Displaying items by tag: heist

Serbian police recovered Rembrandt’s (1606-1669) Portrait of a Father on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, seven years a after it was stolen from the Novi Sad City Museum located in the northern city of Novi Sad. Police arrested four people in connection to the 2006 heist that involved three other paintings including a work by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a 17^th century piece by the Italian Baroque painter Francesco Mola (1612-1666), and another painting from the 16^th century by an unknown German-Dutch artist.

Rembrandt, one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history, painted Portrait of Father in 1630 and it is estimated to be worth around $3.7 million. The painting was stolen 10 years prior to the 2006 robbery, but it was eventually recovered in Spain.

None of the other works involved in the Serbian heist have been found.

A Romanian woman has been arrested in Rotterdam in connection to an art heist that rocked the Netherlands in October 2012. The 19-year-old woman, who is the girlfriend of one of the three suspects currently being held in Romania for alleged involvement in the heist, is thought to have helped the thieves haul the seven stolen masterpieces out of the country.

Police claim that after the robbery, the paintings were taken to a home in Rotterdam where the frames were removed. The paintings were later taken to Romania where prosecutors are investigating the mother of one of the suspects who claims that she burned two of the stolen works.

The robbery, which took place at the Kunsthal museum, was the biggest art theft in two decades in the Netherlands. The stolen works, which are part of the private Triton Foundation collection, include masterpieces by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Claude Monet (1840-1926), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and are believed to be worth between $66 million and $266 million. Among the masterpieces lifted by the thieves were Picasso’s Harlequin Head (1971), Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London (1901), and Matisse’s Reading Girl in White and Yellow (1919).  

Phivos Istavrioglou, a resident of Athens, Greece, has been arrested in connection to the botched theft of a Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) painting from a New York gallery last June. Security cameras captured Istavrioglou as he made off with the watercolor and ink work, which is valued at approximately $150,000. After surveillance images were released to the public, a panicked Istavrioglou mailed the Dalí painting back to the Upper East Side gallery in a cardboard tube.

 Fingerprints left on the returned painting helped officials track down Istavrioglou, 29, and he was arrested on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at John F. Kennedy airport in a sting that lured him to the United States from Italy. After his arrest, Istavrioglou appeared briefly in a Manhattan court where he pleaded not guilty to grand larceny in the second degree. Istavrioglou’s bail was set at $100,000.

 The stolen painting, Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio (1949), was on view at the Venus Over Manhattan gallery as part of its inaugural exhibition, which opened in May 2012.

In March of 1990, two thieves posing as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole thirteen works of art including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet. Now known as the greatest art heist in history, the case has remained unresolved despite the countless hours of investigating the FBI has conducted. While the Bureau has offered immunity to anyone who assisted in the recovery of the artworks, they have never received a concrete lead.

While it would appear that the reputed organized crime figure, Robert V. Gentile, who found himself in federal court this Wednesday on drug trafficking and gun possession was irrelevant to the Gardner case, the FBI believed Gentile had vital information to share. Gentile, 76, of Manchester, Connecticut, helped federal authorities for 10 months prior to his arrest but none of the information was useful in tracking down the thieves. Gentile’s lawyer claims that his client did know some of the individuals the government believed were involved in the heist, but that most of them were dead by now. Gentile now faces a maximum of 150 years in prison if he is convicted. The government is willing to negotiate his sentence so that his prison term will be reduced to 46-57 months.

Gentile became involved in the Gardner case when Elene Guarente, the widow of Robert Guarente, a mob associated who died in 2005, told investigators that her husband gave Gentile a painting that he had kept in a tube since the 1990s.

A member of the canine unit recovered four paintings stolen from South Africa’s Pretoria Art Museum in a private cemetery on Tuesday, November 13. While the paintings still need to be verified, police officials are almost certain they are Maggie Laubser’s Cat and Petunias (1936), JH Pierneef’s Eland and Bird (1961), Irma Stern’s Fishing Boats (1931), and Hugo Naude’s Hottentot Chief, all of which disappeared after an armed robbery took place at the museum on November 11. Gerard Sekoto’s Street Scene (1939) is still missing.

The Pretoria Museum closed after the heist and will re-open on November 20 after officials finish a number of updates to the institution’s security system. The robbers entered the museum as paying visitors on Sunday but there is no surveillance footage as the museum’s security cameras had stopped working earlier in the week.

A sharp upswing in the value of South Africa’s best-known art has led to the country’s biggest art heist. Posing as paying visitors at the Pretoria Art Museum, three men proceeded to hold the museum staff at gunpoint and walk away with works by local masters Irma Stern, Gerard Sekoto, JH Pierneef, Maggie Laubser, and Hugo Naude.

Images of the criminals were not recorded because the museum’s camera surveillance system broke down on November 8, three days before the heist. Officials did alert Interpol. The three criminals left behind the most expensive piece in the museum’s collection, Two Malay Musicians by Irma Stern, due to lack of space in their getaway car. Works by other well-known South African artists such as William Kentridge, Walter Battiss, and Robert Hodgins were left untouched.

The five stolen artworks were owned by the City of Tshwane and were insured.

Juan Carlos Emden, the grandson of a wealthy Jewish businessman, is demanding that the Swiss Buehrle collection return a Claude Monet painting that the family was forced to sell as they fled Europe during World War II. The masterpiece was sold in haste for a little less than $32,000. The painting today is valued at around $27 million.

Emden is the Chilean grandson of Max Emden who bought Monet’s Poppy Field Near Vetheuil in the 1920s. Max was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 for Ticino, Switzerland, where he built the Villa Emden to house his art collection, including Poppy Field Near Vetheuil, one of Monet’s most famous paintings. After his death in 1940, Emden’s son, Hans Eric Emden, was forced to sell his father’s art collection to finance his fleeing to South America from Europe.

Juan Carlos Emden is rumored to have been fighting for years to regain ownership of his grandfather’s painting and is planning to travel to Zurich to discuss how to recover the work with his lawyers. Poppy Field Near Vetheuil was stolen during a heist at the Buehrle museum in 2008, but it was found several days later.

The victim of a devastating art heist that took place last Friday, the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam claims their security system is not to blame. The Museum’s director Emily Ansenk shot down allegations that a rear emergency door had been left open. However, police are investigating whether or not there was someone in the museum after hours that could have opened the door for the thieves, as there were no signs of forced entry.

After robbers swiped seven artworks including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Monet, the Kunsthal became the subject of intense scrutiny. The Museum admitted to Dutch police that there were no security guards on duty when the robbery occurred. An external security firm was the first to respond when the Museum’s alarm went off. Museum officials claim that their security system, which relies solely on alarms and security cameras, is state-of-the-art.

Late on Friday, police released three grainy surveillance photos of the burglars exiting the Museum out of a back door. While their faces were not visible, police hope that the bags the thieves were carrying are recognizable. Police proceeded to post leaflets around the neighborhood, asking potential witnesses to step forward.

Major paintings by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse were stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Museum on Tuesday. The thieves, who ransacked the museum in the early hours of the morning made off with seven works that may total hundreds of millions of dollars.

The heist is the largest in years for the Netherlands and includes Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin, Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte, dite la Fiancee, Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait, and Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed.

The works belong to The Triton Collection, a private collection that is being shown to the public for the first time ever as part of the Museum’s 20^th anniversary celebration. The Triton Collection was assembled over a twenty-year period and includes 150 works of modern art spanning from the 19^th century to the present day.

The Kunsthal’s alarm went off at 3AM and Rotterdam police have secured evidence from the scene. The police are speaking with potential witnesses and investigators are looking into the security camera footage.

As of yesterday, a Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) painting that was stolen during an armed robbery at a Houston home last September has been named one of the FBI’s top ten unsolved art crimes. A private insurance company has offered a $50,000 reward for any helpful information leading to the work’s recovery.

The painting, Madeleine Leaning on Her Hair, was completed by the pioneering Impressionist in 1918 and has an estimated value of $1 million. The painting has also been added to the Art Loss Registry, the National Stolen Art File, and Interpol’s Works of Art System. Interpol, an international police organization, encourages cooperation between law enforcement agencies in different countries. By taking these measures, the thief will most likely be unsuccessful if he/she attempts to take the painting to a knowledgeable dealer or gallery or tries to sell it at auction as most members of the art world regularly check these databases.

The other top unsolved art crimes on the FBI’s list include the notorious Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in which four Rembrandts, five Degas drawings, and one Vermeer (among other works) were stolen. Also on the list is the theft of two Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney commissioned Maxfield Parrish paintings from a Hollywood gallery, the 2002 van Gogh Museum robbery in which two paintings valued at $3 million, and the 1969 theft of a $20 million Caravaggio from Italy’s Oratory of San Lorenzo.