installed at a park in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Lundeen received an insurance settlement after his Mighty Casey went missing.
“That’d be cool if it did turn up,” he said. “I’m not counting on it. But it would be cool.”
Wittman, the founder of the FBI Art Crime Team, believes the sculpture is still out there and hasn’t been chopped up or melted down.
The stolen statue has Lundeen’s signature on the base along with the edition number of the sculpture: No. 10.
Museum painting swiped in broad daylight
Employees at the Tucson Museum of Art were setting up for an artisan craft market in November 2003 when a painting by a local Western artist, Jack Van Ryder, went missing.
An incident report on file at the museum notes the thief may have been a well-dressed, middle-aged woman with brown, layered hair and round glasses.
A museum employee reported seeing a woman with a shawl carrying a gold frame. But he didn’t recognize the work she was carrying as stolen because of all the activity taking place that day.
A guard later noticed the painting was gone.
“She was that brazen,” said Susan Dolan, the museum’s registrar and collection manager at the time of the theft. She told ABC15, “She popped out the door with it.”
Dolan said the museum called the police and alerted local art galleries, just in case the woman tried to sell the painting.
She believes the 12-inch-by-16-inch painting may have been more of an impulse theft.
“It was an odd thing,” she said. “The painting wasn’t valuable.”
She said the museum had several Van Ryder paintings as well as drawings and sketches.
The stolen oil painting, “Landscape with Lake,” was donated to the museum and was not part of the museum’s permanent collection, said Norah Diedrich, the museum’s director and chief executive officer.
The painting is described in the FBI file as a landscape in muted pastel colors of pink, purple and blue. “Landscape with Lake” features a lake surrounded by mountains and was in a gilt frame with glass.
Stolen sculpture comes as surprise to artist
New Mexico artist Gordon Snidow is known for his award-winning Western art, depicting cowboys and ranches and western landscapes.
He’s a charter member of the Cowboy Artists of America.
He made a series of sculptures cast in bronze that he titled “Just a Pinch,” after a tobacco company’s slogan “Just a pinch between your cheek and gum.”
The sculptures show a cowboy dressed in chaps, sitting and taking a break. The FBI report notes there were 40 of the sculptures made.
ABC15 reached out to Snidow, who lives in New Mexico, by phone and email.
He responded in a letter, saying he was unaware Statue No. 20 had been stolen. He said the statues had many collectors. One of those collectors must have commissioned a statue for sale at the Mammen Gallery II in Scottsdale, he said.
The gallery has since closed.
Snidow said he is “amazed” and “perplexed” by the theft.
Update: This statue was recovered in 2023 after a Gilbert man saw this ABC15 story and learned the statue that he inherited from his brother-in-law’s estate matched the FBI’s description of a stolen one. The statue has since been returned to the daughter of the couple who owned the Scottsdale art gallery where it was stolen.
Email ABC15 Investigator Anne Ryman at anne.ryman@abc15.com, call her at 602-685-6345, or connect on Twitter and Facebook.
