Hi there, this is Martine Powers.
It's Saturday, January 10th, and this is Post Reports Weekend.
Today, you're going to be hearing a story written,
reported, and read by my colleague post-art critic Sebastian Smee.
I don't want to preempt him at all because it's a really beautiful story,
so I'm just going to let Sebastian take it away from here.
Hi, I'm Sebastian Smee.
What you're going to hear in a moment is a story I wrote about the theft of three works by Jackson Pollock from the home of a Harvard professor in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
I'll be narrating the story.
It's broken into chapters and there'll be some light music to immerse you in the piece.
The story is really in three parts.
It's about the special friendship between Jackson Pollock and the owner of the works,
Reginald Isaacs, whose daughter, Mary White,
has unpleasant memories of visiting Pollock's home on Long Island in the years leading up to his death in a car crash.
It's also about the theft itself, and it's about the recovery of two of the works.
It also recounts new information about the mystery of the third works whereabouts.
I guess I wanted to tell the story, not because I'm especially fascinated by art thefts,
although I know a lot of people are,
but because I discovered that this particular art theft opened out onto some incredibly complex emotional wounds.