Tag: Art Theft

$150 Million worth of art in the trash?

Stolen to order?
Nature Mort au Chandelier, Fernand Léger, 1922

Last week it was reported that three individuals were arrested in connection with the theft of five works from the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris. The thefts took place in 2010 and there were reports that the museums alarms had been malfunctioning for months. Well the thieves may have had a very easy time stealing the art. There are reports that the five stolen works were destroyed, and that one of the works was stolen to order:

Detectives said that while they remained sceptical about his account, they could not “totally rule out” this catastrophic scenario. The destruction of such landmark masterpieces would be a major blow to international art heritage. The first to be arrested was a Serb known only as Vrejan T, 43, nicknamed “Spiderman” and who was detained days after last year’s heist over a separate art theft from a chic Paris apartment. Under questioning, the suspect reportedly recounted how he loosened screws in a window at the Art Deco Palais de Tokyo housing the museum, returned a few nights later to remove the frame and sliced through a padlock on an iron grille. He had initially gone there only to steal a Léger work to order, he said, but once inside, was “surprised” when the burglary alarm failed to sound. Being a “veritable art lover,” the Serb told police he then wandered around for another hour, eluding 30 closed circuit cameras to cherry pick four other masterpieces. “He found the Modigliani the most beautiful of all,” a judicial source told the JDD. Vrejan T reportedly told investigators he had stolen the Léger for Jean-Michel C, 56, an antiques dealer with a shop called Antiquités Bastille. He was arrested in May for selling other stolen art works.

As a wise Museum Security Director once said: ‘shit happens’. Lets hope this is the statement of a desperate defendant, and the paintings are still safe. This underscores the point that tracking down art thieves is a delicate proposition. They have a very big piece of collateral, in this case five important works of art. If you prosecute the thief too harshly, you run the risk of destroying what you were after. Of course the best way to prevent this destruction would have been better basic attention to security.

  1. Henry Samuel, £100m masterpieces stolen from French museum “crushed by rubbish truck,” The Telegraph, October 9, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8816634/100m-masterpieces-stolen-from-French-museum-crushed-by-rubbish-truck.html (last visited Oct 10, 2011). 
The other stolen works:
La Pastorale, Henri Matisse, 1906
L’Olivier pres de l’Estaque, Georges Braque, 1906
The Pigeon with Peas, Pablo Picasso, 1911-12
La femme a l’eventail, Amadeo Modigliani

   

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Three arrested in connection with thefts from Musee d’Art Moderne

In May 2010 five works were stolen from the Musee d’Art Moderne near the Eiffel tower. Now three individuals are being detained in connection with the thefts, though the works are still missing. From AFP:

The Pigeon with Peas, Pablo Picasso, 1911-12

The three, a woman suspected of taking part in the theft and two people suspected of handling stolen goods, were arrested and charged over the robbery of the five paintings, by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, and placed in custody on September 16, the official said. A lone burglar sheared off a gate padlock and broke a window to get into the city-run Musee d’Art Moderne in the brazen operation during the night of May 19 last year. The paintings were found to be missing just as the museum, a major tourist attraction near the Eiffel Tower, was about to open. Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe later said one of the museum’s alarms had been “partly malfunctioning” since the end of March, and that it was still awaiting repair when the thieves struck.

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Footnotes

File:Apamea 02.jpg
The Cardo Maximus in Apamea in Syria

On a two-week trip to Paris, Mr. Lacoursière found himself loitering in the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre, which were in so many ways the exact opposite of his beat at home where he toured the dirtiest corners of the human psyche. He returned to Montreal, vowing to find a way to incorporate his long-time love of art with his police work. So he enrolled in an art history night course at a local university.

She has a fellowship in the department of art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is head of the department of antiquities in the breakaway territory of Somaliland, in the north-west region of Somalia. She is the only archaeologist working in the region.

It’s a remarkable journey for a girl who fled Mogadishu in 1991, aged 14, as Somalia descended into the chaos of civil war. Driving her forward is the urge to uncover and preserve a cultural heritage that has been systematically looted, both in colonial times and more recently by warlords trading national heritage for guns.

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An Art Theft Anniversary

100 years ago Vincenzo Peruggia stole this painting:

The Mona Lisa

And 50 years ago Kempton Bunton stole this painting:

Goya’s The Duke of Wellington

Noah Charney discusses both in an Op-Ed for the LA Times:

These two famous art thefts, the date of the latter chosen by the colorful Bunton for the theatricality of falling on the anniversary of the former, helped to mold the public perception of art theft as a crime of oddball characters who did not really harm anyone. It is true that some of the many famous art thefts of the period preceding World War II were of this ilk, involving quirky nonviolent thieves with gentlemanly aspirations.

To read more about the Mona Lisa thefts, you can read Noah Charney’s long essay, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting, available from Amazon. All of the proceeds support ARCA. You can also read my short forward to the book, where I argue that perhaps we’d all be better off had the work stayed stolen.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Hotels Not the Best Place for Art?

As a wise Museum Security Director once said, ‘It’s a hotel, why should we expect them to safeguard their art?’ On Saturday this Rembrandt sketch was stolen from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey, but has since been recovered near a church in Encino. the small drawing was removed from the exhibit Saturday night when the curator was distracted and the drawing was quickly stolen. This almost seems like a case where the work was poorly secured, and anyone could have walked up and stolen it. But there have bee other more elaborate thefts of Rembrandt’s works. For more on why Rembrandt is such a popular artist to steal, have a look at Anthony Amore and Tom Mashberg’s new Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists.

  1. Rembrandt painting stolen from Marina del Rey art exhibit, officials say – latimes.com, (2011), http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/08/rembrandt-stolen-from-marina-del-rey-art-exhibit-.html (last visited Aug 16, 2011).
  2. Stolen Rembrandt recovered at church – latimes.com, (2011), http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/08/rembrandt-stolen-church.html (last visited Aug 16, 2011).
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"Do you have to look like a pretentious a-hole?"

So asks Stephen Colbert, interviewing former FBI agent Bob Wittman last night asking about what you have to wear when going undercover:

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Is an Electrician the greatest Picasso Thief?

Pierre Le Guennec and his wife

It would be hard to top 271. Police in France have charged a man and his wife with selling 271 stolen Picassos. He claims Picasso gave them as a gift:

Pierre Le Guennec, 71, was caught and sued along with his wife when he contacted the late Spanish painter’s estate seeking to authenticate the works, which he had kept in his garage for nearly 40 years, Le Monde newspaper said.
The local public prosecutors’s office declined to confirm the report to AFP and Le Guennec and his lawyer could not be reached for comment.
The report said Le Guennec claimed Picasso and his wife and muse Jacqueline had personally given him the works when he was working at their farmhouse in Mougins, not far from his own home in Mouans-Sartoux, southeastern France.
Investigators found however that some of the works — which include collages, sketches and prints — disappeared from another location, Le Monde said. They seized the works and charged the couple with handling stolen goods.

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Art Theft at the Forbidden City

Seven works of 20th century decorative art have been stolen from the Palace Museum inside the Forbidden City in Beijing. The items were stolen when the thief may have knocked a hole in the wall. The pieces were works made of gold and encrusted with jewels. A spokesperson said that a suspect was seen fleeing the seen but guards did not intervene:

This will be an embarrassment for those who run the Palace Museum. 
One official has already said that there was a lapse in security. 
“Certainly we can only blame the fact that our work was not thorough enough if something like this can happen,” said official Feng Nai’en at a news conference. 
An investigation has begun to see where improvements can be made and the museum is checking to see if any other objects have been taken. 
Perhaps more embarrassing though is the fact that these items were on loan from Liangyicang, a private collection in Hong Kong. 
The Beijing News reported that the Hong Kong museum had not insured the items for as much as it could have because it believed they would be safe in Beijing. 
The Palace Museum is based within the Forbidden City, home to the country’s emperors during the Ming and Qing dynasties. 
The complex is made up of courtyards, palaces and gardens. It became a museum in 1921 after the fall of the last emperor Puyi a decade earlier.
  1. Michael Bristow, Rare theft from Forbidden City, BBC, May 11, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13356725 (last visited May 12, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

"He really loves art. . . "

This is what an art thief looks like.

“. . . but also the money that he can get from it”.

So says an unnamed source describing the notorious Stéphane Breitwieser who stole 240 works of art, went to prison, wrote a memoir and has been arrested again in his home:

At Breitwieser’s home, police discovered about 40 paintings, three sculptures, and a tapestry, French newspaper Le Parisien reports. At Breitwieser’s mother’s place, cops also found a landscape by a Brueghel pupil that had been stolen from a Brussels museum. Several valuable objects, including chandeliers and pocket watches, were also discovered in the pond next to Breitwieser’s mother’s house. In the past, she destroyed several paintings in order to protect her son, and also hid his stolen artworks along a highway, in a canal, and even in a neighbor’s chicken coop.

  1. Police Nab Europe’s Most Notorious Art Thief — And His Mom, Too, ARTINFO France, April 25, 2011, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37537/police-nab-europes-most-notorious-art-thief-and-his-mom-too/ (last visited Apr 25, 2011).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Stolen Degas Work Revealed as Stolen Before Auction

“Blanchisseuses souffrant des dents” by Edgar Degas, stolen in 1973

This work was recognized by a an individual from Le Havre France as a painting which had been stolen in 1973. The individual recognized the long-missing painting in Sotheby’s auction catalogue.  It was slated for sale today before the auction house withdrew it. The French Culture Ministry says that it will negotiate the return of the work, and that the seller “seems to be of good faith”. The case speaks to the difficulty with multiple stolen art databases. The painting is apparently on a museum data list in France, but it is unclear from the initial reports whether the work was reported to the Art Loss Register, the leading stolen art database.

  1. Stolen Degas painting resurfaces at Sotheby’s auction, AFP, November 3, 2010, http://ph.news.yahoo.com/afp/20101103/ten-france-us-art-painting-auction-degas-1dc2b55.html (last visited Nov 3, 2010).
  2. Stolen Degas painting discovered at New York auction, RFI, November 3, 2010, http://www.english.rfi.fr/americas/20101103-stolen-degas-painting-discovered-new-york-auction (last visited Nov 3, 2010).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com