Would have Van Gogh have been impressed? Hard to say. He might have raised an eyebrow in disbelief. Each day he headed off into the landscape, paint box and easel at the ready, canvas under his arm, to produce what would become the quintessence of Post-Impressionist painting. At the time he had no idea of the impact his work was going to have given that no one wanted to own one of his paintings. Move forward in time a few decades and all of that changed. He would become the artist of an unenviable record. His very portable paintings would be the most stolen artefacts of the 20th century. Now you don’t see anyone trying to make off with Barnett Newman’s Red, Yellow Blue 111 – destroy it certainly in the defence of ‘real’ art as happened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam- mostly because its enormous and doesn’t fit under the arm easily. Van Gogh was much more accommodating and any number of brazen thieves either broke in through the skylight or simply removed one of his paintings from the wall under the eagle eyes of vigilant museum staff and made off with it.
It became something of a groundhog day for the press to be reporting stolen Van Gogh’s. In 2002 Vincent van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers 1887 was stolen from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Giza, Egypt and In 2003 an early Vincent van Gogh The Parsonage Garden in Spring (1884 disappeared from the Singer Laren museum in the Netherlands and in the same year several works were stolen from the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester by a robber who broke into the museum using a sledgehammer and got past various layers of security. The aforesaid press amused themselves when the paintings were discovered in a cardboard tube in a run-down toilet not far from the museum. They dubbed it the “loovre”, toilet humour being a staple of tabloid news.
There were other favoured targets. Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin and Renoir of the moderns and Rembrandt and Caravaggio of the old masters all score a guernsey. However, there were some notable works that any thief with brains would have realised were going to be difficult to sell off. Surely the Mona Lisa would have to be one of them. I can’t imagine what the Italian handyman who stole it in 1911 thought he was going to do with it. I suppose he could have hung it over his fireplace. Given just how many copies of the painting there are in existence, any visitors might well have taken it for a print. Given the value to the Louvre of having this precious artefact hanging on their wall, no stone was going to be left unturned by the French police.
In the same bracket would have to go Munch’s The Scream 1910 and the painting that gave Impressionism its name [much to the dismay of Monet- the press at work again] Impression Sunrise 1872. Thieves bought tickets to the Musée Marmottan in 1985, bailed up nine guards and forty visitors at gunpoint and walked out with a number of works which they carted away in a black station wagon. Of course, it helped that they were all of a size that fitted under the arm. Munch’s The Scream was stolen from Munch Museum in Oslo during the 1984 Winter Olympics lending added value to the story. Rumour has it that the Mafia were starting their own art collection and most stolen work simply disappeared never to be seen again which is a familiar story with any number of works stolen by the Nazis during WW2 and secreted in hidden places to this day.
There is no doubt that Rembrandt would have been surprised that he holds the Guinness Book of Records medal for the most stolen work. Jacob de Gheyn III was stolen in 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983. This wasn’t a seminal work like Impression Sunrise but a standard commercial portrait for a businessman client in 1632. Other than art connoisseurs few would even have heard of it, but it would still have been difficult to shift.
While so many paintings were never recovered, the number of thieves and handlers incarcerated across the world ought prove a salutary lesson but I doubt the criminal classes see prison as any more than an occupational hazard and the routine theft or art will continue. A corollary to the digital age however has proved an incentive. The hacker community revel in the idea of breaking into highly secured sites just because they can. At least one recent art theft had the ‘hacker’ claiming that his theft was actually a public service in exposing the lax security of the nation’s treasures. The authorities disagreed.
In 2018 I visited England and being from Hertfordshire about twenty miles north of London decided that I would visit Henry Moore’s sculpture Park which was just down the road from where I grew up. When I arrived at the gate I saw a sign that said that the grounds were closed indefinitely due to theft. Someone[s] had backed up a large truck with a crane and removed a bronze sculpture weighing several tonnes. It was never found. Police suspected that it had been melted down and the bronze sold off for scrap.
While many paintings were never recovered and could well be hanging in private galleries of the rich and anonymous [to say nothing of Mafiosi], much greater care no doubt would have been taken to protect the investment. Whatever value thieves and their clients attribute to owning works of art, to melt down a Moore is something quite different. There is no scrap value in canvas and paint.
So what has all this got to do with hackers? Turns out the thief who stashed the stolen canvases in the toilet block was a bored hacker in need of a new challenge and bypassing alarm systems filled the bills. He had no idea about art at all let alone what to do with his stolen booty. Ah, the criminal mind.