Woman-Ochre is a 1955 abstract expressionist oil painting by Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning, part of his Woman series from that period. It was controversial in its day, like the other paintings in the series, for its explicit use of figures, which Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists considered a betrayal of the movement's ideal of pure, non-representational painting. Feminists also considered the works misogynistic, suggesting violent impulses toward the women depicted.
Several years after it was completed, a wealthy collector from the Eastern United States bought it and later donated it to the new University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA) in Tucson, where he frequently vacationed, with the stipulation that the museum could not ever sell or give it away, even as the value of other de Kooning paintings from that era rose to over million in the early 21st century; however the stipulation did not prevent the museum from loaning it to traveling exhibits, and it went with several, as far away as Eastern Europe.
In 1985 it was stolen from the museum. Investigators believed the thieves were a couple who had visited the museum briefly on the day after Thanksgiving Day that year, as it was found to have been cut from its frame shortly after they left. Sketches were circulated in an effort to identify them, but no leads turned up until it was recovered 32 years later after it was offered for sale at a New Mexico antique store, where it had been part of the estate of Jerry and Rita Alter, two former New York City public school teachers who had retired to the area. Visitors to the store speculated that the work was a de Kooning, and then the proprietor found a picture of the missing painting on the Internet. He contacted museum staff, who were able to provisionally authenticate it, and it was returned to Tucson. The museum did not put it back on exhibit, except for one day before sending it to the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, and raised funds to restore and repair it. After delays resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, it was finished in 2022.
It has not been determined who stole the painting. Suspicion has fallen on the Alters, who were photographed at a family Thanksgiving dinner in Tucson the night before the theft, and displayed it in their house in a manner that only they were likely to have seen during their lifetimes. They also did bear a slight resemblance to the couple in the sketches, and Jerome Alter later wrote a book of stories in which two characters carry out a similar theft of a museum piece to reserve for their own exclusive enjoyment. The living relatives of the Alters believe it is possible that they bought the painting from a third party, entirely unaware of its provenance. A 2022 documentary about the crime and the Alters implicated them in the theft of two other paintings, which have also been located and returned to the museum they were stolen from.
History
De Kooning started Woman-Ochre, an extension of his earlier Woman series, in 1954 while living in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village along with other artists and intellectuals of the New York School. He finished it the following year.
Like the other paintings in the series, it depicted a female figure, recognizable albeit highly stylized into abstract shapes. They were controversial both among de Kooning's fellow artists and critics. The former, especially Jackson Pollock, felt the artist had been unable to sustain abstract expressionism's goal of pure painting by resorting to what was still recognizably figurative art. John Elderfield, who curated a 2011-2012 de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, says that the series' power stems from its use of the thick brushes and broad strokes associated with Venetian painting juxtaposed with its subject matter: "He was using traditional techniques to make alarmingly modern paintings, and I think this hybrid quality made people uncomfortable."
From outside the arts community, critic Emily Genauer attacked the works from a feminist perspective, calling them misogynistic depictions of women being tortured. De Kooning's comments on the paintings did not allay that criticism. "Women irritate me sometimes", he said. "I painted that irritation in the 'Woman' series." His wife Elaine said her mother-in-law, not she, was the inspiration.
After de Kooning completed Woman-Ochre in 1955, it was displayed at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York for two years, part of a one-man show of 21 works, mostly oils but with a few sketches, only two of them abstract. Edward Joseph Gallagher Jr., an architect and collector from Baltimore, bought it in 1957. Another pastime of his was vacationing at dude ranches in Arizona. The following year, after reading an article in Life about the University of Arizona's new art museum and its collection of Renaissance art, Gallagher called the university's president and offered to donate some of his modern paintings to the museum in honor of his son, who had recently died in a boating accident. Ultimately, he gave UAMA 200 works including Woman-Ochre, many of which were by de Kooning and other abstract expressionist painters such as Pollock and Mark Rothko. His gift came with the stipulation that the museum could never sell or give the paintings, including Woman-Ochre, to anyone else.
During the 1960s, the museum loaned it to several exhibitions elsewhere. It was displayed at the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1963, and then at several colleges in New England over the next two years. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) included it in one of its own traveling exhibitions, Two Decades of American Painting, during 1966 and 1967. A 1969 Smithsonian exhibit, The Disappearance and Reappearance of the Image, introduced the painting to museumgoers in several Eastern European countries, Paris and Brussels.
Woman-Ochre largely remained in Arizona after that. It was loaned to another MoMA traveling exhibit, Four Contemporary Masters, in 1975. For two weeks at the end of August 1981, it was displayed at the Guild Hall of East Hampton, New York, which had exhibited many of de Kooning's other works and helped popularize him.
Theft
On November 29, 1985, the day after Thanksgiving, an older woman and younger man, wearing heavy winter coats against the late November chill, were waiting outside the museum shortly before its 9 a.m. opening time. When security guards let a staff member in, the couple followed. The guards decided to let them in anyway.
The couple went upstairs. Midway up the stairs, the woman began asking the guard on duty about some of the artwork in the museum, while the man continued upstairs. Shortly afterwards, he returned and the two left.
This very short visit to the museum seemed unusual to the guard, and he went upstairs to see if anything was amiss. He found that Woman-Ochre had been cut from its frame. It appeared that the man had hidden the painting under his coat before leaving. A witness later recalled seeing the two drive off in a rust-colored two-door sports car.
No fingerprints were found at the scene. At the time the museum had no security cameras, so investigators had to rely on eyewitness accounts which described the man as in his late 20s, with dark brown hair, glasses and a mustache, wearing sunglasses and a dark blue water-repellent coat with a hood; the woman was said to be older, with a scarf and granny glasses, reddish-blonde hair, wearing a red water-repellent coat and tan bell-bottoms. Sketches were made and distributed to the public. The university's police department turned the case over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but no leads materialized.
The museum's insurance company paid ($ in ), the painting's estimated market value at the time, on the claim. It used the money to buy security cameras; the museum also revised its schedule to stay closed on the day after Thanksgiving in the future. Like many other art museums that have suffered thefts of works on display, it did not replace Woman-Ochre, instead placing a blank ochre-colored canvas on the wall behind the frame, where the cut fibers were still visible, to call attention to the loss. By 2015, when another 1955 de Kooning, Interchange, was sold for million, making it the most expensive painting ever at that time, the museum estimated the value of the still-missing work at million.
Recovery
In June 2017, Rita Alter, a former speech pathologist in the New York City public school system as well as the local school district in Cliff, New Mexico, died. She and her husband, Jerry, a former clarinetist and music teacher in the New York City schools who had predeceased her in 2012, had retired to the area in 1977 and built a house on of land near Gila National Forest that included a sculpture garden with busts of Beethoven and Molière, where they raised their own chickens and ducks. Her nephew, Ron Roseman, was named executor of her estate.
Roseman sent photos of the Alter's artwork and statues to a dozen museums and auction houses. Roseman then hired a local realtor, Ruth Seawolf, to sell the Alters' house. As the two were touring the house to prepare for the sale, Seawolf noticed several items in the house that might be of interest to someone she knew, mainly pottery and African pieces. She called up a friend, David Van Auker, who ran an antique store in nearby Silver City, and Roseman hired him to appraise the art and furniture in the house that the family itself had not wanted. He sought to sell them those items in bulk so the family could then sell the emptied house and dispose of the estate. Van Auker went to the house to inspect the contents in August.
During Van Auker's tour, in addition to the art Seawolf had told him about, he found another painting in the Alters' master bedroom, hung on the wall next to the door in such a way that it was visible only when the door was closed, a discovery he made only when he closed the door to get a better look at a broken dresser drawer, part of the room's mid-century furniture set, which he thought could be sold together at a good price. While he did not recognize the painting, it appeared to him to be the work of a mid-20th century artist as well, which he thought was "great" and "cool", although he thought very little of its frame.
Van Auker bought the contents of the house for and returned the next day with some friends to take the artwork and furniture back to his store. They put the painting atop the pile in their truck and drove it back to Silver City, where he put it on display, propping it up against the wall on the floor. He intended to change the frame, which he disliked, and hang it in his guesthouse.
Silver City has a large population of artists, and shortly after Van Auker put it on display, a customer recognized it as a work by de Kooning, a remark the proprietors dismissed. But within an hour, two other customers had made the same assessment; one man even returned several times and offered to buy the painting for . Van Auker, realizing he might have acquired something more valuable than he appreciated, decided to put the painting in a bathroom, the only room in the store that could be locked. He did an Internet search, which eventually led him to a 2015 article about Woman-Ochre in The Arizona Republic.