Two armed thieves entered the Musée Magritte in Brussels at 10am this morning and made off with surrealist René Magritte's Olympia, valued at £3 million. One of the thieves rang the bell and asked to be let in. When he entered he pulled a gun and ordered the woman who answered the door to let his accomplice in.
A policeman said: “There were three museum workers inside at the time and two Japanese tourists. All five of them were ordered out the back and told to keep quiet by the man with the gun.
“In the museum the other person stole the painting and they both made good their escape. They seemed to know which painting they wanted to steal - they took the whole painting off the wall, including the frame.”
What usually happens to stolen paintings? Do the thieves hold them for ransom, do they sell them to private collectors who have secret museums in the homes, or what?
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My guess is that they end up in very private collections.
man I wanna steal a painting
I think there was a NY Magazine article where they surmised that many stolen paintings end up in the hands of russian and middle eastern petrochemical billionaires.
How is it possible to steal a painting in Brussels when Belgium doesn't exist??
Art would be a stupid thing to steal unless you wanted it for yourself or already had a buyer lined up. Thus these probably aren't independent thieves, but goons hired for the specific job for the intended owner, who would need the right combination of wealth, unscrupulousness, arrogance, and at least a pretense of refined taste. Petrobillionaire sounds about right.
It'll probably be paid for with TARP proceeds.
Baberman: that was the first thing that occurred to me too. I see no reason they couldn't take the painting to somewhere like the UAE or Iran and sell it to someone who would just display it openly.
If belgian police or interpol or whoever say: "That's stolen."
Well, the owner would just say: "So?"
When a specific painting is stolen, it is on order from a wealthy client. Some rich person saw it, liked it and contacted their shady friends. He/she will show it to their friends to impress them, sure in the knowledge that none of his friends will know it is stolen. - Seriously, if you saw the Rembrandt painting stolen from the Gardner museum, would you recognize it at a glance?
Looks like she's got crabs. Hermit crabs.
Art heists have got to be some of the most interesting crimes. Mostly because there seems to be so much thought and research that goes into deciding what to steal. Then there's the seedy underworld of stolen art.
The biggest heist in American history was at a museum in Boston. They were dressed as cops and made their way through the place cutting the canvasses out of their frames. http://bit.ly/2fykS3
Art is the third most illicitly trafficked product after drugs and weapons. Looted art is usually leveraged for money (sometimes for one of the first two).
The secret private collection is not common, but not unheard of.
Further Reading;
Museum of the Missing, by Houpt http://tinyurl.com/ycezc6y
The Rescue Artist, by Dalnick http://tinyurl.com/ye59pwa
Sorry, Dolnick* is the last author.
...I'm a museum nerd 8-|
Not mentioned in the report were a few incidental items stolen. Police are still baffled what use hand cream and tissues could be to art thieves.
Stolen items of art are sometimes used as collateral in drug deals.
@EBARRETT3
third most illicit?
third most trafficked?
in either case, by what measure?
weight? value?
somehow, i doubt either is true
Thank you E Barrett 3! More for my reading list.
A Vanity Fair article a while back suggested that stolen famous paintings often aren't sold at all--it's too difficult to smuggle them across international borders.
Instead, copies are made in advance and cached in strategic locations around the world; since the theft hasn't yet occurred, there's little risk of this attracting attention. After the well-publicized heist, the multiples can each be sold as genuine.
The thieves then arrange for the hot-potato original to be recovered--and the buyers of the forgeries, of course, can't go to the police.
Here in the Belgium news the value stated is 750 000 euro.. seams that prices go up quite a bit during the last few hours :)
greetings from brussels
On loan from the collection of Thomas Crown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr2vA88rHj0
Most stolen art ends up with private collectors.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/04/20/MN59520.DTL
If they go after one particular painting right away, they've probably been hired by someone who in turn was commissioned to obtain that particular painting. And that likely means some one particular person wanted it.
I'd like to point out that a lot of stolen art ends up in far less glamorous situations than on an oligarch's basement wall - a fair amount of art is stolen before a buyer is found, and when the thieves realize that no one in their right mind is willing to take the piece off their hands, it ends up mouldering in a storage facility. Worst of all, many pieces get hacked up by desperate thieves into smaller pieces that are easier to sell. And then there are the large metal sculptures that, in the current market, are more valuable to thieves simply as scrap... In reality, art theft isn't nearly as sexy as a couple of the more famous cases would imply, and most art thieves are bumbling idiots.
The painting was stolen from the artist's home in Jette (outskirt of Brussels) and not from the brand new national Magritte Museum, in the cty centre.
The Magritte Museum opened to the public on 30 May, 2009 in Brussels.
Well, that didn't last long.
@OOERICTOO
http://www.artcrime.info/facts.htm
Damn it, got it all the way home and reallized I don't have any place to hang it. Anybody want a bunch of Vermeers?
@POLOSSATIK
Either that or the value of the dollar has dropped during the last few hours.
@LB
Actually, only in that particular case. Looting in Iraq's National Museum was the result of a military activity and common looters. It is much like the French and British pillaging Italy, Greece, Egypt etc. in the 19th and early 20th century. Sadly, this is not the first or last time something like this will happen.
As with the case in Belgium this was most likely an organized crime. Like Munch's Scream(s) - different versions looted in 1994 and 2004 - we might not hear from the looter for years and then suddenly find the frame leaning against a wall in an alley. If we're lucky they will keep the painting in pristine condition to keep the value up. If we're unlucky...who knows.
#8 His wife would have been about 50 years old at the time, as he was. And they'd have been married for 26 years. Why do you ask?
Ceci n'est pas une dame.
I had 2 of my pictures stolen off the wall of a big & busy restaurant one week after a major show of my work had opened. I got the call on a Saturday morning; somewhere between the time they closed at 3am and opened again at 10, the pictures were gone. These were not small pictures (both were 26x40) and would not have been easy to get at or out the door without being seen. It Must have been an inside job...
...the night of the opening there was a dinner party opposite the drawings. I was making my way around the crowd, and one of the people at the table asked me about one of the pictures, specifically a portrait of my girlfriend. He said he had to have it. I told him it wasn't for sale. He said to name my price and I told him I couldn't and it didn't belong to me. I have no doubts that that man was responsible for the disappearance of the drawings. And if he wanted them that badly, I can appreciate his backhanded compliment.
Stolen art ends up in the hands of the most passionate private collectors. Otherwise, there's not much point to stealing it. And as much as it sucks, there's a sense of pride to be had by having your work stolen; I made something so beautiful and they wanted it so badly that it drove them to break the law to possess it. I must be doing something right.
Further further reading:
The Irish Game by Matthew Hart - really fascinating reading
In what language did the thieves order the workers and guests about? Headline should read: "Polyglot pilferers plunder priceless paintings."
Has anyone checked that Russian guy's yacht?
@EBARRETT3
In what particular case? The article I posted was about the National Museum. I assume you mean those particular pieces of art?
A lot of the stuff stolen was actually recovered later on, mostly because it was stolen by people who didn't know what to do with it (common looters).
I remember reading another article with a quote from a dealer mentioning how after the museum was looted, he got calls from several collectors asking if he had any of the stuff/could get some of the stuff. He was horrified.
ceci n'est pas un vol.
OK, so this painting is called Olympia and the recent theft of Warhol's Athletes paintings - http://arttheftcentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/warhol-athletes-series-theft.html - would suggest to me a sport connection. Maybe they were to stolen to order by the same person?
Are there any other paintings/artworks with this theme that they should be getting extra protection on do you think?
There was a massive art scandal here in the Netherlands this spring. Rob Noortman, a respected art dealer based in Maastricht, died in 2007. He had founded TEFAF (the European Fine Art Fair), which is held every March in Maastricht. The city honored him in 2006 and he was in line for posthumous royal favor.
This year, nine paintings that had been stolen from his collection in 1987 resurfaced. They'd been insured by Lloyds and were assumed to have been destroyed. A private detective named Ben Zuidema had other ideas, and working with the police, recovered eight of them. According to the detective, one of the thieves had contacted him and said that Noortman had hired them and ordered them to burn the works. Happily they didn't.
The story broke during this year's TEFAF.
Among the recovered works were one by Pissaro, a Renoir and "Some Monkeys" by Jan Brueghel (The Younger). I Googled that one; it's a reference to the Tulipmania of 1637.
I was impressed by today's Independent newspaper, which carried a large photo of this painting on the front page, in glorious colour.
Americans are always astounded that The Sun carries naked breasts on page 3. I'm glad the indie goes one (two?) better. I wonder if any US papers carried this image, and if so, on what page?
(Today's Indie also had a fun vitriol-filled mini biography of the Queen Mum by Johann Hari, which I recommend wholeheartedly. More of a hag-ography than a hagiography).