Tag: Art Theft

Coming soon after the theft of the Warhol works in Brentwood, and the armed robbery in Belgium, there has been another major theft in California. In Pebble Beach 13 works by Rembrandt (pictured here), Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and others were stolen.  These new works may  be worth as much as $27 million.  The works were stolen from Angelo Benjamin Amadio; who has since offered a $1-million reward for the return of the objects.

Why all these thefts?  Is it a product of the economic downturn?  Or are thieves hoping to gain some of these lucrative rewards?

Big art theft reported in Pebble Beach [Monterey County Herald, Sep. 28, 2009]

Earlier today armed robbers stole this work, Olympia by Rene Magritte from an appointment-only museum just outside of Brussels today.  The men rang the bell, asked if visiting hours had started, and then put a gun to the attendant and rounded up the visitors, and stole the work.

No word yet on if they were wearing bowler hats.  Magritte painted the work with the man in the hat and an apple in front of his face, the Son of Man — an image which was prominently used in the Thomas Crown Affair.  It seems unlikely thieves would risk punishment to re-enact a film, so why was the painting taken?  There are a few oft-cited possibilities:

The first, is that a collector admires the piece, and hired a thief to take it for him. We can call this the Dr. No situation. This seems the least likely possibility, but the one that strikes a chord with the imagination. Writers in this subject frequently cite the Dr. No as being responsible for thefts, and I admit it makes for good Bond villains, but there has been no convincing evidence that thsi is why people are stealing rare objects. Another similar possibility which seems far more likely is that an unscrupulous dealer may have a similar piece for sale, and if he can establish some excitement around these kinds of pieces, the price for his similar work may go up. 

Second, the thief may not have known that the object was so rare as to make its subsequent sale difficult.

Third, the thief may simply be trying to kidnap the object. They could then insure its safe return for a generous reward, or negotiate its return.

Finally, perhaps the market is doing such a poor job of regulating what is and is not legitimate, that it may not be all that difficult to sell this piece after all. This strikes me as the most troubling possibility, but also not very likely.

A series of prominent Andy Warhol portraits of 1970’s-era athletes has been stolen from the home of Robert Weisman in Los Angeles earlier this month. It seems the thieves knew what they were looking for, as the home wasn’t ransacked. A reward of $1m has been offered for information leading to the return of the paintings. As has been noted many times, the theft of these works was probably the easy part, the difficulty will be trying to sell these well-known works.

Why were these works stolen?

Mark Durney wonders why these works were taken:

Were thieves simply enticed by the popularity of Warhol’s athletic icons? Maybe they sought to steal Weisman’s most emotionally important pieces of personal property. Could there be a market of potential buyers who feel dejected by the “absurdly” high asking price for the series in 2007?

There are four other possibilities:

The first, is that a collector admires the piece, and hired a thief to take it for him. We can call this the Dr. No situation. This seems the least likely possibility, but the one that strikes a chord with the imagination. Writers in this subject frequently cite the Dr. No as being responsible for thefts, and I admit it makes for good Bond villains, but there has been no convincing evidence that thsi is why people are stealing rare objects. Another similar possibility which seems far more likely is that an unscrupulous dealer may have a similar piece for sale, and if he can establish some excitement around these kinds of pieces, the price for his clock may go up. This is just wild speculation, and assigns a quite sinister tak to arts and antiquities dealers, a habit far too many writers in this field are fond of doing.

Second, the thief may not have known that the object was so rare as to make its subsequent sale difficult.

Third, the thief may simply be trying to kidnap the object. They could then insure its safe return for a generous reward, or negotiate its return.

Finally, perhaps the market is doing such a poor job of regulating what is and is not legitimate, that it may not be all that difficult to sell this piece after all. This strikes me as the most troubling possibility, but also not very likely.

The New York Police Department has released images of the works stolen from the Nicholas Roerich Museum back in June.  As I posted yesterday, the works were taken from the museum, but were not immediately discovered.  The small museum has limited hours and a small staff.  Such a small museum is a good target for art thieves as it may not have sophisticated security systems, and limited visitors who may notice a theft.   

Libby Nelson for the New York Times’ City Room blog notes:

The museum, at 318 West 107th Street, is open from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Sundays. The paintings were stolen during visiting hours on June 24 and June 28, the police said.

“A lot of people come here, and during the open hours, somebody stole one painting,” [Daniel Entin, the museum director, said]. “And then, maybe a day, later stole another.”

He said he believed that the same person, a woman, was responsible for both thefts. 

“If someone steals your car you can go get another one”. So says Daniel Entin The Executive Director of the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York. The New York Post reports on the discovery of the theft of two works from the Nicholas Roerich Museum. A police officer noticed the initial theft in June:

A cop who happened to be visiting the museum was the first to notice a work was missing from the Nicholas Roerich Museum on West 107th Street near Riverside Drive.

It was 30 minutes before closing time on June 24 when he saw a blank spot on a wall where a picture was supposed to be.

“A police officer was just visiting, and he noticed there was a label and no painting,” said a museum employee.

Gone was a $20,000 piece called “The Himalayas,” a 10-by-14 inch pencil-on-paper drawing that Roerich, a Russian artist, sketched to mark his days in the 1930s when he was living in the foothills of the Asian mountains.

But then four days later an employee noticed “a work was missing from a wall in the same hallway, a 12-by-16 inch oil-on-canvas painting called “Talung Monastery,” valued at $70,000.” The difficulty the museum had in discovering the theft of the works probably speaks to how the thefts took place. The museum has only four staff, and receives about 25 visitors daily.