2010 has been the year of art tragedy. Alexander McQueen died in February aged just 42, Picasso’s The Actor got torn at the Metropolitan Museum, New York and now five masterpieces have been stolen from the Museum of Modern Art, Paris.
Capitalising on alarm problems at the museum, the thief (or thieves) scarpered through a window with something in the region of £86 million worth of modern classics.
Pastoral by Henri Matisse (1906), Dove with Green Peas by Pablo Picasso (1911), Woman with Fan by Amedeo Modigliani (1919) Olive Tree near l’Estaque by Georges Braque (1906) and Still Life with Candlestick by Fernand Leger (1922) were the paintings that were taken in the robbery.
The worst thing is that the paintings may never see the light of day again, depriving us all of the opportunity to see for ourselves what made them so great. The 1990 burglary of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, for example, took Rembrandt’s Lady and Gentleman in Black and The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, along with Vermeer’s The Concert from the art world. None of which have been seen since, and they may never be again.
Along with potential knowledge of the problems with the museum alarm, the thief or thieves also had the skills to strip the paintings from their frames and get out of the building within just a fifteen minute timeframe. Despite the fact that art experts have dismissed the possibility of selling the paintings on the open market, I would imagine that they could have already had a buyer in place before the heist if the nature of the burglary is anything to go by.
