The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee

A companion piece to The Lost Vermeer by Kasey Smith

When art is stolen or destroyed, how can curation decisions mediate our relationship to that loss? 

When Isabella Stewart Gardner established her museum in 1903, she did so with an enviable clarity of vision. She was so sure of her collection and approach to curation that her will required it be kept intact after her death — meaning nothing could be sold away, rotated out, added into, or rearranged within the original building. This portion of the museum now functions much like a momento mori, helping to enshrine her legacy as if it were funerary marble. Such monumentality is somewhat uncommon within art museums, with most striking a much different balance between growth and conservation. It’s almost as if the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has transitioned from being a living, breathing collection of objects to a singular, historic Object. The building, its decor, its collection, and its history now operating as a single, undifferentiated entity.

Which is not to say that it’s a bad or inferior museum. Simply that the terms of its creation imbue it with a historicity that exists outside the contemporary moment. But what happens when the contemporary moment intervenes? As it did during the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990?

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Let me begin by saying — I never planned to make art about The Storm On The Sea of Galilee and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. Once I finished all fourteen Pixelated Pearl Vermeers I was supposed to start a new series on Van Eyck and the history of paint making. But after recreating Vermeer’s painting The Concert, I fell in love with the drama and intrigue around its theft. Which of course led me to fall in love with the Rembrandt paintings taken that day. Or, more specifically, with the frame left behind by The Storm On The Sea of Galilee.

For while thirteen art pieces were stolen that day, the frames of the five largest paintings were not. Left scattered across the floor of the museum’s Dutch Room, they were removed to reduce bulk during the getaway. After the cops had left, statements been made, photographs been taken, and fingerprints dusted for, back up onto the walls the frames went, in order to fulfill the institution's promise to Isabella that nothing about her museum would change. Even though, with that theft, everything unfortunately did.

Frames delineate. They form a visual boundary that helps us differentiate between things that should be read as Art and things which should be read as Not Art. In the Dutch Room, instead of Rembrandts and Vermeers, these five empty frames now highlight the green damask curtains hanging behind them. Elevated to the visual foreground, the damask feels awkward on the receiving end of our attention. Framed in this way we notice very fold, every errant wrinkle, every fault or defect in the weave. Decor is ambiance not Art and curtains were never meant to be considered in such detail. But curated in this way, the damask represents lack — as in the lack of the painting that should fill this frame instead — yes cannot fade into lack itself, it’s pattern lending far too much visual volume for it to feign Nothingness.

It fascinates me that this patch of green thread was never even meant to be seen. And certainly not on these terms! So in my piece of the same name, I have recreated The Storm On The Sea Of Galilee within the form of a similar green damask pattern; embroidering an image that merges the original painting with how its frame has been curated in absentia. This frame requires us to consider each thread of the damask as if it were a brush stroke on canvas. Here, by translating Rembrandt’s actual brush strokes into thread, I am elevating the damask to fully actualized Art in its own right. As the frame highlights and contextualizes the damask, here the damask highlights and contextualizes the painting that once obscured it; defining it as both an object with meaning and something which can delineate meaning itself.

This is a powerful transmogrification of ambiance into Art that acknowledges the role of curation in how Art is understood. Does this replace the original? No, nothing short of a full return and restoration of the stolen works can achieve that. But as with much of my work, this piece forms a vessel of remembrance to deposit our feelings about the original painting and its theft into. Much as the empty frames on the walls of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum do.