Stolen moments

In a couple of weeks the second art crime symposium kicks off at Wellington’s City Gallery. The art crimes under discussion don’t involve the production and presentation of bad art but rather the theft, forgery and trafficking of any art. No doubt there’ll also be room to talk over some of the serious (the armed theft of a Tissot painting from the Auckland Art Gallery), the opportunistic (the removal of a £1,000 painting in 1908 from the NZ Academy of Fine Arts and consequent payment to an ‘A G Ransom’ to get it back), the destructive (the slashing of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s painting Glasgerion by G Sheridan in 1944) and the ludicrous (Dr Jack Rucinski convincing Robert McDougall director John Coley that he had found Psyche, a painting that went missing in 1942 - when he certainly had not).
 
Hopefully there will also be time enough to explore the logistics of one of the most audacious art thefts in New Zealand’s history: the disappearing of a life-sized set of seven nativity figures nicked from a storage facility in Taihape.  Joseph, Mary and Jesus et al were the work of Martin Roestenburg, the sculptor who also made the too-big-to-be-stolen giant statue Our Mother of Lourdes in Paraparaumu.

The symposium starts on 15 October and you can book here.

Sannd man

New Zealand’s most incompetent art thief, Ricardo Romanov (aka Ricardo Genovese aka Anthony Ricardo Sannd), has just been served up seven years for pinching a limited edition Ducati Desmosedici motor bike. This is the same man who stole James Tissot’s painting Still on Top from the Auckland Art Gallery back in 1998. Although the crime certainly turned serious, it began comically enough with Romanov (known as Sannd at the time) reconnoitering the Gallery decked out in a false wig, fake beard and dark glasses. The following month he entered the Auckland Art Gallery wearing a motorcycle crash helmet and holding two firearms including a double barreled shotgun. After knocking a security guard to the floor he took Tissot’s painting from the wall, removed it from its frame, rolled it up and left. He made his escape on a motorbike of course but not before firing the shotgun into the air when approached outside the Gallery. It only took the Auckland police eight days to find Sannd along with the ‘dramatically damaged’ painting that had been rolled up in an old sack. And all this before he could sell it to a supposed Hong Kong business man who he claimed had ordered up the robbery offering $800,000 in $100 notes for the painting. Sannd got 16 years and nine months for his efforts and was released in March 2012.
You can see a video here on the theft and restoration work required on the Tissot

Crime watch

It’s got to be said that art crime in NZ doesn’t feel like a growth industry. The biggest one in our history has got to be the large-scale removal of Maori taonga in the early days making everything since pale by comparison. When it comes to recent ransacking, people with contemporary art on their walls are unlikely to find it’s been included with the swag. Of course there have been some famous examples, the theft of the Tissot from the Auckland Art Gallery, the kidnap of Colin McCahon’s Urerewa mural, the life-sized nativity nicked from Taihape and never found, Christchurch’s painting Psyche by Solomon J Solomon. Some sculptures have been melted down and a few works have been poked, written on and spat at over the years, but the tally isn’t huge. There are always forgeries of course or at least talk about the possibilities but it’s probably at the low end of challenging the criminal justice system. Anyway, this is to let you know that a symposium organised by Louisa Gommans titled ARTCRIME2015 is going to take on this subject and give it a shake in September. You can find out more about it, speakers etc. and register here.

Missing

Pippin Barr’s latest look at the art world via games is in 3D. It takes off from the FBI National stolen art file (worth a look in its own right) and where stolen art might not be found even if you found it. You can move around The stolen art gallery by going here and read some background on the game here. Maybe, while you're inside you could even try to nick one of the labels when no-one’s looking.

Double Dutch

"I could not imagine that a museum would exhibit such valuable works with so little security"
 
Speaking during his trial, for the theft of works by Gauguin, Monet and Picasso, Romanian Radu Dogaru sets the scene for a suit against the Kunsthal in Rotterdam for negligence.

We was framed

One thing you can count on in the movies is that if art theft is involved it will be called a ‘heist’ or a ‘caper’.  Last Sunday's Doors open on UKTV was a classic in the caper category starring Stephen Fry as your typical bumbling curator (sic).  

The promo pic shows the cuddly crims holding what we assume to be the loot from some English art museum or stately home. They might just as well be coming out of a Dunbar Sloane auction with works by Charles Barraud, Raymond McIntyre, and practically any abstract painter showing at the New Zealand Academy up on Buckle Street in the early sixties. 

You can see a preview trailer for  Doors open here and links to other museum crime movies, a bunch of new ones plus a few we have covered in the past.
 
Images: top, promo for Doors open movie. Lower, OTN’s highly skilled Photoshop division re-jig distorted picture held by criminals as if by magic.

Art Heist: Yes, it's a steal the original, copy original, burn the copy, give original to evil collector movie

The art of stealing: A couple of bad hats are paid to nick a Van Gogh from an abandoned farm owned by an Argentinean countess. Watch the trailer here

Double trouble: Security guards from two Chinese cities join forces to catch art thieves. Trailer here

Dr No: A Classic. James Bond meets the evil cat stoker who owns the stolen portrait of the Duke of Wellington

Entrapment: Catherine Zeta-Jones snakes through those nifty red laser beams to steal a $40 million Rembrandt

Gambit: Statue stealing and a fake Monet with Colin Firth as the curator

The good thief: Nick Nolte steals a fortune in rare paintings from a Monte Carlo casino. Trailer here

Headhunters: HR operative by day, art thief by night

Ocean's Twelve: Vincent Cassel's climbs through more nifty red beam to steal a Fabergé Egg

Trance: After an art heist caper a hypnotist is called in to find a missing stolen painting (seriously).

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999): thieves pinch Monet’s landscape The island of San Giorgio Maggiore at dusk from the Met

The Train: Immaculately uniformed Germans are on the rails with hundreds of paintings from French museums but don’t reckon on Burt Lancaster. Trailer.

Talking books

“And for ten days and nights I wrenched and slapped and sanded until, with the flood still running through my head, the canvas put the holy fear of God in me, made the bloody hair on my bloody neck stand up on end.”

Artists Butcher Bones describing the production of his McCahon-like painting If you have ever seen a man die in Peter Carey’s Theft: a love story

Goners

In the story of gold frames there's probably none sadder than those hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. New Zealanders might be forgiven for thinking they've stumbled on a Julian Dashper installation but this image is in fact a reminder of the day in 1990 when thieves stole $US500 million worth of artworks from the museum. You can see them here on the FBI’s stolen art site. Now the Gardner is offering a $US5 million reward for information leading to the return of the works and today the FBI has announced it knows who stole the works, but doesn't know where they are. You can read this amazing true art-crime story here.

Image: once were paintings at the Stewart Gardner Museum

Stop thief... whoever you are

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One of our readers (thanks D) has pointed us to the recently published finale of the theft alluded to in Dr No. The portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Goya seen in the movie was stolen from the National Art Gallery in London and eventually recovered. Kempton Bunton, a 61-year-old unemployed bus driver, confessed to the crime and spent three months in jail although he was eventually found not guilty of nicking the painting only of stealing the frame. It now appears that it was in fact his son John who did the deed. Friday’s Guardian tells all:

“Just before dawn on Monday 21 August 1961, John Bunton – a temporary van driver living not far away in digs off Tottenham Court Road – stood on a parking meter to get over the gallery's back wall. He then used a six-metre ladder left by builders to climb through the unlocked window of a men's toilet to get into the main building of the gallery.

"The painting was standing on an easel in a roped-off enclosure at the top of the main stairs. 'I went up to it, took hold of it, and carried it back to the gents toilet,' he told the police. He climbed back out of the window, down the ladder, and retraced his steps to the back wall by St Martin's Street. 'I climbed over the wall, still holding the picture in one hand ... I put the picture on the back seat of the car and drove back to [his furnished room in] Grafton Street. I then put the picture under my bed.'"

Bunton said that he hadn't carried a jemmy and if the toilet window had been shut he would have had to give up. He had to push-start the small black Wolseley that he used as a getaway car.

You can read more of this strange art story here.

Images: Look and Learn magazine illustrations for a story on the theft. Thanks to this new information we now know they got the thief wrong and that the painting wasn’t taken off a wall. The illustrations Recovery of the stolen Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington are by Andrew Howat / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / The Bridgeman Art Library

The returning

Stealing the carved figure of a crucified Christ from the Futuna Chapel in Wellington’s Karori must have taken some nerve. It’s not a small item for a start and with the arms out stretched as they are, not easy to smuggle under a blanket. But now, ten years later, this work carved by Jim Allen has been recovered. In terms of religious theft the Christ figure is not the biggest object to have been nicked in NZ. Consider the loss in sixties Taihape of an entire life sized nativity scene carved by the same artist who made the giant Virgin Mary statue on State Highway One near Paraparaumu. In that case though the figures were never seen again. Other theft-of-sculptures-of-Christ stories on OTN here.

Image: Before and after the theft (reconstruction only)

Panting for art

We haven’t had a really good protest outside an art museum in NZ for ages. It's hard to imagine Te Papa showing a statue of the Virgin in a condom nowadays or the City Gallery fronting up with a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, but in Caracas, Venezuela protest has reached giddy heights sparked by the saga of the Matisse painting Odalisque in Red Trousers.

Around 12 years ago the painting was stolen from the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art with the thieves replacing it with a shonky version they'd knocked up. The switch went undiscovered for who knows how long but came to light as the museum struggled to find works by Jasper Johns, Henry Moore and Lucian Freud. Some commentators think there may be up to 365 works missing (which puts the 20 that Te Papa were having trouble finding a few years ago into perspective). 

And the troubles in Caracas aren't over. The Matisse Odalisque has been found by the FBI but they are being slow, very slow, to return it (oh, oh, they are now starting to think that this one might be another fake). Losing patience a group of women have done what any sensible art protestors would do and gathered outside the museum just wearing red harem pants. More here if you want it.

Image: Top protestors at the Caracas museum and bottom the recovered painting

Container theft

"When things do go, they go high up the food chain and you don't often get them back."

Masterworks Gallery director Eloise Kitson in the NZH attributing recent lookalike thefts (container division) to drug users.

Yo mouse

Saturday morning and here’s an art-clip for the kids. It’s Rastamouse episode 103 Da Missing Masterpiece. 

Images: the Rastamouse story in four pics clockwise from top left to save adults slouching over to You Tube. Thanks to RS for leading the way.

That art is scrap

A couple of years ago, prompted by the theft of a bronze sculpture we reported on the price of bronze as an incentive to nab art. Well don’t try it in the States where they have www.scraptheftalert.com. It was this website that recently alerted police to the thieves responsible for pinching $90,000 worth of art from the Ratner Museum. You can read the full story here.

Bagged

Last week Swedish police found three stolen paintings in a plastic bag while investigating a credit card fraud. The paintings worth $NZ2 million by Edvard Munch, Gustaf Rydberg, and Pär Siegård were from the Malmo Art Museum and had been stolen three weeks previously. 

How did the police know this? Simple, the words Malmö Art Museum were written on the plastic bag. Which was kind of lucky as the people at the Malmö Art Museum hadn’t noticed that the works had gone, "I was shocked. Flabbergasted," Göran Christenson, the museum’s director told Swedish radio.

Send the cash or the life-size head with exaggerated features gets it

“a plaster cast of a skull; a 20cm-high kneeling figure holding a bowl, in mulberry; a life-size head with exaggerated features made out of gingko wood; and a smaller, mask-like face in walnut.” – description of sculptures stolen from Christchurch artist Paul Dean reported in The Press today

Duck tales

No, this is not a look-alike.

It is a warning to the citizens of Christchurch.

Sometime last Sunday in the Boston Public Garden, one of seven bronze ducklings was cut off at the feet and stolen for scrap. Nancy Schon’s sculpture Make Way for Ducklings has the same informal approach to animal anatomy that the Christchurch Corgis do, so this is a heads-up about any potential copy corgi attempt.

The Boston Ducks, unlike the Christchurch Corgis, have a long history of animal liberation. Individual ducklings have been nabbed in 1987 (shortly after the work was installed), 1988, 1992 and 1999. Only two of the stolen birds were ever returned.

Other bronze napping stories on OTN here.

As we slept Boston's bronze duck was found. You can see a video of the momentous event here.

Images: top, missing duckling Boston. Bottom Christchurch

The Bronze age

When the Wall Street Journal does an article on art thefts for scrap, it’s time to lock up your sculptures. The article was prompted by the theft about a year ago of John Kennedy’s The Spirit of Life. The 113 kilos of bronze were snatched in Brea California and no doubt scrapped. Since then a 2.1 meter 232 kilo bronze statue Miner has been taken from the Cathy Circle in LA. Valued at $125,000 it was expected to get about $900 as scrap.

In all the WSJ identifies eight sculpture thefts in the US over the last three years. Of course we had our own bronze age for sculpture theft in 2005. Most spectacular was Napier’s Pania of the Reef when was taken off its perch. Weighing in at 60 kilos she was probably worth around $30 as scrap but was found unharmed. There was a flurry of concern the same year when a guard was put on Wellington’s Bronze Form by Henry Moore, probably in sympathy for the one that was pinched the same year from the Henry Moore Foundation in England. In that case the 3.4 x 2.4 meter sculpture valued at $NZ7.5 million was simply loaded onto a Mercedes flat-bed lorry. The view at the time was that the Moore would be less valuable as scrap and had probably been shipped to the mysterious Argentine collector who buys all the stolen art in the world.

Meanwhile, in Wellington, Brenden John Marshall, possibly fired-up by the Pania heist, nicked a 3 x 3 metre sculpture from outside the Swell restaurant in Waikanae. Long Horizon by Paul Dibble was valued at $250,00. When he came to trial in July 2007, Marshall was also found guilty of blackmailing the owners by threatening to cut up the artwork and sell it for scrap if they did not pay a ransom. Marshall copped 300 hours of community work for his troubles. Who says art isn’t part of the real world?
A reader tells us that bronze is currently $18 per kilo. We also omitted to mention the five bronze sculptures by Greer Twiss stolen by thieves who used bolt cutters to break into the Wintergardens Fernery in the Auckland Domain in October 2007. Thanks W.