Great Artists Steal by Mary Dutta

$22,000,000. Not a bad price for a painting once found in a plastic bag at a bus stop.

There’s a story there, of course. Twenty years before its high-priced sale this week at Christie’s auction house, the painting in question (Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt) had been stolen from an English stately home. Art detective Charles Hill took the case, arranging the reward that resulted in the bus stop drop-off and the canvas’s return to its rightful owners.

Hill is the same detective who helped recover Edvard Munch’s The Scream when it was stolen from an Oslo museum in 1994. The recovery efforts involved sensational details like false identities and a trapdoor, but the highlight of that story for me is actually the note the thieves left behind saying “thanks for the poor security.” Their snarky triumph was short-lived, however, as the painting was quickly found and the conspirators jailed.

The still-unknown burglars who stole several million dollars’ worth of paintings from the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England in 2003 also shared their low opinion of the institution’s security, but in a more well-meaning way. A few days after the theft, the museum received an anonymous tip about the whereabouts of the missing works. “We didn’t intend to steal these paintings,” the tip-off read, “just to highlight the woeful security.” My favorite part of this story is where the missing paintings were found: in a decrepit public toilet building nearby, which the British press promptly christened “the Loovre.”

Who better to pull off such a heist than someone trained to prevent it? On a 2006 visit to the National Museum in Vienna, alarm system specialist Robert Mang noted the lax security measures taken by the museum. He returned late one night and helped himself to a gold salt cellar worth (shockingly) tens of millions of dollars. At his trial, he claimed he broke in and stole the artwork merely to test his theory that the museum was failing to properly guard its treasures. He was convicted.

And then there’s Martha Fuqua, better known as “Renoir Girl,” who attempted to sell one of the painter’s works that she claimed to have found in a box of odds and ends that she bought at a West Virginia flea market. But Fuqua’s story soon unraveled. Not only did the Baltimore Museum of Art announce the painting had been stolen sixty years earlier, but multiple people came forward to say the painting had hung in Fuqua’s mother’s house in the intervening decades. The painting is now back in Baltimore.

Not every such story has a happy ending. One of the most famous unsolved art thefts is the 1990 break-in at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. To this day, no one knows what happened to the thirteen paintings that were taken, and the ten-million-dollar reward for their return remains unclaimed. For some fun takes on the Gardner case, you can check out author V. M. Burns’s Anthony- and Edgar-nominated short story “The Vermeer Conspiracy,” or “The Honor Thief” by WWK’s own Martha Reed, included in the Anthony-Award-winning anthology This Time For Sure: Bouchercon Anthology 2021. The latter is available for free on Martha’s website, https://www.reedmenow.com/short-fiction.

Art can present an irresistible temptation to the unscrupulous and an inspiration to crime writers. Is it merely a coincidence, for instance, that the leader of the gang that stole The Scream in 1994 died just days before Christie’s auctioned off that once-purloined Titian? I feel like there’s a story there, about an art heist, maybe, with a falling out among thieves and a complicit auctioneer. For this author, at least, a picture might be worth a few thousand words.

Do you have a favorite art heist story, real or fictional?