FBI recovers two Taos treasures missing for 40 years
By Geoffrey Plant
Forty years ago, art thieves targeted the Harwood Foundation, an unassuming public library on LeDoux Street with a small exhibition gallery upstairs. A woman distracted the librarian while a mustachioed man removed Victor Higgins’ “Aspens” and Joseph Henry Sharp’s “Indian Boy in Full Dress” and left with them under a long coat.
Thanksgiving that same year, a man and woman used a similar M.O. to lift Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.
The bizarre 2017 tale surrounding the return of de Kooning’s masterpiece led investigators to the missing works by two members of the Taos Society of Artists.
All three paintings were secreted away for decades in the remote community of Cliff, New Mexico, where they hung inside an innocuous-seeming married couple’s home until 2017. Jerry Alter died in 2012. Rita Alter passed away in 2017. That summer, their nephew cleared out their home.
He engaged a Silver City estate sale company to collect the bulk of the home’s contents, donating other items to a tiny Silver City thrift shop. Removed from the back of the Alter’s bedroom door, the de Kooning went to the estate company’s resale shop, where customers soon identified it as “Woman-Ochre.” News spread like wildfire across the art world that the stolen 1955 work of abstract expressionism, now valued at $160 million, had been found.
After some twists and turns, and a lengthy restoration process, it was returned to the University of Arizona last year.
Initial speculation that the Alters stole from the art museums strictly to keep the works for themselves morphed into theories by amateur investigators that the couple were professional art thieves. They traveled internationally and domestically several times each year, living beyond their means.
A photo shown in the 2022 documentary film “The Thief Collector” shows both Taos Society of Artists paintings on a cozy-looking wall beneath which Jerry Alter is seated playing a clarinet while reading sheet music.
The Higgins and Sharp paintings were among the items donated to the humble Town and Country Garden Club Thrift Store. The nonprofit behind the store ultimately sold the works through the Scottsdale Art Auction in 2018 for $93,600 and $52,650, respectfully. The shop closed in 2021.
In 2024, true crime writer Lou Schachter did some sleuthing to uncover the stolen Taos paintings, writing in a series of articles published by Medium, “In the movie, a garden club volunteer describes the auctioned works and mentions their artists: Joseph Henry Sharp, Victor Higgins, and R.C. Gorman.”
Schachter found a 1985 Taos News story on the Harwood thefts, traced the paintings to the Scottsdale auction and notified the Harwood. In April 2024, the Harwood asked the FBI to track down the paintings, which were found by December.
Juniper Leherissey, executive director at the Harwood Museum of Art, said, “We’re hopeful they will be returned between now and September. We anticipate getting them back.”
Two empty frames representing the stolen works are on display with “Return of Taos Treasures,” an exhibition featuring Joseph Henry Sharp and Victor Higgins’ works from the Harwood’s collection on display until Sept. 7.
The Harwood Museum of Art’s permanent collection includes over 6,500 works of art, including pieces by Sharp, Higgins and the Taos Society of Artists, established July 19, 1915 by Sharp and five other artists and later joined by Higgins, who was also on the founding board of the Harwood Foundation.