The Alter Ego: on Allison Otto’s The Thief Collector

Chelsea Rozansky

Dissatisfied with their unflattering portrayal, art patrons Fred and Marcia Weisman sold their double portrait American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) (1968) shortly after commissioning David Hockney to paint it for them. The work hung in their Los Angeles estate briefly, which at the time housed one of the largest private collections of contemporary art. After divorcing a decade later, critics point to Hockney’s stiff interpretation of the couple for its prescience and suspect that the Weismans wouldn’t have wanted to display such a bad omen. 

 In their double-portrait, the couple poses in the sculpture garden of their private estate, which later became the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, the house-gallery where Fred showcased his agreed upon half of the divorcés’ joint collection. Now, similar house-museums and open houses for private collections are so commonplace among blue-chip collectors, as critic Rhonda Liberman notes, that they are sometimes referred to as “ego-seums.” 

Next to the William Turnbull, Hockney depicts Fred in profile, his posture stilted. His gaze is directed not at his wife, but at the distance beyond her, beyond the painting’s frame. His shadow looms over the Turnbull sculpture at his feet. Marcia, front facing, dons a pink kaftan, her posture mimicking the Henry Moore displayed through the window of the ultra-modern pool-house behind her. The only object aesthetically out of place in this super-chic mise-en-scene is the totem pole in the background. It is unclear whether the totem pole belongs to the estate in Hockney’s rendering, but his insertion of this Indigineuous cultural object among the Weismans’ collection symbolizes the colonialism often present in collectorship (symbolically, in the impulse towards ownership, and literally, in the actual stolen objects populating private and public collections, and the stolen land upon which they are housed). Hockney paints the couple like the objects around them: depth of field, dimensionality, and texture collapsed onto one plane so the collectors evince the same quality as the stucco behind them, the pebbled concrete beneath them, and the statues between them. Upon first glance, they are almost indistinguishable from the artworks. 

This leveling of subjects and objects is often noted, but I think it goes further. Commodity fetishism reverses the hierarchy of subject and object; economic exchanges are elevated to social, and social exchanges cheapened to economic ones. Oozing from Fred’s clenched fist are two paint drips, as if he is part of the artwork, rather than the scene it depicts. Absorbed into material, he is less real and more artificial than the art. Consider that since Hockney painted them, Fred and Marcia have divorced, died, and decomposed. But the Moore remains intact, the Turnbull pristine. You can visit them in the gallery’s permanent collection.

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There is a shot about five minutes into Allison Otto’s documentary The Thief Collector that, whether intentional or not, recalls Hockney’s painting. A photograph’s reflection is viewed in front of an abandoned desert house. Strange sculptures (some artworks, some cultural objects) populate the property. The photograph projected onto this scene portrays a semi-translucent row of women in pink, like the Pepto-Bismol kaftan Marcia wears in her portrait. This optical illusion of a reflected image conjures the same haunted quality of a double-exposure, projecting onto the atmosphere its ghosts. 

Like that resplendently awkward 1968 canvas, Otto’s film is an unsparing double portrait of husband and wife caught up in their obsession with ownership. Otto’s Hockney homage portrays the New Mexico estate of Jerry and Rita Alter, who allegedly relieved Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre (1955) from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985. The painting was found by estate-resellers in 2017 and, after a long conservation process—the thieves made their own restorations to de Kooning’s masterpiece, evidence of ego and an elementary studio practice—is currently being shown for the first time since its heist (the painting’s exhibition at the Getty Center recently closed, and is now on display at the Arizona Museum as the centerpiece of a show dedicated to its return and restoration). 

 Rather than selling the painting, the Alters, portrayed as Bonnie and Clyde-esque art lovers on the run, hung it behind their bedroom door. It is unusual for art bandits not to attempt selling stolen work, but, as FBI agent Tim Carpenter, who covered the Woman-Ochre case, offers, there is the rare thief “who might fixate on a particular piece, and they just have to have it.” This compulsion to own, beyond theft—“If I see something I love, I must have it!” as Lieberman writes, quoting a collector at an open house—characterizes the ethos of art collectorship. As Lieberman oft opines, “art collecting is the most esteemed form of shopping in our culture today,” here implicating art theft as the most esteemed form of shoplifting. 

“If all this sounds disconnected from actually experiencing art, it is because all the excess wealth sucked into the global art markets has fatally blurred the lines between collecting and luxury retail,” notes Lieberman. But collectorship is disconnected from experiencing art because it is disconnected from experience itself. In experience, philosopher Immanuel Levinas writes, one “maintains a relationship with reality distinct from him…experience deserves its name only if it transports us beyond what constitutes our nature.” This is a beautiful definition of transcendence, which the spectator may undergo before an artwork. 

But the collector, entangled in a dynamic different from experience, misidentifies with the artist: gazing at a work and imagining her own reflection, the collector seeks to claim genius and beauty. Too late to create the artwork, the collector must own it. Ownership, the appropriation of exterior beings and things into the self, is how Levinas regards Western philosophy, self justifying in tandem with the history of colonialism: “the reduction of the other to the same leads to this formula: the conquest of being by man over the course of history. This reduction does not represent some abstract schema; it is man’s ego.”

As shadowy dopplegangers of above-table collectors like the Weismans, thieves, as The Thief Collector indicates, appear as doubles, or alter-egos of collectors. The Alters’ ego-seum housed a hoard of trophies. The couple traveled the world, sneaking into regions closed off to tourists and returning each time with stashes of souvenirs. (Audiences to the film can only guess about their claim to the provenance of such objects, true too for the history museum’s, and here we are reminded of the close association between egos and their shadows). The Alters kept their collection secret, and, in one of the film’s fascinating layers of misrepresentation, told neighbors that any real works were replicas. In addition to the cultural objects displayed tastelessly and carelessly throughout the house as Orientalizing fetish wares, were works of Americana by artists including Frederic Remington, J.H. Sharp, and R.C. Gorman (recognized as authentics by employees of the thrift store where the Alters’ relatives unassumingly unloaded their inheritance). Such a surreal hodgepodge of Indigineuous and settler Americana, and souvenirs from Africa, is revealing not only of the Alters’ bad taste, but also of their illiteracy of glaring symbolism. 

Jerry Alter, a failed artist, displayed 75 of his own paintings—which I’d describe as weird kitsch: imagine wannabe Werner Panton-like sloppy, psychedelic landscapes—throughout his home, dedicating floor-to-ceiling gallery walls to his obsessively repetitive op art series. Curatorially, such a prominent display of Jerry’s own work presents a stunning contrast to the masterpiece hanging in a corner behind the door. Jerry’s other failed artistic venture is his writing practice. His book of thinly veiled memoir, The Cup and the Lip—which includes a story describing a museum heist—reads both like a confessional and an ego-aggrandizing fantasy. Otto uses this short story collection to script her film’s reenactments. The FBI used it as evidence in their investigation, though Carpenter admits he had a hard time getting through it: “It’s a hard read, right?” Jerry’s prose style is smug, affected, and eye-rollingly hubristic, his word choice showy and ornate, his storytelling rhetoric a series of cornball cliches: “At home in Paris, Georges and Suzy lived a conservative life, comma ostensibly,” Another FBI agent reads aloud, raising an eyebrow. Jerry concludes his book with a grand pontification on humanity: “For such is the nature of man,” he writes, which Otto’s film quotes, again and again, as a powerful indicator of the author’s delusions of grandeur. In short, he’s a bad writer.  

The filmmakers enjoyed adapting, and making fun of, Jerry’s stories in goofy, hyper-saturated reenactments, over-acted by television actor Glenn Howerton. Howerton interprets Jerry as an Inspector Clouseau-style caricature, wiggling a fake mustache (which Jerry actually wore during the IRL heist), while brow-raising and side-eyeing the camera. One suspects that the author's interpretation of his protagonist lacks this humor. At first, The Thief Collector almost fools its audience into regarding the film as tired Wes Anderson pastiche—from the Saul Bass-style opening credits, to the literary narration of Jerry’s fiction over the hyper-stylish play of tropes that the movie begins with.

In its adaption and framing, the film offers more layers of mimesis, misidentification, and misrepresentation. 

While disregarded by the FBI, the film invites a local cop to investigate another story in The Cup and the Lip, which describes the murder of an undocumented pool-cleaner. The investigation is inconclusive, but such investigations are set up for inconclusions. Offering a pretty good definition of Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, the cop theorizes on the many unresolved missing persons cases involving undocumented immigrants. “If you don’t recognize their presence in the first place, how would you notice their departure?” Fame, according to Hannah Arendt, is one protection against statelessness, a migrant’s condition of invisibility to law, because fame provides definition. The cop referenced countless similar workers that have gone missing. Though only an object, the loss of Woman-Ochre was incredibly more notable than such human lives. It was on the list of the FBI’s top 10 art crimes. After its theft, the artwork appreciated in value exuberantly: from $400,000 to over $160 million. The contrast of Woman-Ochre’s value to the unsolved pool-cleaner case represents the horror of commodity fetishism at its tragic extreme. 

Otto’s film raises a number of theories as to why the Alters wanted Woman-Ochre in the first place. Perhaps Rita was a lover of de Kooning’s, perhaps Jerry ran in similar circles when he tried to make it as an artist in New York. Perhaps he is jealous of de Kooning’s success; perhaps he wants a sharehold of his genius. Whichever the case, both the movie and Jerry’s stories suggest that the couple is tormented by the artwork. Ownership may promise to offer the collector imagined-identification with artistic genius, but, stripped of their bragging rights, the Alters’ ownership is compromised. Unfortunately, ownership, as Hockney’s paint drip indicates, dissolves the collector onto the same plain as their objects. It is ironic that as a cultural artifact, The Thief Collector realizes the Alters’ delusions of grandeur. The catch, of course, is that in their legacy, they’ve lost their humanity. Jerry Alter, a failed artist and accomplished thief, is a character in a movie. He’s played by television actor Glen Howerton.

Another story in The Cup and the Lip, about two tribes battling to death, might provide the deepest insight into the Alters’ psychology. Rita Alter recounts witnessing these murders to her friend, who says that Rita told “this story of watching people being killed like they’ve gone to Disneyland.”The narcissism in storytelling, or Levinas’ “the soul conversing with itself”, divorced from concern for others, to Levinas, sums up “the whole Western civilization of property, exploitation, political tyranny and war.” As a pathology, collectorship is antisocial behavior. Compare the racism of the Alters’ representation of such lives as art or entertainment to the estimated importance of Woman-Ochre. In its absence, the painting appreciated in value by hundreds of millions of dollars. Unable to contribute any economic value, value is not ascribed at all to the missing migrant worker in Jerry’s story. But under capitalism, such is the nature of man.