Two events happened on March 18 — separated by sixteen years and 5,000 miles — that together tell us everything we need to know about the relationship between art, the body, and power.
In 1974, a nude sculpture was torn from its pedestal in Istanbul because the wrong people found it offensive. In 1990, thirteen artworks — including one of the most intimate paintings of the human figure ever made — were ripped from their frames in Boston because the wrong people found them valuable.
Different motives. Same result. The art vanished.
Istanbul, 1974: The Woman Who Lasted Nine Days
Turkey was approaching its 50th anniversary as a republic. To celebrate, the government commissioned several sculptors to create public works for Istanbul’s prominent squares. Among them was Gürdal Duyar, an established sculptor well known in his native city, who proposed a work called Güzel İstanbul — “Beautiful Istanbul.”
The sculpture personified the city as a nude woman, exposed and leaning back, head tilted upward. It was installed in Karaköy Square, one of the busiest intersections in the city.
It lasted nine days.
A conservative faction of the national coalition government objected to the nudity. According to the art historian Seyhun Topuz, the controversy nearly brought the coalition down. On the night of March 18, 1974, the sculpture was torn from its base and removed. The artist said little publicly about its fate. When journalist Nebil Özgentürk asked Duyar about the repeated removals of his work twenty years later, the sculptor’s silence spoke volumes.
Güzel İstanbul eventually ended up in Yıldız Park — hidden from the public square where it was meant to stand, tucked away in a garden where fewer people would see it. A nude body, representing a city, exiled from that city’s streets.
The story isn’t unique. Public nudity in sculpture has been contested for centuries — from the classical traditions of Greece and Rome to Michelangelo’s David (whose nudity scandalized some Florentines) to the ongoing Instagram wars over artistic nudes. But Güzel İstanbul carries a particular sting: a nation celebrating modernity and secularism couldn’t tolerate the oldest subject in art.
Boston, 1990: The Heist That Haunts the Art World
Sixteen years later and half a world away, the early hours of March 18, 1990, brought a different kind of disappearance.
Two men dressed as Boston police officers rang the buzzer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum around 1:20 in the morning. St. Patrick’s Day celebrations were winding down. The night watchman, a 23-year-old making barely above minimum wage, saw police uniforms on the closed-circuit television and let them in.
Within fifteen minutes, both guards were handcuffed and duct-taped in the basement. Over the next hour, the thieves moved through the museum’s Dutch Room and Short Gallery, slashing canvases from stretcher bars, smashing protective glass, and selecting their targets with puzzling inconsistency.
They took Vermeer’s The Concert — now considered the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world, one of only 34 known Vermeers. They took Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, his only seascape. They took sketches by Degas, a painting by Manet, a Govert Flinck landscape. Thirteen works in total, valued collectively at hundreds of millions of dollars.
They left behind a Botticelli, a Raphael, and a Titian.
And they were never caught.
The Empty Frames
Here’s what makes the Gardner theft more than just a crime story — and what connects it to Güzel İstanbul and everything NALA cares about.
Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will stipulated that her collection and its arrangement should never be altered. Nothing added. Nothing moved. So when the paintings were stolen, the museum didn’t take the frames down. They left them hanging — empty — on the walls where they’ve remained for 36 years.
Walk into the Dutch Room today and you’ll see gilt frames holding nothing. The absence is the statement. The empty rectangles are as powerful as any painting that once filled them. They say: something was here. Something was taken. We’re still waiting.
The FBI has pursued leads through the Boston mob, Dorchester street gangs, international fences, and undercover sting operations. The museum has offered a $10 million reward — the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution. Every lead has gone cold. Bobby Donati, the gangster some believe organized the heist, was murdered a year after the robbery. Others have denied knowledge even when offered reduced prison sentences.
Vermeer’s The Concert — a painting of three figures making music in a candlelit room, one of the most quietly human images in all of Western art — simply vanished from the world.
What Disappearance Teaches Us
The Güzel İstanbul sculpture was removed because someone with political power decided a nude body didn’t belong in public view. The Gardner paintings were removed because someone with criminal intent decided they were worth stealing. In both cases, the public lost access to art that belonged in their world.
This is what censorship and theft have in common: they both decide, unilaterally, that certain people don’t get to see certain things. The censor says you’re not ready. The thief says you’re not worthy. The algorithm says you violated community standards. The result is always the same: an empty frame where something human used to hang.
Vermeer painted The Concert around 1664. A woman plays a harpsichord. A man plays a lute. Another woman sings. There is nothing explicit about the painting — no nudity, no scandal. But it captures something about human intimacy, about bodies in a shared space making something beautiful together, that feels profoundly connected to what happens when artists gather to celebrate the figure.
Duyar’s Güzel İstanbul was explicit — a nude woman, unapologetically visible in a public square. But it, too, was about beauty, about a city’s identity expressed through the human form.
Both disappeared on March 18. Both left empty spaces behind. Both remind us that art’s greatest enemy isn’t indifference — it’s the conviction that certain images are too dangerous, too valuable, or too provocative to let people see them.
Thirty-Six Years Later
The Gardner Museum’s empty frames are now among the most photographed objects in the building. They’ve become art in their own right — monuments to absence, to the violence of taking, to the stubborn hope of return.
Güzel İstanbul still stands in Yıldız Park, where it was quietly relocated. It hasn’t been restored to Karaköy Square. The body it celebrates is still, in some sense, in exile.
And the pattern continues. Gauguin’s genitalia painted over by customs officials. Instagram’s algorithms flagging Renaissance paintings. Museums adding content warnings to figure studies that have hung peacefully for centuries.
Every time art disappears — whether by politics, crime, or code — we lose a piece of what makes us human. The body in art isn’t decoration. It’s a mirror. And when someone takes the mirror away, they’re not protecting you.
They’re deciding what you’re allowed to see of yourself.
NALA has been celebrating the nude in art for over six years. Get involved and join the conversation about artistic freedom, figure drawing, and the human form in contemporary art.