Switzerland: Art Robbery

84m paintings stolen in 'spectacular' Swiss raid

Four paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas and Monet, worth an estimated SFR180m, have been stolen from a Swiss museum in what police said was the largest art robbery in the country's history. A reward of SFR 100,000 has been offered for any information leading to the recovery of the paintings. Detectives said three masked men wearing dark clothing entered the Emil Bührle Foundation half an hour before it closed


By JAMES STURCKE
Story from www.guardian.co.uk
(Published: February 11, 2008)


Four paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas and Monet, worth an estimated SFR180m, have been stolen from a Swiss museum in what police said was the largest art robbery in the country's history. Armed men in masks threatened staff before making off with Cézanne's Boy in the Red Waistcoat, Monet's Poppy Field at Vetheuil, Ludovic Lepic and his Daughters, by Edgar Degas, and Vincent van Gogh's Blooming Chestnut Branches, Zurich police said.

The "spectacular art robbery" was one of the biggest ever in Europe, Marco Cortese, a spokesman for Zurich police, said. A reward of SFR 100,000 has been offered for any information leading to the recovery of the paintings. Detectives said three masked men wearing dark clothing entered the Emil Bührle Foundation half an hour before it closed.

One of the men, armed with a pistol, forced museum staff to the floor while the two others went into the exhibition hall and took the four paintings. The men were about 5ft 9in tall, and one spoke German with a Slavic accent, police said. They loaded the paintings into a white vehicle parked in front of the museum. Officers, appealing for witnesses to come forward, said it was possible the paintings were partly sticking out of the van as the robbers made their getaway.

The foundation is a private collection, founded by a Zurich industrialist who lived between 1890 and 1956, that boasts many Impressionist works. Lukas Gloor, the museum's director, said the robbers had taken four of the collection's most important paintings. He added that they appeared to have taken the first four they came to, leaving even more valuable paintings hanging in the same room. The museum also owns Auguste Renoir's Little Irene and Degas's Little Dancer. "We are happy that no employees or visitors were hurt," Gloor said. The stolen paintings were hung behind glass, and a security alarm went off as soon as they were touched, he told a news conference.

The works Bührle bought form one of the most important 20th century private collections of European art, with French Impressionism and post-Impressionism constituting the core. The raid comes after two Picasso oil paintings on loan to an exhibition in the town of Pfaeffikon, near Zurich, were stolen last Wednesday. Tete de Cheval (Head of Horse) and Verre et Pichet (Glass and Pitcher), were being lent by the Sprengel museum, in Germany, to the Seedamm-Kulturzentrum.

Maja Pertot Bernard, of the Art Loss Register, said small galleries were easy targets for thieves because they were often unable to afford the elaborate alarm systems and security personnel of larger museums. She said it was hard to tell whether the paintings were stolen to order or would be offered on the black market, but added that they would be easy to transport out of Switzerland.

"You just have to take them off their frames and stretchers and roll them up," she said. "Paintings, like jewellery, are of very high value and very easy to move. "With the publicity surrounding the latest thefts, they will probably either turn up quickly or disappear for a long time."

Swiss police compared the magnitude of yesterday's robbery with the 2004 theft of Edvard Munch's the Scream and Madonna from the Munch museum in Norway. The paintings, insured for 70m, were recovered nearly two years later. Bührle, a German-born industrialist who provided arms to the Third Reich during the second world war, amassed one of Europe's greatest private collections in the aftermath of the fighting. By the end of the conflict, he owned at least 13 works of art that were on a list of looted art used to recover pieces stolen from Jews by the Nazis. The paintings were returned in the late 1940s, and Bührle received some compensation from the Swiss government.

Seven Picasso oil paintings were stolen from a Zurich gallery in 1994 and have not been found. Portrait of Suzanne Bloch (1904), worth around 25.7m, was stolen from the Sao Paulo museum of art in Brazil in December, but was returned undamaged last month.


(Published: 09.03.2008.)

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