The White Duck
Michael Hampton

Perhaps all stories and all art begin with a need to deceive embedded both in their formal structure and narrative content. Fiction itself is a type of sophisticated illusion, artistic representation too, and ‘suspension of disbelief’, despite being an expression coined as recently as 1817 by Samuel Coleridge in ‘Biographia Literaria’, makes a call on readers that is as old as the hills, and that certainly goes back at least since the classical muralist Zeuxis (5th century B.C.) performed his famous optical trick with a bunch of painted grapes. So why not go further and announce that in the beginning was the rhetorical deception?

Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s masterful oil painting ‘La Vie Calme avec le Canard Blanc’, commonly known as ‘The White Duck’ (1753), dates from the tail end of a successful career, one that had seen him rise from being a competent if obscure portrait limner into court painter to Louis XV. A brilliant draftsman, Oudry’s designs were frequently used as the basis for royal tapestries produced by the legendary Gobelins workshop; but it is as a painter of animals that he is best known and more especially of hunting scenes and still life buffet pictures, some of the latter so brilliantly executed in his studio at the Tuileries that they must be regarded as belonging to that denigrated sub-category of art history: ‘trompe l’oeil’. ‘The White Duck’ is actually a meticulous exercise in the use of white, or ‘fond blancs’, ‘a pedagogical demonstration of the relativity of whiteness and the achievement of tonal relief without strong contrasts of value,’ to quote Grove’s 1996 ‘Dictionary of Art’, and so when it was stolen in a raid at Houghton Hall, Norfolk in 1992, not only was a majestic composition lost from view, but also an important example of Oudry’s conceptual skill, the only palpable trace of which must have been the dust outline left by the missing canvas after the robbery.

Since its appropriation the original painting has disappeared from view, cropping up from time to time in the press, its whereabouts and guardians the subject of journalistic speculation. Jason Burke (‘The Observer’, 3 Sep. 2000) relates how a Philippines based informer had tipped off the newspaper as ‘he believed “The White Duck” was being hidden in the attic of a remote and rundown house on moors near Newcastle.’ Gypsy gangs seem to be the main suspect in a string of burglaries in the UK, including the one at Houghton Hall and the trademark theft of Cézanne’s ‘Auvers-sur-Oise’ from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford on millennium night. The Oudry has since gone underground, or been ‘laid down’, to use the criminal parlance, the suggestion being that the item was ‘artnapped’ probably by savvy thieves using ‘Country Life’ magazine as an Argos catalogue to scan loot, either to be sold back to its owner through a middleman, used as collateral in drug deals or, more improbably, as a ‘get-out-of-jail-free-card’. Historically it joins a select group of pictures that have undergone this fugitive phase in their provenance The ‘Mona Lisa’ (1503-6), for instance, was kept concealed under the bed of Leonardo Peruggia, alias Leonardo Vincenzo, for two years, after being pinched from the Louvre in 1911. Gainsborough’s society portrait ‘Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire’ (1783) was stolen from Agnew & Agnew’s Bond Street showroom in 1876 by the Victorian cracksman Adam Worth, who, incidentally, is fingered by some as the real life model for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty. Lastly, there is Rembrandt’s much stolen, much travelled ‘Jacob De Gheyn III’ (1632), sometimes known as the ‘takeaway Rembrandt’. All these works were recovered in due course either through stupidity, negotiation or luck.

Turning to the presence of ‘The White Duck’ as an internet image brings with it a new set of issues, and googling it reveals a small array of different digital versions, either ruining or reinventing the picture, depending on your viewpoint, even implying that Oudry may have actually produced copies. Not so. These low-resolution thumbnail images, subject to copyright, are in fact ads for online galleries that will sell you a 100% handmade oil reproduction of the work, rolled or stretched. One company even offers a craquelure option for a small extra charge. Nowhere in the description is the theft mentioned, although it is stressed somewhat optimistically that the work belongs to the Collection of the Marquis of Cholmondeley. Such are the commercial substitutes then for this stolen masterpiece, paltry visual compensations which can never make good its auratic disappearance. After the 1994 theft of two Turner’s loaned from the Tate, ‘Light and Colour’ (1843) and ‘Shade and Darkness’ (1843), Sabine Schulze, curator of the Schirn gallery in Frankfurt, recalled how ‘I stood before the empty wall. I couldn’t believe it. It was the darkest moment of my professional life,’ (‘The Sunday Times’, 26 Jan. 2003).

Since 1997 the German artist Ralph Bageritz has also addressed this void in his ongoing conceptual cycle ‘The Metaphysics of the Vanishing’, a project that uses the Art Loss Register as its source, commonly installing surrogate photos plus inscriptions as stand-ins for nicked works of art. The Art Loss Register (ALR), a database set up in 1991 by a partnership of leading auction houses, insurance companies and the International Foundation for Art Research, sounds reminiscent of Lloyd’s Register of sunken shipping and many of the pictures and antiques on its list are probably just that, wantonly destroyed or metaphorically gone beneath the waves for ever. For Bageritz though this is just the starting point for his melancholic investigation of vanished art, theft being the pre-condition for many of his works. For instance Andy Warhol’s acrylic painting ‘Lenin’ (1987) was reproduced by Bageritz as a Lambda print in the 2009 group show ‘Portrait’ at G.A.S.-Station gallery Kreuzberg, Germany. It came with a superscription announcing that the original was stolen in 2001 during ‘short storage in a Cologne warehouse’ (recovered by ALR in 2002). This is typical Bageritz exploring the dynamic of absent presence, metaphysical vanishing expressed as a slick and elusive surface double accompanied by sparse information, both creating a commentary on individual lost paintings and also casting doubt ipso facto on the very principle of legal ownership.

Bageritz’s cottage industry depends on people such as the serial art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, responsible for a string of brazen thefts from museums and galleries across Europe. Often using his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, as a decoy and lookout, Breitwieser, a restaurant waiter, stole approximately 240 paintings and artefacts between 1995 and 2001, turning his bedroom in his mother’s flat into a shadowy private museum, his overall cache valued after his arrest at around $1.5 billion. In court he pleaded ‘fraudulent removal’ rather than theft, as he had never made any attempt to sell on his haul, but did jail time both in France and Switzerland, releasing his celebrity biography ‘Confessions d’un Voleur d’Art’ in 2006. A portrait of him by the painter Jean-Paul Matifat has only provided an extra layer of notoriety. Nevertheless 60 works stolen by Breitwieser are still missing, presumed trashed by his mother in the waste disposal unit in their building, amongst which were canvases by Watteau, Breughel and Boucher, not to mention the blue chip ‘Sybille, Princess of Cleves’ (1526) by Lucas Cranach the Elder, stolen from a Sotheby’s auction at Baden-Baden in 1995. Now images of this extremely beautiful painting function as memento mori too, its wanton destruction attended by a sharp sorrow.

Recalling his very first theft in 1995 from the castle at Gruyères (an 18th century painting by Christian Wilhelm Dietrich), Breitwieser stated that ‘I was fascinated by her beauty, by the qualities of the woman in the portrait and by her eyes,’ as if hypnotic suggestion were behind the act. ‘Trompe l’oeil’ artworks also utilise such sensual appeal, particularly to the haptic, as if they were inviting the viewer to touch them to test their truth, this temptation to touch just one step away from theft itself. Likewise, diabolical, unlawful powers have been on occasion ascribed to ‘trompe l’oeil’ practitioners. Two 19th century American ‘trompe l’oeil’ painters William Harnett and John Haberle were both warned by the US secret service, a body established in 1865 to suppress fake currency, to stop depicting bank notes in their pictures. Harnett complied but Haberle carried on with impunity. Described by the critic Alfred Frankenstein in ‘The Reality of Appearance’ (1970) as ‘wry and wacky’, Haberle himself called his work ‘artistic mechanics’, incredibly skilful representations of frayed dollar bills that took the art to a new level. Titles such as ‘Reproduction’ (1886-7), ‘USA (the Chicago Bill Picture)’ (1889) and ‘Can You Break a Five?’ (c.1888) gave the game away and brought him brief notoriety. The American Arts Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2 notes of ‘Can You Break a Five’ that ‘Haberle positions the five dollar bill diagonally across a partial one-dollar bill, and the visible reverse includes a government warning about counterfeiting.’ However, rebel that he was, Haberle still worked in a pre-Duchampian universe, unlike modern bad boys the Chapman brothers, J.S.G. Boggs and D*face, practitioners who have featured money, real or otherwise, in their practice in order to test out the viable limits of transgression.

In 2007, the Chapmans were investigated by the Bank of England following the latrinalia style defacement of currency at the Frieze Art Fair. D*face connived a piece, ‘United States of America’, featuring the head of George Washington morphed into a winged skull, while Boggs has finessed the art of counterfeiting to the extent that his fakes, known as ‘Boggs bills’ have been accepted as legal tender in that most conservative country Switzerland. Money as art. Money from art. Art money. However you configure the terms their impact is hard-edged and brutal.

Furthermore, since 2005, there has been a world-wide boom in the price of metals such as brass, bronze, copper and nickel that in combination with easy cash turnover from scrap metal dealers has fuelled the rise of a new kind of robbery: premeditated theft of public sculpture by organised gangs. In 2006 alone, a one-and-a-half-tonne bronze statue of a soldier was taken from a Nuneaton war memorial, two sculptures by Lynn Chadwick vanished and, most notoriously, Henry Moore’s ‘Reclining Figure’ (1969-70) was removed from Perry Green under cover of night by flatbed Mercedes. Speculation has it that the Moore was shipped out to China and melted down, destined to find its way into electronic circuits. In 2007 abstract works by Jonathan Miller were taken from his Camden garden along with a rusty tin bath. Even Tehran has been affected by this sinister Philistinism, with ‘ten bronze statues’ of various cultural icons lately heisted (‘The Jackdaw’, July/August 2010). This metal hungry crime wave has also seen UK streets stripped of their manhole covers and brass door-knockers ripped off. Thus stolen art in some instances has simply been reduced to the same level as municipal road signage, undistinguished scrap on the back-street commodities market, provenance terminated, aesthetic value obliterated. If Leonardo Peruggia were stealing the ‘Mona Lisa’ today he might have also gouged out the four iron pegs in the wall that were all that was left behind after its removal!

On a bizarre note, art theft reached a new low recently when ‘Ghost’, a Nissan Sunny car, modified by Clara Ursitti for the 2010 Tatton Park Biennial was stolen from outside the artist’s home in Glasgow. Ursitti had ‘soundproofed’ and ‘imbued the 1994 car with the luxurious whiff of a Rolls Royce, carefully recreated from an 1980s scented magazine advert’ (‘The Independent’, 29 Apr. 2010). She remarked that, ‘The sound was so much smoother, and then there was the smell as well,’ and although such subtleties may have been lost on a feral thief, this is a case of the artwork entering the public domain by accident and with a perverse stealth. The incident could be classified as the dematerialisation of the object by person or persons unknown, an unwitting jest usurping the role of late conceptual art.