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by Edward Dolnic
International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, August 25, 2004
The unloving truth about those who steal beauty
In a line-up
of the world's great art museums, the Museum of the Missing would rank near the
top. This imaginary museum, whose collection would consist entirely of stolen
paintings and drawings, would sprawl as endlessly as the Louvre. Its treasures
would include 551 Picas-sos, 43 Van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts and 209 Ren-oirs.
Vermeer would be there, and Caravaggio and Van Eyck and Cezanne.
On Sunday,
the museum made two new acquisitions, Edvard Munch's "Madonna" and "The
Scream," which were taken from the Munch Museum in Oslo.
It wasn't
the first time a famous Munch has gone missing. In 1994, on the opening day of
the winter Olympics in Norway, another version of "The Scream" was stolen from
Norway's National Gallery. This time around, thieves stole a different but
equally valuable rendition of "The Scream" - Munch returned time and again to
the themes that haunted him - and made off with a painting whose open-market
value experts put in the neighborhood of $100 million.
Who would
steal an instantly recognizable painting? Whenever thieves take a masterpiece
too famous to sell openly - when they stole the "Mona Lisa" in 1911, or
Vermeer's "The Concert" in 1990, or Leonardo da Vinci's "Madonna of the
Yarnwinder" in 2003 - bewildered policemen hint darkly that some criminal
mastermind has ordered the theft for his own delectation. Somewhere Dr. No or
Thomas Crown lights a cigar and settles back to gaze at the painting forever
hidden from all eyes but his own.
Not so.
Wherever "The Scream" is now, it is almost certainly not in a billionaire's
study.
Except in
movies, thieves are seldom connoisseurs. In the eyes of a typical art thief,
the most dazzling of paintings is simply a multimillion dollar bill hanging on a
poorly guarded wall.
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Whose who
steal art are surprisingly casual about the details of how they might turn their
newly acquired paintings into money. In my interviews with art thieves, they
talked lightly about "Arab sheiks" or "South American drug lords" sure to want a
bargain-price Van Gogh.
Thieves
know, too, that a painting doesn't have
to surface
to be valuable; it can be used as black-market currency in the underworld. In
1990, Gabriel Metsu's "Woman Reading a Letter," which had been stolen in Dublin
in 1986, turned up in Istanbul, in the hands of a thief trying to barter it for
a shipment of heroin.
Ransom is
another possibility. "Art-napping," after all, offers the advantages of
kidnapping with-
out all the
fuss. No one needs to feed a stolen painting or keep it quiet. And if the
police begin closing in, a painting can always be flung into a dumpster.
The game is
easy, and thieves are opportunists. Museums will always be vulnerable because
they exist to display their treasures to as many people as possible. Banks can
hide their money in underground vaults and protect it with armed guards, and no
one will complain. Compared to even modest banks, many of the world's best
museums — especially those in Europe — are as open as street fairs.
Nor are the
police much interested in stolen paintings. For them, art smacks of culture and
is therefore suspect. The public, too, prefers that the police focus on "real"
crime rather than on purloined art. Unsolved assaults are scandals; missing
paintings are mysteries.
With
temptation all around, and punishment unlikely, thieves will inevitably strike —
and strike again. Few cases will have happy endings. Ninety percent of stolen
art is gone forever. Tide one bright spot is that the greatest paintings, which
are the hardest to sell, are the most likely to end up back where they belong.
For
criminals are foolish, as the 1994 "Scream" theft demonstrated. After a bumbling
attempt to j sell the painting back to the National Gallery, the 1 thieves were
ensnared by a Scotland Yard detective, posing as "The Man from the Getty," who
was J willing to pay anything to buy back the painting and share it with the
world.
Let us pray
that thieves have grown no smarter in a decade.
Edward
Dolnick is the author of the forthcoming "The Rescue Artist: A True Story
of Art, Thieves and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece," about the 1994
theft of Edvard Munch's "The Scream."
