Stealing History
The recent news that three men accused of stealing two Edvard Munch's iconic paintings from a museum in Oslo have been sentenced to prison puts art theft in the news.
Earlier this week, the New York Times declared that, "Three of six men charged in the 2004 theft of Edvard Munch's paintings 'The Scream' and 'Madonna' were declared guilty today in Oslo District Court and sentenced to prison terms of four to eight years." The article goes on to describe the theft in some detail:
"What no one disputes is that two masked robbers yanked the paintings violently from the walls of the Munch Museum here on Aug. 22, 2004, as about 80 visitors cowered on the floor or milled about obliviously in side galleries. The robbers - one of whom threatened museum employees with a .357-caliber handgun - carried the heavily framed paintings to a black Audi station wagon, driven by an accomplice, and then disappeared."
Thefts of art or artifacts from museums, while not exactly commonplace, are common enough to warrant rather high level security for museum collections including bulletproof glass display cases, fingerprint I.D. access for behind the scene storage rooms, and, of course, on-site security guards. Museums not only keep track of objects that have been stolen from their exhibits and store rooms, they have started to report art thefts to international databases, such as the Art Loss Register - which has offices in the U.K., U.S., and Germany. Databases like the Art Loss Register allow auction houses and museums to explore whether or not an object has been reported as stolen before they send it to auction or attempt to purchase it or accept it for donation.
Cases like the theft from the Munch Museum indicate that the private art market is desperate enough for certain, high profile, pieces of art that private collectors are willing to pay large enough sums of money up front to sponsor daring robbery attempts from museums across the world. While museums and auction houses have started to take steps to avoid fueling the black market for art and artifacts by purchasing them, private collectors desperate enough to stoop to stealing from public institutions to build their collections will continue to harm museum collections all over the world.
The Munch case is proof; however, that crime does not always pay, as two of the three convicted men have been order to pay the city of Oslo $121 million, the combined insured value of the still missing paintings.
Related Suite101.com articles:
Buyer Beware! Part II: Fakes and Reproductions
By Barbara Nicholson Bell (see also the topic Antiques and Collectibles)
and
Stolen fossils are in the news again. What effect does this have on science, and what can you do to prevent it?
By Beverly Eschberger (see also the topic Paleontology)
For more about the theft of art and antiquities:
Wikipedia's entry on art theft offers some good general information about the subject as well as notes about a handful of high profile cases.
The Christian Science Monitor recently ran an article about the looting of archaeological sites and art theft from private collections - click here to read.
