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Private Notes
In 2000 two Renoirs and a Rembrandt worth $80 million were stolen in an armed daylight raid on the National Museum in Stockholm . It was a well-planned heist with the thieves making their escape by boat through the labyrinth of canals in the Swedish capital. When the ringleaders were finally traced, police discovered that the plot to carry out the robbery had been hatched by two inmates in a prison many miles away.
When the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum was robbed in 1990 it was the biggest art theft in history. Up to $500 million worth of art was ripped from the walls of the gallery in a single night, including rare masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt.
For more than a decade two Englishmen conned a gullible art market with fakes and forgeries. Art teacher John Myatt produced over two hundred fake paintings by leading 20th-century artists. John Drewe forged the provenance of the paintings to make Myatt’s fakes seem genuine.
Edvard Munch’s the Scream is one of the most famous paintings in twentieth century art. In 2004 two robbers burst into the museum dedicated to the great Norwegian artist and ripped The Scream and another Munch masterpiece, the Madonna, from the walls.
Nearly thirty years ago thieves walked into a remote Massachusetts home and stole seven paintings. Among them was a Cezanne, one of the most influential paintings in art history.
In 1974 in war torn northern Cyprus a priceless mosaic is chipped from the walls of a Greek orthodox church by Turkish looters. It is smuggled out of the country into the underworld of stolen antiquities and broken into pieces before being sold to the highest bidder.
Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century. But in March 1938 it was seized by the Nazis. The golden portrait, commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer of his wife, was one of six Klimts taken by the Germans.
In 1994 the head of Scotland Yard's Art squad was called to the British Museum to investigate a case of suspected stolen Egyptian artefacts.
Two Rubens paintings are lifted from a tiny gallery in a small town in northern Spain by a mysterious robber. One of pictures turns up in Stockholm. The robber is arrested and convicted but escapes and disappears.
On a summers day in 1911 a man walked into the Louvre, took the Mona Lisa off the wall and walked out. He had stolen the world's most famous painting and thousands of people queued to see the empty space the painting had left.
More than two hundred items with an estimated value of $5million, including jewellery and precious enamels, were discovered missing during a routine inventory check at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
In 1988 a glittering golden headdress was looted from an ancient tomb in the desert of northern Peru – and disappeared. The octopus headdress with eight Medusa like tentacles belonged to one of the Moche lords a sophisticated culture that pre dated the Incas by 1000 years.
The Disappeared vanished from the National Art Gallery in Buenos Aires. At the time Argentina was ruled by a ruthless military junta responsible for the torture and death of thousands of ‘disappeared’ members of the opposition.
It’s four in the morning in the centre of Vienna. An alarm goes off at the seventh floor window of the Museum of Art History but the security guards don’t react. The next day one of the most important gold sculptures from the Renaissance is discovered stolen. It’s insurance value is a cool £35 million.
