Stolen Art Will Be Hard To Sell

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The New York Sun

In one of the largest art heists ever in Europe, three thieves in ski masks walked out of a museum in Zurich on Sunday with four Impressionist paintings valued at more than $163 million.

The paintings, which were stolen from the E.G. Bührle Collection, include a famous work by Paul Cézanne, “Boy in the Red Waistcoat,” as well as Edgar Degas’s “Count Lepic and His Daughters,” Claude Monet’s “Poppies Near Vétheuil,” and Vincent van Gogh’s “Blossoming Chestnut Branches.”

One thief held museum employees at gunpoint while the other two took the paintings off the wall. Afterwards, the three fled in a white van. The local police said that one of the men spoke German with a heavy Slavic accent.

As in all cases involving the theft of well-known artworks, the mystery is what the thieves intended to do with the paintings. “No one is going to be able to sell these works through the legitimate art market,” the executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, Sharon Flescher, said. “The Cézanne is one of the most famous images in the world.”

Sometimes thieves will use artworks as collateral for a drug or an arms deal. Sometimes they expect that they will be able to collect on a reward or negotiate a payoff, particularly when works are insured, Ms. Flescher said. There is a debate in the art world about whether insurance money should be used to buy back stolen art, since doing so might ensure a particular work’s safe return but also encourage further thefts.

Experts also believe that the high prices Impressionist and Modern artworks bring at auctions play a role in motivating thieves to target these areas. (Last week, two Picassos, valued at $4.5 million, were stolen from a museum in the Swiss town of Pfaeffikon.)

“We do believe that [the market] has something to do with why common thugs will go into museums and grab these big names,” the general counsel for the Art Loss Register, Christopher Marinello, said. But the thieves are likely to have a wake-up call, Mr. Marinello added, when they realize they can’t sell paintings whose theft has been so widely publicized.

Mr. Marinello said that he believes the paintings will end up in the Balkans, where “a lot of murky art crime heads these days.” The Art Loss Register keeps a database of around 200,000 stolen artworks. Its staff scans every auction catalog, as well as eBay and art fairs such as Maastricht and the Art Dealers Association of America Art Show, and checks works against the database. More important, in a case such as this, the staff also has sources who will alert them if something is being offered around in a way that seems suspicious.

“People will contact us and say, ‘Hey this is unusual; will you please check your database and see if this is on it?'” Mr. Marinello said. Referring to the paintings from the Bührle Collection, he said: “If they try to unload these, we will find them.”

The Bührle Collection is named for Emil Georg Bührle, a German-born industrialist who, as the owner of a Swiss armaments factory, made a fortune during World War II selling weapons to both the Nazis and the Allies. After his death in 1956, his family established the museum to showcase his art collection.


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