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Subjects | Fact sheet | Samples
Arts, media, and entertainment: Sample feature essay
Made-To-Order Theft – The Art World's Worst Nightmare
by Anna Farkas
Introduction
The daring 'made-to-order' art theft that has plagued the art world over the years, often the work of a professional thief hired to steal a particular work, has become a billion-dollar industry linked to drugs cartels and illicit arms dealing. Stolen artworks are easy to transport around the world and have become a very valuable commodity in the hands of criminal organizations where, as
well as being a means of laundering money, they can be traded as collateral in making deals with one another.
The master criminal
The theft of a $4.8 million Cézanne from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, on New Year's Day 2000 was believed to be another incident in this underworld trade in stolen art, now estimated to be worth more than £3 billion a year. The oil on canvas, Auvers-sur-Oise, was painted between 1879 and 1882 and marked an important transition between Paul Cézanne's early and later work. The thief, striking at 1.30 a.m., apparently clambered over the rooftops of other university buildings before reaching the museum. He then reportedly smashed a skylight and lowered himself down a rope, before tossing a smoke canister onto the floor of the Hindley Smith Gallery. The room was instantly filled with smoke, obscuring the view from the security cameras. Less than 10 minutes later the intruder, carrying the Cézanne, slipped out of the Ashmolean Museum and quickly blended into the crowds celebrating the new year around the city.
The criminals' masters
According to experts there is virtually no chance of the Cézanne coming on the legitimate market without being identified as a stolen work. Not only is it listed on the databases of stolen art that auction houses and dealers consult every time an important new item comes up for sale, but it is also immediately identifiable as the Ashmolean's. The painting could pass from hand to hand in the vast art underworld, where it could be sold for a fraction of its value until it finally emerges, years later, in a legitimate sale. Art crime specialists have emphasized how art and cultural property crime has become inextricably connected to organized crime. Groups as diverse as the US, Italian, and Russian mafia, the IRA, and Colombian cocaine cartels have been identified as being involved. Investigators believe that the J M W Turner masterpieces Shade and Darkness: The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour: The Morning After the Deluge, stolen from the Frankfurt gallery Schirn Kunsthalle in 1994, have passed on to Serbian gangsters connected to Balkan war criminals, and that the paintings were being used as collateral for drug deals – particularly as a £160,000 reward for their return has been ignored; many of the gangs operating in Frankfurt and the north of Germany have Serbian connections.
Lost and found
Thousands of institutions and private art collectors have been successfully struck by art thieves in the last several decades. There have been a spate of raids on British art collections, in which the total value of art and antiques being stolen is estimated at £300–500 million each year. The Art Loss Register and the Thesaurus Group, organizations that track down stolen art and antiquities, each has a database of more than 100,000 missing items ranging from the smallest antiques of sentimental value to the biggest of old masters. These include items taken in general burglaries, not just works targeted by art thieves. The international police organization Interpol has about 14,000 major art works on its files that are missing around the world. According to the Art Loss Register, among the missing are 47 works by Edgar Degas, 54 by Auguste Rodin, 142 by Rembrandt, 355 by Pablo Picasso, 271 by Joan Miró, and 250 by Marc Chagall. One of the most shocking art thefts of the last decade took place in 1990, when two men dressed as policemen talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in the middle of the night, bound and gagged the guards, and left with a treasure trove of items, including The Concert by Jan Vermeer and Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The stolen works worth £130 million, which were uninsured, have not been
recovered. Another sensational art raid occurred at Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art in 1993, when thieves copied Jules Dassin's film Rififi (1954) in which the gangsters cut through a roof to steal jewellery. They stole six works by Picasso (three of which were recovered a month later) and two by Georges Braque, the whole totalling more than £40 million. Although some works are never recovered, others reappear in the legitimate market after five to seven years. Some paintings have been recovered after
the thieves demanded a ransom, as in the case of Edvard Munch's Scream (1893), which was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo in 1994 by intruders who propped a ladder against a wall, smashed a window, and reportedly left a note saying, 'Thanks for the poor security'. The painting was recovered when the police foiled the ransom plot. There has also been the occasional happy ending. In 1991 two thieves broke into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and stole 20 paintings. The works, worth an estimated £320 million, were recovered less than an hour later by police who found them in a car near a railway station.
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