The crazy true story behind the most expensive painting ever stolen

The Concert is the most expensive painting ever stolen. It disappeared in an epic 1990 heist. Not seen since. Value: $250 mil+. $$ you’ll get for info on it: $10 mil (largest private bounty ever). A story with $500 mil of lost art, one fateful night, & a very strange heist👇

The most expensive painting - in fact, the most expensive stolen OBJECT - of all time: The Concert by Vermeer. One of the only 34 paintings from Vermeer that survive. Vermeer died unrecognized, of panic and grief, at 43 in 1675. What does the The Concert show us?

The wall in "The Concert" has a second painting to the left of our pianist - it shows a wild unruly landscape. The three people in the main painting are in-between the wild landscape on the left and the brothel painting on the right.

The delicate balance of civilization?

Painting bought by Isabella Gardner an art collector for $5K in 1892. Put in the "Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum." 1st building in the US with a glass-covered indoor garden. A building that Gardner willed must never be renovated, leading to terrible security 100 years later.

Alfred Hitchcock released a TV episode in 1964, 26 years before the actual heist, where The Concert gets stolen. In the 1980s, the lax security of the Gardner museum was an open secret among the guards. And then one night, two men dressed as police knocked on the museum door...

In 1990, Rick Abath, a 23 year old night guard at Gardner Museum, saw 2 police officers ringing the buzzer on his TV. Their claim: Investigating a disturbance. He let them in. Rick was told he looked like a suspect they were hunting. Could he step forward and provide ID?

Stepping forward took Rick Abath away from the only alarm button that could summon the police. He was quickly subdued and handcuffed by the thieves. The other guard, returning from his nightly vigil, met the same fate. And then the two thieves got to work for the next 81 mins.

The Gardner Museum Heist is strange because the two thieves left behind Titian's Rape of Europa (valued at $2.5 mil) and other valuable artwork while taking a 14000+ year old Chinese beaker only worth a few thousand $$$. And they left behind no hair, no DNA, no fingerprints..

33 years later, the Gardner Museum Heist remains unsolved. FBI has scoured continents, Mafia orgs have been shaken down, Netflix & BBC have made documentaries, $10 mil prize declared, full immunity offered to thieves for returning the art. The paintings remain missing.

Here is a reading rabbit hole for you: Dissident Insights On Art:

• Paglia on why art is man's rebellion against nature

• Eliot on marrying innovation with tradition

• Nietzsche on how art comes from intoxication

And more.