The FBI solved the case in 2013.
The Bureau said it believed it knew the thieves. No works returned and no public conviction closed the file. Unsolved remains the honest status.
The object list is closed. The custody chain after 18 March 1990 is not.
English folklore prefers a genius thief to a local crime-group story the FBI floated in 2013.
Still open
- Where the thirteen works are — No public, verified location exists. They may be stored, destroyed, or held as unusable collateral. The museum still asks for a return.
- A courtroom identification — The 2013 FBI claim has not become a public trial of living handlers with the art on a table.
- Condition of paper and paint — Degas sheets and old-master oils age badly in hidden storage. Good-condition clauses in the reward assume a care that is unproven.
- How many hands after 1990 — Informant stories describe later offers. None has been confirmed by a recovered object.
- Whether all thirteen travel together — The finial, the gu and the paintings need not share one hiding place. Split lots would change how a recovery might look.
Myth vs record
A single mastermind outwitted the art world for sport.
The official 2013 line pointed to organised-crime figures, not a lone aesthete. Sport-thief stories are film grammar.
The pictures were insured and the museum was made whole.
Money cannot replace the Concert or restore Gardner's hang. The frames are not a settled claim.
The empty frames are a tourist gimmick.
They follow a will that forbids rearranging the collection and a recovery strategy that keeps the loss visible.
Local notes
Boston as hometown file
English in New England still reads the theft as a Globe story: Fenway, St Patrick's weekend and a museum that belongs to the city's self-image.
National art-crime beat
New York and Washington English treat Gardner as the FBI's unfinished masterpiece case, filed beside recovered wartime art rather than beside local break-ins.
Visitor English
Guidebooks in English now describe the Dutch Room as a place to see absence. That sentence did not exist in 1989.
The Gardner theft remains an unsolved public-record loss: thirteen named works, empty frames and a reward that has not been earned.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.