A$30 million in artwork has gone missing from Italy’s National broadcaster Rai after an artwork believed to be by Ottone Rosai fell off the wall breaking its frame, to reveal that it was, in fact, a fake and after an audit of its collection found 120 artworks are missing out of 1,500. [1][2][3][4]
After detectives investigated the artwork, they traced it back to a retired employee who admitted to stealing the painting by Ottone Rosai and selling it in the 1970s but due to the statute of limitations, they can no longer prosecute for the theft.
Rai executive Nicola Sinisi told La Repubblica that they believe the artworks were most likely stolen after the 1996 exhibition in Puglia which brought awareness to the value of the artworks hanging in the corridors of the Rai where there were no alarm systems to protect the artworks.
The artworks that were stolen were an etching by Monet, along with an etching by Modigliani and one by Alfred Sisley.
Other artworks stolen where by artists Guttuso, Giorgio De Chirico, Giovanni Stradone and Francesco Menzio.
The employees are suspected to be the cause of the theft of the artworks.
This isn’t the first time artwork has been stolen
So as you can imagine this is not the first time art has been stolen, ranging from opportunistic employees to the depths of the underworld, in fact, there are still currently at the time of writing this article, 12 high-value artworks are still unrecovered after being stolen. [5]
Including artwork from the largest art heist in history, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where an estimated $500 million in artwork was stolen. [6]
And this includes Old Masters like the only known Rembrandt seascape depicting Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee with what appears to be Rembrandt, the only figure looking directly out at the viewer, a self-portrait. [6] [7]
And one of only 34 known Johannes Vermeer artworks “The Concert” depicting a young woman sitting at a harpsichord, a man playing the lute, and a woman singing. [6] [8]
Stolen artwork also knows no borders, an old master painting by Frans van Mieris the Elder “A Cavalier” was stolen in June 2007 from the Art Gallery Of NSW in Australia during business hours, the artwork was insured at the time for A$1,400,000. [9] [10]
The most recent artwork is The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen by Vincent Van Gogh stolen from an exhibition at the Singer Laren museum on the 30th March 2020 (Van Gogh’s birthday) which is estimated to be worth £5,000,000. [11]
Not as easy to sell art as one might think
Although stealing artwork worth millions of dollars might seem like easy money, in reality, high-value artwork is quite possibly one of the hardest objects to sell.
You can’t display them at least not the high-value artworks, you can’t sell them to any respectable dealer or auction house after it has been reported stolen and they are worth a fraction of their value on the black market.
The stolen artworks only hope is that they are used as bargaining chips in the future (for shorter criminal sentences), returned or found and not destroy like the five Modernist artworks stolen by the “spider-man” from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in which the thieves binned the artworks after they “panicked and destroyed the canvasses before throwing them into a rubbish bin” the artworks at the time having a total value of $107 million.
However, all is not lost you may just find a rare artwork in the luggage compartment of a bus like the painting by Edgar Degas titled “Les Choristes” worth €800,000 which was found after French customs officers pulled over and searched an intercity bus primarily looking for illegal drugs. [15] [16] [17]
PHOTO RMN / HERVÉ LEWANDOWSKI
The art detectives
Thankfully there are teams of investigators around the world combing through information to find these missing works and hopefully eventually return them to their owners.
The USA has the FBI’s “Art Crime Team” composed of 20 special agents. [18]
There are also private art detectives like the 30-year veteran Christopher Marinello from Art Recovery International who has recovered over $500 million on behalf of collectors, museums, artists, dealers, and the like. [19]
Italy has there own Art Squad “Carabinieri for Protection of Italy’s Cultural Heritage” (Carabinieri Art Squad) a world-first specialist team of 280 investigators, who have recovered over 58,000 antiquities and other works worth over €348,000,000 in 2008 and 2009 alone. [20] [21]
In closing, I don’t think this will be the last time we see high-value art being stolen but hopefully, gallery’s, private/public collections, and museums alike, learn their lesson and increase their security and take art theft seriously.
Further Reading:
[4] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rai-art-theft-1979907
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stolen_paintings#Unrecovered
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museum_theft
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storm_on_the_Sea_of_Galilee
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concert_(Vermeer)
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cavalier
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parsonage_Garden_at_Nuenen
[13] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/07/art-thieves-almost-never-destroy-their-loot.html
[14] https://news.artnet.com/art-world/spider-man-art-thief-jail-time-847490
[15] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43168246 (Stolen Degas painting Les Choristes found on a bus)
[16] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/world/europe/degas-painting-bus.html
[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Choristes
[18] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/violent-crime/art-theft
[19] https://www.artrecovery.com/about