How The Mona Lisa Theft Revealed Picasso's Dark Secrets, or Strange Museum Thefts With Unpredictable Consequences

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In November 2019, a Dutch detective managed to find and recover Oscar Wilde's stolen ring. No, fortunately, it was not the Irish playwright who was robbed personally - the ring was stolen twenty years ago, and during Wilde's lifetime it no longer belonged to him. The writer gave this ring as a keepsake to a classmate, and it was kept at the school where they both studied.

Detective Arthur Brand, who managed to get on the trail of the loss, is called behind the backs of Indiana Jones - he has repeatedly searched for the disappearances associated with the world of art, many of which are real treasures. Of course, the ring Wilde had given him was conspicuous: gold, in the form of a buckled belt, with an inscription on the rim. But, of course, no one thought to openly put it up for sale, so it was possible not to look through the ads on the Internet.

And yet Arthur Brand managed to get on the trail of the ring when it was sold on the black market in 2015 - the detective has his own ability to track such transactions. In particular, one London antiques helped Brand. The detective went out to the new owners, and the ring only had to return to the walls of its native school.

In the spring of 2019, Brand managed to find a Picasso painting that was also stolen twenty years ago. The canvas "Bust of a Woman" disappeared from the personal collection of the Saudi Sheikh - it hung on his yacht. The theft occurred while the yacht was anchored in a French port. Until the discovery, the painting was used by the Dutch mafia as a guarantee in the sale and purchase of weapons or drugs.

Such stories are not uncommon in the art world. Masterpieces and souvenirs are a tasty morsel for any thief. Sometimes detectives are hired by museums, sometimes by relatives of deceased artists and writers, sometimes by national governments. Alas, finds and returns are rare enough to make every case big news.

How the Mona Lisa theft revealed Picasso's dark secrets

The most notorious case of the theft of a masterpiece is considered the incident with "La Gioconda", which occurred in 1911. On August 21, the painting disappeared from the Louvre, and on August 22, it was discovered - the employees were sure that the painting had been removed temporarily in order to photograph or restore a little. One of the suspects, for some unknown reason, was the famous painter Pablo Picasso. The artist panicked and tried to urgently get rid of two statuettes - which, it turns out, he whistled from the museum. However, he was not to blame for the loss of Gioconda.

While detectives were circling around Picasso for two years in a row, hoping that Mona Lisa would emerge from the thieving genius, the picture lay quietly in the apartment of a little-known Italian colleague Pablo, by the name of Perugia. And, although at first his treasure warmed his soul, he worried more and more and began to look for ways to get rid of it as soon as possible. It was on these attempts that he was caught. But the term was set small, only a year: Perugia pity the court with a story about how his Italian heart suffered from the fact that his compatriot's masterpiece is kept abroad. Patriotism was respected.

Note by the toilet

In April 2003, a Picasso painting was stolen, along with paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin. The total cost of the masterpieces exceeded four million dollars. The theft took place at Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, UK. As the police discovered, the paintings were taken out into a hole in a metal mesh fence.

All media reported the theft. Since masterpieces are rarely discovered after that, as a rule, settling for several generations in the private collections of billionaires, many have already mentally said goodbye to the paintings - when suddenly, in the midst of the hype, an anonymous call came to the rescue service. A well-wisher advised me to move a pile of leaves near a public toilet. There, in the leaves, was a tube with stolen paintings and a mocking note saying that it was just a demonstration of a poor security system.

It is unclear whether the theft was really just an original joke or the thieves were scared of the hype (although this would be very unusual), but the gallery urgently rushed to improve the security system. In order not to be disgraced anymore.

Golden Cellini

In May 2003, the police managed to find the "La Gioconda of the World of Sculpture" - a gold statuette by Benvenuto Cellini "Saliera". This statuette was deliberately stolen from a museum in Vienna, having managed to turn off the alarm, go down from the roof to the window and smash the glass cube in which the Saliera stood with a hammer. The management of the museum could only assume the worst: one of the Austrian collectors ordered the theft of the masterpiece, which means that the world was deprived of the opportunity to see it for a century or two, before Salier was not allowed to surface.

However, three years later, the thieves got in touch, demanding a ransom of twelve million dollars (ten times less than a gold salt shaker - and this is how the word "Saliera" is translated - cost). Obviously, either the customer was unable to pay on time, or was stolen specifically for the ransom. The government was not at a loss and offered seventy thousand euros - they say, it will still not be possible to sell such a noticeable and expensive thing on the black market without noise.

In the meantime, the police figured out from which phone the ransom call was made, where this phone was sold, removed the portrait of the buyer from the video cameras in the store and launched it all over the media as a portrait of the person who stole the national treasure. A few hours after the publication of the portrait, the thief, whose name turned out to be Robert Mang, himself confessed. The fact is that literally all friends and acquaintances recognized him from his portraits and began to press on him with interrogations and suspicions; it turned out to be psychologically unbearable so much that the thief did not even think to rush.

He pointed out a cache in the forest near the town of Tsvetl, in which the Saliera was hidden, safe and sound. Experts examined and confirmed its authenticity. By the way, Robert Manga, an alarm specialist, was tried, but in 2009 he returned to his usual life - selling alarm systems. For him to agree to write a book or star in a documentary, he was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Mang rejects all offers.

Thief for peace

In the summer of 2001, a sketch by Marc Chagall for the painting "Above Vitebsk" was stolen from the Jewish Museum of New York. The cost of the sketch was estimated at a million dollars, it was part of the collection of early works of the famous native of Belarus, which was just exhibited in the United States. The thief soon sent a letter to the museum. It turned out that he was holding the sketch hostage and demanding the conclusion of peace between Jews and Palestinians for its return. Complete. So that no one ever fired anywhere.

At this point, everyone said goodbye to the missing sketch, but the thief, who had waited a year in vain for peace, got tired of worrying about his mission and just threw Chagall at the post office in Kansas. After that, the sketch returned to the Russian Museum.

Observant student

Xiao Yuan, a library curator at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, has stolen nearly 150 drawings from the academy's gallery in eight years of work. He replaced each of them with his fake; the stolen drawing was auctioned off. At one of these auctions, an observant student at the Academy noticed the stamp on the picture and raised the alarm. Xiao Yuan was arrested.

At the trial, the library superintendent said that in the gallery, drawings are constantly being stolen, including someone stealing his forgeries, replacing them with their own - of even worse quality. This fact caused a big scandal in China and among those who bought drawings by Chinese artists from auctions. You know, you were sold an honestly stolen original - or a copy, which was replaced by a stolen original in the gallery?

Alas, very often thefts remain unsolved, and exhibits - not found. Stolen masterpieces: Famous paintings, the whereabouts of which are still unknown.