SOPHIE CALLE

On March 18, 1990, six paintings by Rembrandt, Manet, Flinck and Vermeer, five drawings by Degas, a vase and a Napoleonic eagle were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The frames of Vermeer’s, Flinck’s and Rembrandt’s paintings had been abandoned on the spot. In 1994, after restoration, they were hung again in their rightful place, thus delimiting the absence. I asked the curators, guards and other museum staff, as well as visitors, to tell me what they saw inside these frames.