Alice Knott
The video begins with an establishing shot of a famous painting, hanging alone on a wall of white. The camera is clearly handheld, a feature divulged by its framing’s subtle waver, rather informal given the context of the forthcoming recorded act. And though the footage bears no titles, no credits, many will immediately recognize its featured image as Woman III, a work of oil on canvas composed by Willem de Kooning, according to records, in 1953.
In the painting, a sprawl of subdued color—gray, gold, blue—forms an abstract female figure shown head-on: breasts like blunted pyramids, braced beneath shoulders so broad no ambulant human could hold them upright. Mangled, muddy hips bracket the focus of her crudely rendered crotch, outsized in turn by massive, jagged hands slung to her knees. Atop it all, the woman’s diminutive face, a landscape of moon dirt, leers slyly toward the viewer, as if aware of something inevitable none among us might wish to know.
The original version of the video, unlike the truncated one eventually most widely shared by news media, allows one full minute elapsed in silence, a last glimpse of the object without suggestion of its fate. In later edits, this buildup will be cut, plunging the viewer headlong into action without preamble, for there is little time to waste.
Likewise, not until after the video has been shared online more than seven million times—a reach accrued in less than three nights following its debut—will any major news source link the painting’s fate to a related story several weeks prior, wherein said work had been reported stolen from the primary residence of its last known owner, an aging heiress by the name of Alice Knott.
Regardless of preamble, in any version of the video, a pair of masked figures eventually appears, coming in on each side of the painting from offscreen. They are dressed identically, in stark white hooded work suits that obscure their hands and faces. Together they lift the painting of the wall, turn
