Stolen art — BYU searches the world to recover pilfered pieces

The "Port Washington Point" painting came back to BYU with a fraudulent BYU sticker on the back. The thief, trying to establish the painting's provenance, or proof of a clean history, created the sticker. The university has never made such a sticker or anything like it.

The painting is the only one returned to BYU since Poulsen began working at the museum five years ago, but she and Lemmon aren't done pursuing the lost art.

O'Wyatt took a second Homer drawing at the same time as the Monet sketch and other Homer drawing. He told police he loaned "Over the Garden Wall" to a relative who wouldn't return it.

The truth was he sold the drawing. It now hangs in a home in Scarsdale, N.Y. The university continues to negotiate for its return.

Lemmon and Poulsen also know who has a Weir painting called "A Lady with a Lyre," an incomplete work that the thief had taken to an artist and finished. Lemmon has spoken with that artist.

Another piece is part of the estate of Swiss Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. The estate is being liquidated and BYU has been negotiating with the estate's attorneys for its return for about 20 years. The estate cannot sell the painting.

"It really devalues a work of art when you check the provenance and we say it's stolen and we will never relinquish title," Lemmon said. "Time is on our side."

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But time passes and BYU's Museum of Art is still without a portrait of Brigham Young by George Taggart, or one of former LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith by John Hafen. Four Weir oils and watercolors have been recovered, but 11 are still missing. So are three Minerva Teichert watercolors.

The university managed to get back a Renoir landscape done in oil on panel, but still doesn't have an Avard-Tennyson Fairbanks bust of Brigham Young or a Rodin bronze called "The Lion."

The losses remain painful, even to someone like Poulsen, who wasn't born when the art was stolen.

That made the recovery of "Port Washington Point" all the sweeter.

"It had seemed like a lost cause," Poulsen said. "It gave us renewed hope we could still go after these works of art."

IFAR executive director Sharon Flescher said BYU shouldn't lose hope.

"Statistics suggest that only about 10 percent of works that are reported stolen are recovered," she said. "Often, as in this case, it's many years later. Thirty years is indeed a long time, but 15 and 20 years is not very uncommon at all. It may take a whole generation before they change hands or where they change hands publicly so that someone who knows about the theft sees the work."

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