Jerry, tall and dashing in a slightly geeky way, and Rita, a kind of radiant ’50s earth mother, were former New York City public school teachers (he taught music she was a speech pathologist) who shared a passion for international travel. Directing her first feature, Allison Otto skillfully interlaces photographs and silent home movies, and she interviews art scholars like the de Kooning biographer Mark Stevens, agents from the FBI’s art-theft task force, and several of the Alters’ relatives, notably their genially perplexed mensch of a nephew, Ron Roseman (who was made executor of the estate), all to paint a portrait of who the Alters were. For a while, “The Thief Collector” devotes itself to this furtive tale of “ordinary” art thievery. The discovery of “Woman-Ochre” solved a 30-year-old art-heist mystery that had grown more sensational with the decades, since the painting, worth $400,000 when the Alters took it, was now valued at $160 million.
It became their private masterpiece and stayed there until their deaths (Jerry died in 2012, Rita in 2017), at which point it was discovered by Dave Van Auck, one of the proprietors of Manzanita Ridge Furniture and Antiques, the local company that had been hired to sell off the Alters’ estate. But the stolen de Kooning was just for them.
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Their modest desert house was full of random small works of painting, sculpture, and native art, along with dozens of Jerry’s own proudly displayed ersatz-Peter Max rainbow doodle canvases.
The Alters took the painting back to their home and hung it, in a cheap gold frame, behind their bedroom door, so that it was more or less concealed. As it turns out, though, this brazen act of out-in-the-open thievery, as insane as it was, isn’t the strangest part of the story. “The Thief Collector” re-enacts this robbery in staged scenes with a couple of actors: Sarah Minnich and, mugging a bit in a hideous fake mustache (which Jerry wore that day), Glenn Howerton. He rolled it up and concealed it, and he and Rita walked out of the museum and into a rust-colored sports car and made their getaway. As Rita distracted a guard, Jerry walked up to the museum’s most prized work, “Woman-Ochre,” an abstract expressionist portrait painted by William de Kooning in 1955, and proceeded to cut the canvas right out of its frame. It was 9:00 a.m., and the museum was mostly empty. In 1985, on the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, Jerry and Rita Alter, who were retired residents of the scrub-brush desert town of Cliff, New Mexico, wandered into the University of Arizona Museum of Art. God.” At first we think we’re watching the story of a weirdly isolated act of art thievery - and for a good stretch, we are, and we’re held in thrall by it. (In 2019, when Jeff Koons’ three-foot-tall silver bunny rabbit sold at auction for $91 million, you could call that sticker shock and thievery.) But I’ve also found that an art-world doc that has the quality of a thriller, like “The Lost Leonardo” or “The Price of Everything,” might open with an outrageous or even criminal situation, but what’s every bit as jaw-dropping is the rabbit hole of reality and illusion you then then find yourself tumbling down.Īllison Otto’s “ The Thief Collector” is an art documentary that builds to a supreme moment of “Oh.
Art-world documentaries often tap into the human audacity of forgery and thievery, the suspense of finding and unmasking fakes, not to mention the sheer sticker shock of it all. Recently, though, I’ve been experiencing that sensation in what may sound like a highly unlikely place: documentaries about the art world. God.” When that happens (kind of a rare occurrence these days), it’s a privileged and intoxicating feeling, one that lifts you right out of yourself. You could also say that the quintessential moment of a thriller is one that makes you go “Oh. You could say, going back to Hitchcock or the silent-film era, that the thriller is the quintessential form of cinema.
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