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*Gone in 50 seconds*

Edward Dolnick's Stealing the Scream follows the trail of a missing 
Munch from Norway to Scotland Yard and back, says Ian Pindar

*Ian Pindar*
*Saturday April 14, 2007*

*Guardian*

*Stealing The Scream: The Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece *
by Edward Dolnick
272pp, Icon, £12.99

It took about 50 seconds to steal The Scream. Early one February morning 
in 1994, a man climbed a ladder, smashed a first-floor window of the 
National Gallery in Oslo, clambered inside and slid the famous painting 
down the ladder to an accomplice. He left behind a postcard depicting 
three red-faced men laughing. On the back were the words: "Thanks for 
the poor security." Inadequate security was the least of the gallery's 
problems. The Scream had been stolen on the very day that the Winter 
Olympics began in Lillehammer, so it was guaranteed maximum press 
coverage. "The theft was a jeering insult," explains Edward Dolnick in 
this gripping account of how The Scream was stolen, "a raised middle 
finger directed at Norway's cultural and political elite."

When Edvard Munch first exhibited The Scream in 1893, he was accused of 
dipping his finger in excrement and smearing it around. By 1994 it had 
become a much-loved icon of modernity and was valued at $72m. Its loss 
shocked the nation and rocked the art world. Norway wanted its 
masterpiece back, but every trail went cold. Enter Christopher Charles 
Roberts, a fast-talking representative of California's Getty Museum, who 
offered to negotiate with the thieves on behalf of the Norwegians. The 
deal was that if the Getty bought The Scream from whoever had taken it, 
then in return Norway would loan it the painting to hang alongside 
another work in the Getty collection, James Ensor's Christ's Entry into 
Brussels in 1889 (1888), a proto-expressionist masterpiece.

It was a good plan, and before long Roberts was meeting two of the 
thieves in the lobby of an Oslo hotel. A deal was struck, although 
unbeknown to the thieves there was one detail they had overlooked. 
Roberts didn't exist. He was in fact Charley Hill, a detective from 
Scotland Yard's art and antiques unit. As Dolnick reveals how this 
elaborate undercover operation came into being, he perfectly captures 
the thrill of planning a sting. "You're a bit like a scriptwriter," says 
one art squad detective. "It's a challenge to come up with something 
that has a genuine feel to it." Roberts certainly felt genuine. The 
Getty even falsified payroll files going back several years in case 
anyone investigated their imaginary employee.

Charley Hill is the hero of this book; a gruff, no-nonsense Gene Hunt 
figure with a love of fine art. As Dolnick observes admiringly, Hill can 
be studying the brushstrokes in an Old Master one minute and kicking 
down doors the next. As a young man he actually volunteered to fight in 
Vietnam (his father was American, his mother English) out of 
"intellectual curiosity". He has an impressive rapport with criminals, 
especially the most violent ones, and he also conforms to a familiar 
trope of all TV detectives: he trusts his instincts. He knows how to 
"read crooks" and how to lie. ("When you lie, lie big," he advises any 
wannabe undercover agents. "What gets you in trouble is lying about the 
little things; that's when things get hard to remember and when you trip 
yourself up.") He also knows when the time is right to do a deal and 
when to say "Go fuck yourself!" - a gamble that pays off in this 
instance as Hill successfully recovers The Scream

Hill regards art crime as a "serious farce", and that's just how Dolnick 
plays it, with journalistic verve, in this enjoyable book. A recurring 
theme is lack of funding. Scotland Yard's "Scream team" is so strapped 
for cash that Hill can't afford the books he needs to swot up on the 
painting. And if security is poor in the world's public art galleries 
it's because the galleries are poor. Yet art crime is a thriving 
industry. As much as $6bn a year could be changing hands in the art 
underworld.

The phenomenal rise in the price of art in recent decades has not been 
matched by any extra security in galleries, so they are sitting targets 
for opportunistic thieves. "Art theft is such an easy game and the 
penalties for getting caught are so low," says Dolnick, "that the most 
hopeless sap can play." Unfortunately this sometimes means great art 
gets destroyed. When Cranach the Elder's Sybille of Cleves was stolen by 
a French waiter, the thief's mother tried to hide the evidence by 
cutting it up and throwing it out with the trash. We can only hope that 
the 551 Picassos, 209 Renoirs, 174 Rembrandts and 43 Van Goghs currently 
still missing have not suffered a similar fate.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/