TAOS, NM — A New Mexico museum announced on Thursday that two paintings stolen four decades ago have finally been recovered and returned.
The paintings have a link to Arizona because they were inadvertently auctioned off through a Scottsdale art gallery after being found in a New Mexico estate sale. No one knew the paintings were stolen at the time.
ABC15 profiled the stolen and missing paintings in a story last year.
Watch the video in the player above for ABC15's previous coverage.
Officials at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos said FBI agents from the Santa Fe office delivered the two paintings back to the museum on May 12.
“This homecoming means so much,” said Juniper Leherissey, the museum’s executive director, in a statement.
Museum officials did not say where the FBI recovered the paintings.
The paintings are by famous Western artists, Joseph Henry Sharp and Victor Higgins. They are tied to one of the biggest stolen art mysteries in recent history, found in the same home as a stolen Willem de Kooning painting. Law enforcement didn’t realize at the time that the de Kooning was not the only piece of stolen art in the home.
The paintings went practically unnoticed among the belongings of a seemingly ordinary retired couple, Jerry and Rita Alter, who lived in rural Cliff, New Mexico.
After the Alters died, the de Kooning wound up in an antique store in 2017 in nearby Silver City, whose owners quickly realized it was stolen and returned it to the University of Arizona. The de Kooning is now valued at more than $100 million.
The two Western paintings, by contrast, were donated by the estate to a non-profit thrift store, also in Silver City. They weren’t recognized as stolen and were auctioned off in Scottsdale to benefit the non-profit.
Lou Schachter, a crime and travel writer for Medium, an online publication, was the first to connect the dots decades later that the two paintings auctioned in Scottsdale were the same ones stolen from the Harwood Museum in 1985.
Schachter detailed his findings in a story, prompting a nationwide hunt for the stolen treasures. The FBI agreed to take the case in April 2024.
“It is really quite gratifying to see these paintings returned full circle,” said FBI Special Agent Susan Garst in a statement.
The Harwood Museum paintings were taken in 1985, the same year the de Kooning went missing. They were yanked from the museum wall with such force that the bottom frame of one of the paintings – “Aspens” by Victor Higgins – broke off. Another painting, originally titled “Oklahoma Cheyenne,” by Joseph Henry Sharp, was also gone. The Sharp painting was valued at $35,000; the Higgins at $12,500.
One staffer told police he recalled seeing a man with a mustache and wearing a black raincoat leave the museum. The raincoat reference is eerily similar to witness descriptions of the de Kooning theft at the University of Arizona, which would happen six months later. In that theft, one of the thieves wore a trench coat.
Taos police found little evidence besides the broken frame. The Harwood, like other museums at the time, had no video cameras.
The paintings remained missing for decades.
Then, in 2017, the executor of Jerry and Rita Alter’s estate, their nephew Ron Roseman, cleared out their house to prepare it for sale after the death of his aunt. He dropped off the two Western paintings along with boxes of other household goods to a non-profit thrift store in nearby Silver City.
The two Western paintings weren’t recognized as stolen. So the non-profit arranged to sell them through the Scottsdale Art Auction. The Sharp painting sold for $52,650; the Higgins landscape went for $93,600.
The Scottsdale Art Auction told ABC15, but said in a statement last year:
“We do our due diligence to prevent the sale of stolen goods, which we have not experienced to date. At the time of taking these two works on consignment, we checked the FBI’s National Stolen Art File and neither painting was listed – nor are they listed today. We will cooperate completely with the FBI in this matter.”
Now that the paintings are back at the Harwood Museum, they will be unveiled to the public from 4 to 7 p.m. on Friday, June 6.
Email ABC15 Investigator Anne Ryman at anne.ryman@abc15.com, call her at 602-685-6345, or connect on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook
