Thieves Stole 3 Pollocks in 1973. One Is Still Missing

When Merry "Corky" White spotted the Jackson Pollock painting at the National Gallery of Art, she didn't just recognize the work—she recognized her childhood bedroom wall. As the Washington Post explains, the 1951 canvas, Number 7, 1951, once hung over White's bed in Cambridge, Mass. As it turns out, it was one of three Pollock paintings that thieves stole from the family residence in 1973. Two have been recovered over the years, including the one in the National Gallery, but the last one (Painting 1028) remains missing to this day. The story stitches together the narrative of all this, including how White's father, Harvard professor Reginald Isaacs, befriended Pollock (then largely unknown) and bought the three paintings.

The friendship meant summers at Pollock and Lee Krasner's Long Island home, where White remembers the painter as drunk, volatile, and frightening—a presence she couldn't tell her parents she feared because they were so proud to know him. The story by Sebastian Smee details all of this, including how the thefts eventually took a devastating toll on White's father. But it also doubles as an art-detective story, explaining how the first two Pollocks were found and how authorities came tantalizingly close to recovering the third in 2014. For White, it's more than symbolic. She "can't help but be acutely conscious that if the third work were recovered, she and her children—and possibly their children—might be financially secure for life." (Read the full story.)