[MSN] Stealing beauty. There were smiles all around when Melbourne's Weeping Woman was found. But most art theft ends in tears. (Review: Museum of the Missing)

Sun Dec 3 14:15:58 CET 2006

Stealing beauty
Email Print Normal font Large font Suzy Freeman-Greene
December 2, 2006
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There were smiles all around when Melbourne's Weeping Woman was found. But
most art theft ends in tears.

It's a strange and moving experience to take an imaginary walk through the
"museum of the missing". Some paintings look weirdly prophetic, like that
tortured, skeletal figure fleeing something (life? herself? armed robbers?)
in Edward Munch's The Scream. Others, like Lucian Freud's downcast portrait
of Francis Bacon or Da Vinci's coy Madonna with the Yarnwinder, seem to
carry a look of resignation.

The Munch has now been found and it's ridiculous, of course, to read these
paintings according to the script of their present circumstances (stolen;
location unknown). But no matter what their subject or mood - from
Strindberg's tempestuous Night of Jealousy to Rembrandt's enigmatic A Lady
and Gentleman in Black - there's now a poignancy attached to them. They are
lost to us.

Lingering at Johannes Vermeer's The Concert (pictured:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/stealing-beauty/2006/11/30/1164777721918.
html), you peer deeper into the reproduced image, exploring the painting's
meticulous detail and quiet layers. That girl at the piano with gleaming
necklace and neatly bunched hair. What is she thinking? The woman who stands
nearby, her outstretched hand gently cupped as she sings. How does her voice
sound? You long to escape this flat, glossy replica; to see brushstrokes,
contemplate the play of light on canvas. But you will not.

This photographic gallery of the world's most famous stolen artworks appears
in Museum of the Missing (Macmillan), a book by New York-based journalist
Simon Houpt. The market for stolen art, he writes, is the third biggest
illicit trade in the world after drugs and arms. In the short space of time
between my reading Houpt's book and writing this article, a painting by
Goya, Children with a Cart, was stolen en route to a New York show.

The most costly recent art theft happened in 1990 at Boston's Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum. Thieves stole 13 paintings, including The Concert
and three Rembrandts. In 2005, the museum issued a press release appealing
to the paintings' guardians, whoever they are, to care for the works
correctly. (They should be stored at 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 per cent
humidity.) It seemed an optimistic step.

Who steals paintings? Few thieves are connoisseurs. While some pictures are
stolen to order, Houpt writes that drug traffickers and gun-runners have
begun using fine art as collateral. It's hard to sell a masterpiece but it
may circulate for years in the underworld, like cash. A more depressing fate
has likely been met by a Henry Moore bronze sculpture, stolen from his
property in 2005. Worth more than $5 million, it's said to have been melted
down for scrap metal.

Some thieves are political activists. In 1974, 19 pictures were stolen from
a British diamond heir, including a Goya and three Rubens, in an
unsuccessful attempt to raise funds for the IRA. In 2001, a Chagall was
pinched in New York, with burglars demanding peace between Israel and
Palestine as a condition of its return. (They eventually gave up, returning
the work.)

For centuries, art was regarded as the legitimate plunder of war. Some of
the most depressing footage from Iraq in 2003 was that of looters taking
Mesopotamian treasures from the Iraq National Museum. Recently, Italian
authorities have tried Marion True, a former curator at the Los Angeles
Getty Museum, for knowingly receiving stolen artefacts. Says Dr Gerard
Vaughan, director of the National Gallery of Victoria: "I would suppose that
most museum directors around the world would be extremely wary about
securing antiquities."

Australia's most celebrated art theft was that of Picasso's Weeping Woman,
taken from the NGV in 1986 and later found in a railway locker. Despite this
case, Vaughan thinks art theft is not a big problem here, mainly because the
market is quite small.

Even so, gallery security is a huge concern. He cannot reveal much about
their "state-of-the art" system, due to arrangements with police and
insurers. But he says it's about "locks, the way works are fixed to the
walls; the way doors close. We can close the whole building down in an
instant . . . we have cameras everywhere and a large number of attendants."

In Norway's Munch museum there are now metal detectors and paintings behind
bullet-proof glass. At the NGV, some incredibly fragile works, such as
medieval panels, are under glass. But Vaughan speaks ruefully of the
"circus" surrounding the Louvre's Mona Lisa, who smiles from behind a wall
of glass in her climate-controlled enclosure. And while some museums ask
patrons to stand behind a fence to view works, "I would prefer that you can
get up to the painting personally and see it."

In 1999, amid the gallery's relocation of 62,000 objects, four small
paintings were stolen. Vaughan says the loss of works by Julian Ashton,
Horace Brodsky, Josephine Muntz-Adams and Murray Griffin was "deeply
regrettable". "While we don't want to lose anything, it's worth saying that
they were minor works."

Which exhibit in the "museum of the missing" would he most like to see?
Vaughan regards the Boston thefts as a tragedy. But he would dearly love to
gaze at Raphael's Portrait of a Young Man. Poland's Nazi governor took the
picture from Cracow's Czartoryski Museum in 1945. It has not been seen
since.

"I live in hope that that great, great Raphael will turn up one day,"
Vaughan says. "And who knows? It could turn up in a garage in Melbourne."
We're not holding our breath.