Stolen Art: The Unsexy Truth

Last week a Picasso notebook valued at 11 million dollars was reported stolen from the National Picasso Museum of Paris. It is no secret that the recession has adversely affected the art market, but now I wondered, how had it been affecting the black art market? Would declining art values discourage criminals from snatching up art as currency?

Apparently not. A news article search for “stolen art” yielded several reports in the past few months: a few paintings picked off from a private collection in Sao Paulo, Brazil; two major art heists in the Netherlands within ten days of each other; a New Haven heroin addict's pillaging of art collections to support his habit.

There is something really sexy about stolen art—maybe because most people’s familiarity with the subject is through Hollywood’s portrayal of the underground art world in such films as Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair. Who wouldn’t want to get in on the black art market when you’re belaying down skyscrapers with Catherine Zeta-Jones or bamboozling the cops with Pierce Brosnan?

I bashfully admit it was these movies that spurred my own interest in the field as a fresh-faced undergraduate art history student. I started to research the organizations or agencies responsible for tracking stolen art. The Art Loss Register is, according to the website, the world’s largest private art tracking service. Perusing ALR’s website as a student, I was enthralled with the list of high profile cases they had solved: a recovered Picasso, Manet, Cezanne. I must not have been the only one, for within a few months the Art Loss Register put up a disclaimer on their website that most of their cases involved searching for stolen jewelry (read: this work is far less sexy than you think it is, folks).

There are also the government-sponsored efforts of Interpol and our own Federal Bureau of Investigation. I read a memoir by Thomas McShane, who worked in the stolen art division of the FBI from its inception thirty years ago. In the book, called Stolen Masterpiece Tracker (yes, not the most inspired name), McShane recounted some of his biggest cases with the help of a best selling mystery novelist to make the book, well, sexy. While the stories are interesting, they also reveal the unglamorous and downright hilarious realities of this stolen art business: miniscule budgets and purely asinine rooky mistakes made for some truly shoddy operations on behalf of the FBI.

One of my favorite stories was when they had an agent (actor Brian Dennehy’s brother) dress up in a rented sultan’s costume and pose as a potential, oil rich buyer to an art thug on the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. During their sit down meeting, the tape recorder that was scotch-taped under the coffee table fell to the floor; luckily someone kicked it out of sight before the art thief could identify the sound. But the highlight of the exchange most certainly was the seller’s justified suspicion that this Arab sultan was serving him a kosher spread from a Jewish deli. Dennehy managed to wiggle out of the forehead-smacking faux pas by declaring Jewish food a guilty pleasure that he could not satiate in his Islamic homeland.

One would also be mistaken to think that the art thieves themselves were as coy as the likes of Sean Connery. While some heists are commissioned by wealthy art appreciators, a great deal of masterpiece-snatchers are hapless crooks of opportunity: one of McShane's biggest FBI cases, a Rembrandt taken from a French museum, was the work of a teenage art student who realized the painting was neither alarmed nor secured to the wall, and walked out with it under his coat. The heroin addict of the recent New Haven caper is another case and point.

So it won’t be surprising if the Picasso notebook thief turns out to not be some salty dog, but rather a petty offender who just happened to notice the display case was unlocked. Art theft, then, is perhaps less the product of economic trends than faulty museum security. Museums should certainly invest more money in camera security systems, alarms on art works, and for Pete’s sake, locks on glass cases!

Articles on art theft researched on www.MutualArt.com, an art information service site. You can learn more about the FBI’s Art Theft Program at http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/arttheft.htm and Interpol’s Stolen Art Division at http://www.interpol.int/Public/WorkofArt/Default.asp. Thomas McShane’s book Stolen Masterpiece Tracker is available for purchase on Amazon.com.