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| Saturday, 04 September 2004 |
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Up for grabs by Richard Lacayo
Actually, museums are where the money is. Where else can you find so many portable items of stupendous value within arm's reach? In a single gallery there can be canvases worth more, taken together, than a whole fleet of jumbo jets. And while banks can hide their money in vaults, museums, by their very mission, are compelled to put their valuables in plain sight. So the theft last week of one of the world's best known paintings was discouraging news not only for anyone who cares about art but especially for museum officials and gallery owners, who know how vulnerable their treasures are. Nothing could be worse than the thought of a canvas as important as The Scream, Edvard Munch's indelible image of a man howling against the backdrop of a blood-red sky, disappearing into a criminal underworld that doesn't care much about the niceties of art conservation. Art theft is a vast problem around the world. As many as 10,000 precious items of all kinds disappear each year. And for smaller museums in particular, it may not be a problem they can afford to solve. The thieves who snatched The Scream and one other Munch canvas from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, subjected them to rough handling from the start. On Aug. 22, at 11.10 a.m., about an hour after the museum opened, two men wearing hooded sweatshirts, gloves and ski masks burst through a side entrance. One of them waved a pistol, terrifying visitors, then pointed it at the head of an unarmed female guard and barked in Norwegian, "Lie down!" Meanwhile an accomplice dashed through the ground-floor galleries until he came upon Munch's Madonna from 1893-94. The apotheosis of the painter's many femmes fatales, sexually inviting, weirdly commanding and more than a little poisonous, it's probably his next best known image. In a frenzy, the thief yanked the frame downward to snap the wires that held it. Mary Vassiliou, a tourist form New Jersey who witnessed the robbery, told TIME, "It looked like he was crazy. He was banging it against the wall. Then he got it off the wall, and he was banging it on the floor." Witnesses say the same man next went after The Scream, which he ripped in the same brutal way from the partition - not even a solid wall - it was hung on. "They dragged them and twisted them and did all sorts of things," says museum director Gunnar Sorensen. Like many great works, neither painting was insured for theft. The high premiums on very famous pictures would be budget busters even for the largest museums. An earlier version of The Scream - there are four - was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo 10 years ago. Three months later, officers from Scotland Yard posing as art experts from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles approached the thieves with an offer to buy the painting, then arrested them when they produced it. But with some other high-profile art-theft cases, the outcome is still in doubt. Last year two men posing as tourists stole Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna with the Yarnwinder from Drumlanrig Castle near Dumfries, Scotland. That case is still unsolved. So is the most spectacular art robbery in the US, the 1990 break-in at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves disguised as policemen made off with 13 pictures, including a Manet, three Rembrandts and Vermeer's magnificent small canvas The Concert. Although large museums have had their share of embarrassing robberies - in 1911 the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre - the greatest problem is small institutions like the Munch Museum or private homes open to the public. Neither can afford elaborate security. Large museums attach alarms to their most valuable canvases, but a modest alarm system can cost $ 500,000 or more. Some museums are looking into tracking devices that would allow them to follow stolen items once they leave the premises. "But conservators are concerned that if they have to insert something, it might damage the object," says Wilbur Faulk, former head of security at the Getty Museum. Thieves sometimes try using artworks as collateral for other underworld deals. The masterminds of the 1986 robbery of Russborough House near Dublin, who snatched 18 canvases, tried in vain to trade them for Irish Republican Army members held in British jails. Others demand a ransom from the museum that owns the pictures. Ten years ago, thieves in Frankfurt, Germany, made off with two major canvases by J. M. W. Turner that were on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The paintings, worth more than $ 80 million, were recovered in 2002 after the Tate paid more than $ 5 million to people having "information" about their whereabouts. Famous pictures usually surface in the end, after whoever took them realizes how hard they are to sell. But along the way the thieves can devastate a delicate image. The one who snatched Vermeer's Love Letter from a Brussels museum in 1971 crammed it under his bed, leaving creases that required restoration. The Scream is especially vulnerable because it was painted on cardboard, which is less supple then canvas and also does not absorb paint as well. The slightest bend could cause pigment to flake away. If that happens, the anguished little man in Munch's picture won't be the only one who feels like screaming. Reported by Walter Gibbs/Oslo, Lina Lafaro and Carolina A. Miranda/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Aatish Taseer/London and Charles P. Wallace/Berlin ############# How I stole a Ming Scroll Patrick Bucklew is a New York City artist who dabbled in theft in the '80s. This is his story: I stole a Ming dynasty scroll from the Berkeley Art Museum and got away with it. It was my mom's birthday. My sister lives in San Francisco, so we met there to celebrate. I was an art student in Los Angeles, and I flew up. We all decided to go to a Richard Avedon photography show in Berkeley. I was kind of a con artist - small jobs, like getting in movies free - and I guess I was ready for a big job. While they ere all looking at the photographs, I went to the next gallery, where the museum was installing scrolls from the Ming dynasty. The room was unguarded, and I slid an 8-ft. piece of Plexiglas out from its holders, removed the scroll and rolled it up. I then placed it in the sleeve of my Windbraker and carried it out, kind of swinging it in a natural arm motion. I learned the scroll on a ledge right, in front of the security guard and went over to the Berkeley art school where I found a bag and a batik print in the garbage. I went back and rolled the scroll in them. My mom, sister and a friend came out and, with surprised expressions, asked, "What is that?" I said, "It's your birthday present, Mom." Later, I gave her the batik print. I kept the scroll in my closet for several moths. Occasionally, I would bring it out to show friends, I even had an offer from a shady friend of a shady friend to acquire it for five grand but decided not to sell. Then, when I was going home to Washington State for summer break and was about to run out of gas near Berkeley, I decided to take the scroll to its rightful owners and claim the 4 500 reward that had been offered for it. The curator was very nice and told me I could leave because I returned the scroll unharmed. I said tat I wanted the reward. He said, "OK, if that's the way you want it," and called in the police. The cops kept asking me to repeat the story of how I found the scroll, and they kept telling me that I was changing it and tripping me up. After an hour, they said, "Patrick Buckelew, did you steal the scroll?" I said. "No." And they asked again and again. Finally, I cracked. I just wanted to go home. They locked me up, and I called my dad, who hung up on me. Then he got me a very good lawyer. I spent three days in jail. After I was released, I didn't have the 50c it cost to take a bus to my lawyer, so I had to bum money from someone who asked what it was for. I told him I as an artist and needed help. He then showed me an article that had just come out - the title read Artist steals Art. I said, "Hey, that's me!" My criminal days ended with the judge giving me a $ 500 fine and telling me never to come to California again. Courtesy: Time |
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Willie Sutton, a once celebrated American crook, was partly famous for
saying he robbed banks because "that's where the money is."
