Netflix s This Is a Robbery director reveals more mysteries, theories about Gardner art heist
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When you think of the “biggest art heist in the world,” your mind likely fills with romantic images of slinky cat burglars, Ocean’s Eleven schemers in three-piece suits or Tom Cruise dropping down from a glass ceiling. In all likelihood, you did not immediately think of seedy car repair shops and a bunch of mafia guys named Bobby.
But that’s the portrait painted by “This Is a Robbery,” Netflix’s wildly engaging four-part docuseries hitting the platform Wednesday. With a new true crime doc dropping seemingly every day, the genre’s a dime a dozen right now. But both novices and experts will find much to fascinate in this gripping retelling of the Isabella Stewart Gardner robbery in which 13 works of art were lifted on March 18, 1990 by a pair of mystery men dressed as cops.
Making A Murderer,
I Am A Killer and
Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel? Fear not: Netflixâs latest offering will fill the true crime-shaped hole in your life. Out now,
This Is A Robbery: The Worldâs Biggest Art Heist is four hoursâ worth of twists, turns, leads, dead-ends, mobsters, Manets and big, big money. This is everything you need to know.
What is it about?
This Is A Robbery delves into the 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, during which two thieves dressed as Boston police officers stole art worth millions from the museum. We learn that the robbers bound and gagged two security guards, before proceeding to loot the museum over an 81-minute period. The four-part true crime series takes its name from something one of the thieves reportedly said before taking the guards down to the basement, where they were discovered (by actual police officers) the next morning. The crime remains unsolved.
A little after 1 a.m. on March 18, night guard Rick Abath buzzed two uniformed men into the building who said they had been called about a disturbance into the museum. When they entered, they asked him to tell his partner doing rounds to return to the security desk as well, and once he did, they bound, blindfolded, and cuffed both guards in the museum’s basement. The two men dressed as Boston Police officers then spent over an hour making their way through the museum, slicing precious artworks as well as some strange choices out of their frames, and leaving a bit before 3 a.m. Authorities were alerted only once museum staff arrived in the morning to find the night guards tied up in the basement, the historic building in a state of disarray, and several works of art stolen, with the security video tape missing. In the 31 years since, no one has been arrested for the crime.
This is a Robbery, Netflix s new docuseries
, recounts the extraordinary story of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a 15th-century Venetian-style palace in Boston from which 13 pieces of art, totalling half a billion dollars, were stolen on March 18, 1990 – the day after St Patrick s Day. Netflix
A little after 1am, two white men dressed as Boston police officers entered the museum, forced the two security guards into the basement where they were handcuffed and blindfolded, and then got to work, shutting off the alarm, stealing the security footage and helping themselves to the following:
The Concert - Vermeer
Eagle Finial - Pierre-Philippe Thomire
Alyson Shotz’s 2005 installation for the
Intersections series,
The Allusion of Gravity, and an Untitled work from 2014 by DC-artist
Linn Myers. figgis-vizueta explores Meyers and Shotz’s use of limited materials, repetition, motion, and the physicality of process, translating these qualities as musical source material from which to generate new proximities between the visual and the aural.
Funding for the Phillips Music Centennial Commission Fund is generously provided by the Sachiko Kuno Foundation.
This performance will be broadcast on this event page and is free with registration. Once you have registered, return to this page on May 2, 2021, scroll down to the section “Watch the Stream” and enter the password provided to you at registration. The performance will be available to view On-Demand for the following 7 days.