The final act for Bonnie Lindberg had come three years earlier. In the spring of 1999, she had plans to feature the well-traveled Date Paintings in a Welcome Home show at Elayne Galleries. The timing couldn’t have been better. Rockwell’s star was on the rise. The twenty-year odyssey of the paintings had been featured on TV and trumpeted in newspaper articles. Best of all, serious Rockwell collectors were on notice that “Before the Date/Cowgirl” had special value because it marked a turning point in the artist’s career.
Karal Ann Marling, an art historian at the University of Minnesota, had written a book that placed Rockwell at the forefront of the realist tradition in American art. In February 1999, the Minneapolis Tribune sought Marling’s opinion of the stolen Rockwells and their standing in the artist’s canon. According to her, a little-known flap involving “Before the Date/Cowgirl” turned out to be the beginning of the end of Rockwell’s lengthy relationship with the Saturday Evening Post.
The paintings the gallery recovered were an early study for a Post cover. In an interview about his association with the magazine, Rockwell said that after he gave them the final version, “some hack” had been hired to make the cowgirl less racy. In the gallery’s painting she is bent ever so slightly in front of a mirror, and some skin is showing through her slip. In the later version, the slip has lost its translucence.
According to Rockwell, that was the last straw. He was weary of battles with magazine editors who were determined to impose their middlebrow values on his work, and he quit painting covers for the Post in 1969. Marling told the Tribune that because of that incident and its effect on Rockwell’s career, the Date Paintings were the most significant of the seven.
Russ, Bonnie, and her husband Kevin at the Welcome Home showing of the Date Paintings in 1999
About the same time that the Tribune was quoting Marling, a collection of Rockwell’s work embarked on a six-museum tour that included shows at the Chicago Historical Society, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, that raised the artist’s profile considerably.
Shortly before the Welcome Home show at Elayne Galleries was scheduled to open, Bonnie got a call from Bruce Hanley, the criminal attorney she had hired before the trip to Brazil. Hanley said he had just spoken to the FBI.
“We have to go down and talk to them, right now,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll come and confiscate the paintings. I’ll meet you there [at the FBI office].”
“I didn’t know what was going on,” says Bonnie.
Two agents were waiting, along with the insurance investigator who had stopped by before the trip to Brazil. They went into a conference room, where the agents took turns walking her through the entire story of their efforts to retrieve the paintings.
“I wondered what they were up to,” says Bonnie. “I especially wondered why they were going over things I’d told them about already. I think I’d either talked to Bob Wittman or someone at the Minneapolis office every day in the week or two before we left for Brazil.”
The good-guy agent asked what they had discussed with Carneiro in New York and how the deal went down in Brazil. He nodded with seeming approval when Bonnie told about the photos they had demanded and the way they had recovered one painting before any cash changed hands.
The bad-guy agent demanded to know why Bonnie thought they were entitled to keep the paintings.
“I said they were ours because we’d never gotten any insurance settlement on them,” Bonnie says. “Then, he laid a piece of paper on the table—bang!—and asked if we’d seen it before.”
It was a statement memorializing an insurance payment of $34,500 to the gallery for the loss of the two Date Paintings, signed by Elayne Lindberg.
“I just saw the whole twenty-year search coming to nothing,” says Bonnie. “I almost broke down in tears, but instead I got angry. I told them I knew nothing about that payment. I’d asked for every single insurance document, more than once, and I’d never seen that one. I’d asked back when we heard from the guy in Argentina, I’d asked when we heard from Luis Palma, and again before we went to Brazil. ‘Now you show me this!’ I said. ‘What kind of scam are you pulling?’”
Didn’t we send you this? asked the insurance investigator. That must be because it was a different claim number.
He proceeded to explain that the records of the two payments, one to Brown & Bigelow, one to Elayne Galleries, must have been separated, possibly when the insurance company was sold. He called it an oversight and didn’t seem to think it mattered much, because the payment had surely been made and acknowledged with Elayne Lindberg’s signature.
But the FBI agents seemed to be taken aback by his admission. “I could tell they believed I’d never seen that document,” says Bonnie. “That changed the tone of things. There was never any mention of stolen property after that.”
The FBI took possession of the paintings pending a resolution of ownership. The Welcome Home show was postponed. A few weeks later Hanley suggested a way to move forward, and the insurer’s attorney agreed. The gallery would put $34,500 in escrow. The paintings would be released to the gallery. Home Insurance would sue, and the court would decide who got what. Hanley bowed out at that point, and Daniel Taber, a litigator, took over.
Home Insurance argued that according to an insurer’s right of subrogation (the right to pursue a party that caused an insurance loss for the amount of the claim), it should get its money back, or the paintings, or both.
Taber argued that Minnesota law does not allow an insurer to enforce its subrogation rights until the insured has been made whole. In this case the insured had paid $80,000 to Carneiro to get the paintings back, plus an estimated $30,000 in expenses searching for the paintings.
Secondly, he argued, the paintings were not recovered through any claim of right by the insured, because according to Brazilian law Carneiro was the rightful owner. Since the insured had no right to the paintings, the insurer had no rights as subrogee.
In a court filing, Taber wrote, “Words on paper are woefully insufficient to express the outrageous nature of any such claims as the insurer’s. The gallery is irrefutably entitled to the paintings with no obligation to reimburse Home’s payment of $34,500.…The gallery needed the entire $34,500, plus another $45,000, to buy back the paintings. If the gallery now had to pay Home $34,500, the insurer would become the insured and the insured the insurer. The gallery would end up with an $80,000 loss with nothing from Home. On the other hand, Home would end up with no loss, having been paid in full by the gallery. Such a result would not only be inequitable, it would be absurd.”
The court agreed. The judge’s ruling in favor of the gallery had some harsh words for the insurer. He noted that they sat back and watched without lifting a finger while the Lindbergs spent more than twenty years searching for the paintings, and then expected to be rewarded for their lack of effort. Neither time nor money had been invested by the insurer, and therefore it had no claim on the fruits of what had been a monumental effort.
The Welcome Home show was finally held, and it was a great success. There were big crowds, lots of coverage by local TV stations, and a story by the Associated Press that was picked up by several newspapers around the country.
In November 1999, the Date Paintings were sold through a New York auction house for $180,000.
In 2001, Bonnie closed Elayne Galleries. The boom times for art as an investment were past. There were still steady sales to collectors, but an offer to buy the building came along and she took it. She and her husband went into the appraisal business.
“Appraisal was always the part we liked best,” she says. Now she does her searching on the Internet.
Her memories of the days when she was fielding tips, trying to make deals with shady characters, and wondering whether the FBI saw her as someone they wanted to help or someone they wanted to arrest—all have grown fonder over the years.
“It was hard, it was frustrating, it was full of disappointments, but ultimately it was rewarding. Especially because everybody got their paintings back, not just us. And it was exciting too, no question. You know, the first thing you think when you find out you’ve been robbed is, ‘I wish that hadn’t happened,’ but looking back on it now, if I had it all to do over, I wouldn’t change a thing. It was an adventure. A real one. How many of those do you get in your life?”
In 2011, she attended a lecture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts about recovering stolen art. The speaker was Bob Wittman. His book had been published the year before, and he was on an author’s tour. The event was well attended, and people were eager to talk to Wittman afterward. Bonnie wanted to introduce herself, but she ended up near the end of a long line of people waiting to get copies of his book signed.
She was about to give up when he glanced her way and said, “Hi, Bonnie. Hang on, I’ll be right with you.”
She found it unnerving that after all those years, and having never met him face to face, he recognized her. They must have photos of me, she thought, maybe even recent ones. It made her wonder how much of a “person of interest” she had been. Or maybe still was.
They had a nice chat, but she didn’t buy his book.