10/14/2026
The morning after Thanksgiving, 1985. A man and a woman walked into the University of Arizona Museum of Art as it opened. She distracted the guard. He went upstairs, cut a de Kooning out of its frame, and rolled it up. They were gone in minutes.
Woman-Ochre stayed missing for thirty-two years. In 2015 the museum marked the anniversary by displaying the empty frame it had been torn from. No leads, no arrests, just an absence.
Then in 2017, an antique shop in Silver City, New Mexico, forty miles away. The owners found it in an estate sale, recognized what they were holding, and called the museum. Then the FBI.
The canvas carried real damage. Cut, rolled, and crudely reframed by the thieves themselves. Getty conservators spent three years bringing it back.
In fall 2022 it traveled from Los Angeles to Tucson with a federal es**rt, handled the way an irreplaceable work should be.
Some pieces survive the theft. What they can't survive is careless handling.
THE MOVING ART ππΌοΈ
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