On the evening of February 16, 1978, more than five hundred people gathered at Elayne Galleries in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, to drink champagne, celebrate Norman Rockwell’s eighty-fourth birthday, and maybe purchase some art.
It was the largest show of Rockwell’s paintings ever held in a private gallery. The plans originally included an appearance by Rockwell, but the artist couldn’t attend. He was bedridden, and would die nine months later. Nevertheless, he was a major presence at the show. Eight of his original paintings were on display, as were many of his signed, limited-edition lithographs.
A dock scene attributed to the French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir was the co-feature. It had a crack extending from the edge into the artist’s signature that diminished its value somewhat, but it was still worth plenty. Altogether the exhibition was an impressive array of valuable art, well publicized and well attended.
Unlike many gallery owners, Elayne and Russ Lindberg had taken steps to prevent a robbery. They had hired a contractor to make the premises secure. He installed an audio-sonic alarm and a “theft proof” lock. They hired the Pinkerton Agency to guard the premises for the duration of the show.
The Lindbergs had gained a nationwide reputation for handling Rockwell’s work. Six of his paintings were on loan for the show, but two others belonged to the gallery, and the opening attracted the kind of collectors who might be interested in buying them.
The invitation to the show at Elayne Galleries at which the paintings were stolen. This special invitation went out to a list of more than five hundred gallery clients.
“It was a good time to be in the business. Art as an investment was becoming very popular in the 1970s,” says the gallery owners’ daughter, Bonnie Lindberg, now an estate appraiser in St. Louis Park.
Bonnie was twenty-two when the Rockwell party took place, blond and pretty, with a dazzling smile. Her mother, a publicity hound who knew how to stage an event, made sure her daughter was around at openings. Her presence was one small detail of a marketing plan that was part buzz and part blitzkrieg. Mailings had gone to clients and potential clients, and circulars had been handed to people on the street and tucked under the windshields of parked cars. There were blurbs in newspapers, and word of mouth had spread via a network that reached art collectors and artists, of course, but also Elayne Lindberg’s former colleagues from law enforcement and probably a few shoplifters she had collared during her days as a store detective. Elayne’s knack for turning an opening into a well-orchestrated extravaganza had boosted her gallery into the top echelon of the local art scene by 1978. Later that year, a show at Elayne Galleries would be billed as “the largest one-time exhibit ever” of the Minnesota-born artist LeRoy Neiman’s work. It featured more than seventy original paintings, prints and posters, plus the artist himself, sporting his trademark moustache. A delegation of boosters from the town of Leroy, Minnesota, arrived about the time the crowd peaked and presented Neiman with the keys to their city.
Elayne Lindberg, her daughter Bonnie, and the sheet cake baked for the opening of the Rockwell show
The Rockwell bash was a gala evening by all accounts, despite an unnerving incident the day before. Three men who didn’t look like art lovers had strolled into the gallery. Extra help had been hired for the show, and the place was bustling with preparations, but the general demeanor of the three, and the fact that one of them didn’t bother taking off his sunglasses as he viewed paintings, got everybody’s attention.
“Things more or less came to a halt,” Elayne Lindberg later told investigators.
The men had some pointed questions to ask about the value of various works of art. Russ Lindberg, normally affable and outgoing, was short with them. He took note of their “bold” attitude and their physical appearance.
After splitting up and browsing awhile, the men gathered near the Renoir, where they were overheard discussing what measures might be in place to protect it. Russ thought they were paying particular attention to the windows and doors. They stayed about twenty-five minutes. When they left, Russ followed them outside and wrote down the license number of their car, a white 1976 Chevy Impala.
“I think he wanted them to know he’d spotted them,” says his son, Gary, thirty-five at the time, now an author living in Chanhassen, Minnesota.
The impression the incident left was of three workmanlike robbers who knew exactly what they wanted and were casing the gallery for entrance and exit routes. Elayne Lindberg called them “cocky.”
After the party ended and the gallery closed for the night, seven of the Rockwell paintings and the Renoir were stolen. The thieves punched the “theft proof” lock and cut the electrical cord that powered the alarm. The ease with which they foiled the security system indicated that they were either very skilled or had some familiarity with its components. The art was estimated to be worth $500,000 when it was stolen, and even though one of the paintings has since proven to be a fake, their net value has mushroomed to more than $1 million now, making it the biggest robbery in the state’s history. The crime was never solved, but the Rockwell paintings were recovered twenty-two years later, after they had been bought and sold on three continents.
The FBI files and interviews with attorneys and others indicate that the theft was planned at the last moment. The perpetrators evidently either checked out an opportunity spotted by someone they were inclined to blow off and discovered it was real or they got a contract for a rush job from organized crime figures on the East Coast.
A last-minute hitch prevented them from taking one of the paintings they had targeted, but they got away cleanly with the others. It looked like they had hit the jackpot. The problem was monetization, but there is a lively market for stolen art and in 1978 it was evolving fast.
Today, according to Interpol, the global traffic in stolen art is an illicit commerce exceeded only by drugs and black market arms sales.