it seems crazy to me to steal a famous painting from a museum. the number of people willing to purchase a black market painting worth ~$millions is probably like a dozen, and the transaction would be super high risk. so many easier crimes to commit.
The numbers are higher than you'd expect. The trade in illegal (and so high rarity and limited access) goods is ongoing and flourishing via the use of third party intermediaries like free port systems [1] as well as networks of morally grey curatorial and preservation staff. Several notable archaeological "missing links" of the past few years came from said staff mediating access to private collections of undescribed provenance.
I don't understand why anyone would want to buy something outside of its legal socio-economic context, when that thing's entire value is derived from that context and is otherwise worth very little intrinsically based purely on aesthetic value.
Any market value it sells for is then based on some shared mental deficiency which prevents people from understanding that.
"Possession is nine-tenths of the law." That's the "legal socio-economic context". If it's worth having, and there's only one, so that if you have it nobody else does, then some people will want to have it with or without legal sanction.
And, a thing's economic value is derived from what someone else will pay for it, and only that. If someone else (or several someones) will buy it, whether or not the law agrees that it's legal, then the thing is valuable. (See drugs for an example.)
I wouldn't say that such people have a mental deficiency. A moral deficiency, yes, absolutely, but not a mental one.
For bragging rights? Somehow I imagine that when the uber wealthy entertain other uber wealthy, they eventually show their rarest collections to a few select guests.
I mean, it only takes the cooperation of 4 parties to create an economic incentive in these cases.
One owner who knows the value but won't sell at that or any value, one willing to pay a thief less than that value, the thief, and a buyer willing to pay more than the thief was payed.
"Wow, the museum payed a million dollars for this? I'd be willing to pay 5."
"Oh? Suppose I know a guy who'll nick it? Now, it'd be stolen so I couldn't charge quite as much, but the guy takes his cut up front, so let's call it 2?"
> the number of people willing to purchase a black market painting worth ~$millions is probably like a dozen
You only need one.
With something like this I imagine you could hold on to it for years or even a lifetime waiting for the right connection to come along. Maybe some of them are even commissioned or pre-sold.
I can’t say I know anyone with stolen art, but over my lifetime I’ve known people across a range of wealth classes who got a thrill out of acquiring and owning something that was risky contraband.
I know someone in LA with a piece like this. I was invited with a couple of close friends to their house to view it. This person didn't buy it, though, they took it with their own hands (and explained how simple it was). There were four of these pieces made. I'm pretty certain one is on public display. I don't know about the other two.
I always wondered if these sorts of people actually existed, with a Mona Lisa tucked away in a secret room, or something. And it turns out, yes, they really do.
Whoa, that's crazy. Did they rationalize it by saying they were preserving it? Were they an art collector/lover in general? or just someone who committed a theft of opportunity decades ago and has been carrying it around ever since, like in The Goldfinch? (I guess I assume the theft was long ago and overseas in some country without an extradition treaty, otherwise I feel like you'd be nuts to be parading millions of dollars of art around random people). Very curious
One of their rationalizations was preservation. They love the piece. They're a recognized expert on this piece. Maybe the expert. I would hazard they are probably one of the best custodians of it, for now. They have it sealed in a display case. The last time I saw pics of the other one on public display it is also sealed in a display case in the lobby of a multi-billion dollar corp.
It had a very low value when it was purloined, but if it were to appear on the open market right now I have no idea what the price would be. Seven digits, easily. It's like snatching a Banksy from his first gallery show in 2001 when his stuff was like $100 on the wall of a restaurant.
It's not quite as romantic as a Goldfinch style heist. Although I feel in some ways it might be to the same point where they can no longer return it since it's become bigger than they thought. I don't believe they need the money, so it might be a Thomas Crown situation and it might just end up being anonymously dropped back off one day.
You reported it I would hope? Art theft is a crime against humanity, not to mention the artist. Sort of like saying, “I know this serial killer in LA, he showed me and some other guys his severed head collection, it was wild.” Ymmv
If you can wait out the statute of limitations you can of course sell it. It seems that in France that is not a thing in stolen art from a public collection
Or, since it’s a Renoir, maybe they were planning to distribute them as punishment.
“Thought you were going up in the world, did you Salvo? Oh no, no Armand Guillaumin for you. The boss ain’t pleased and he wants you to know about it. One more screwup and you’ll end up with a face like that”
i saw your other comment, and now this one. i dont really know much about art, and i'd love for you to help me understand your apparent disdain for renoir
You can pick "bad" artworks from any artist, maybe even objectively bad. And I dislike many of his paintings (sickly sweet, "fluffy" style) but he also did some lovely paintings. In my opinion of course.
e.g. I like the Alfred Sisley painting and the more realist painting of his father, and Madame Clementine Valensi Stora which he apparently repudiated.
But I don't think he ever painted a truly good female nude, and some are just utterly reductive (as a photography nerd I find Torso Effect of Sunlight to be the most interesting but the face oh the face)
Loads of it is really rather Monkey Christ, on reflection, and after about 1905 nothing is great.
Round faces and opulent bodies were hot stuff in Renoir's times, not so much today. Older people simply had different concepts of feminine beauty than us.
Also those were artists deliberately breaking the rigid rules of realist classicism and finding inspiration on Asian art. Renoir was criticized by its figures "with skin and clothes obscenely stained with what seems dirty greasy oil spots" but the big point was to trigger controversy and to flip the bird to the classicism of the "real" professional artists.
Whaaat? Renoir was born in 1840 and died in 1919. Women were about as slim as they are now (or slimmer) in the 1870s and generally slimmer by the early 1900s. Have a look at photographs, including artistic nudes, from this era and you will see. Anne Brigman, Alice Boughton, etc., but also any amount of late 19th century art nude and erotica; you will see that Renoir was likely deliberately choosing to paint chubbier, more cherubic, unthreatening nudes, especially after the late 1880s.
But it’s not the shapes of the bodies that I have an issue with, in general. (Apart from the whole cherubic, gravity free aspect.)
It’s the fact that the faces are terrible, featureless, ugly, often scarily unsettling and clownish, the heads are poorly proportioned, the eyes often dead or doll-like.
He painted out the realism of women just as they were demanding equality, IMO. In the real world, women were demanding better pay, better work protection and votes; in Renoir’s world they were often overgrown insipid cherubs, no evidence of angst or really any kind of inner life. His paintings of male faces, largely, are grounded in more realism even into his late era.
> Women were about as slim as they are now (or slimmer) in the 1870s and generally slimmer by the early 1900s
Not exactly. Women depicted other women as ideal models. Men had a different idea on mind.
There were two types of male painters in that years. Some had enough money to receive a full classical training in Art Academy. Other, like Renoir, came from poverty and blue collar families and had to self-train themselves. They didn't have any access to the elites, and were ignored and mocked by the classically trained ones.
They fought back rebelling against the rigid academy rules, and using shock and scandal so their real experience about the real world couldn't be ignored anymore.
Where Elites embraced paintings of women suggesting opulence (I'm a rich person, I can buy this clothes), mythology (I'm an educated person), elegance or beauty (I'm successful and popular). Blue collared people show proudly their favorite feminine attributes: fecundity and sex.
Renoir could paint a smooth perfect realist face, if he painted a bunch of spots instead, it was a way to declare "I don't want this model to be identified. She received an anonymous face, because is anonymous. Realism and a polished look is not the important thing here". Or maybe he was just drunk and didn't cared. Who knows. Their fellows deliberately rejected the classic glass skins and polished strokes as a way to depict human nature, and founded the modern painting deconstructing the body in all the possible ways on Cubism, Fauvism, Pointillism or Impressionism.
Blue collared painters often painted prostitutes, like a way to shout "this is the real world", "this is what really matters". Some delivered the message in a pretty savage way, even for today standards (See L'Origin Du Monde from Courbet). If you think that all the models were slimmer in 1870, see The Baigneuses also from the same painter.
They proudly show a more free, rebelious underworld (Manet, Dejeuner sur L'Herbe). And many of the big names that came later learned the lesson and became famous selling a fantasy of freedom and underworld to their rich clients.
The real valuable part was not the art (in my opinion). What clients were eager to pay for, was the connections
Dali assured to be filmed always surrounded by beautiful young people. Warhol had their own collection of rare and beautiful animals around to show. Bacon and Hockney played the same role creating safe spaces or became models for Transvestite or LGTB people.
This is the lesson to all future artists. Stick a banana to a wall, it does not matter. Is just an excuse to people came and laugh. What matters is the value of your social net. What you can do to entertain your rich clients, to help them to launder their money, to connect them with famous people, drug dealers, or "trustable" sexual workers.
But this is just my personal opinion, and is fine if other differ.
> But, but... women demanding equality!
This was never about women demanding equality. Art was a war of classes
Renoir's kind of "pop" as far as Impressionists go. Laypeople like him because his work is easy to look at, but trained artists can find a lot to fault in his technique and composition. He was also kind of an asshole.
In the USA, at least, almost all criminal convictions end in a plea negotiation with the government. The criminal and the government go back and forth trying to work out a deal that is acceptable for both (shortest sentence for criminal, least work for the government). Having something the government (or a specific politian) wants can be used in your side of the negotiation.
I doubt they admit to anything, but having some information that helps lead to the recovery of a valuable item could be worth something. To be honest, this is the first I have heard of the practice, but it sounds plausible to me.
There is a plotline involving this in the first season of The Line of Duty.
It opens with a guy who's complaining to the police about the frequent robbery of his house. They view him as a nuisance and try to respond to his complaints as little as possible.
Eventually someone is apprehended committing a different crime in a different location. An officer visits him in the hospital (there was a mighty struggle before he was caught) and asks if he'd be willing to lower his sentence by potentially resolving some other outstanding crimes that the police are investigating.
She reads off a list of crimes, and he responds "yeah, that was me" to everything she says. One of the items is the several robberies of the guy we met earlier.
It's win-win; his sentence is lowered for doing the police a favor, and the police report a higher solve rate.
After that, the original guy who was always brushed off suffers another robbery. Since he happens to be home at the time of the latest one, he is severely beaten.
So the lesson here is if you are a criminal - commit multiple crimes, hope in case you get caught then it is for a lesser crime, so you can trade secrets of a bigger crime for leniency?
I wonder what victims have gotta say about that...
Not everywhere. In some countries there is no bargaining system, and criminals will just fess up because they want to unburden, or because they might as well get famous on their way down.
But it is true that most national states will have a dialogue with organised crime, and privilege the pursuit of this or that interest over blind punishment. Greater good and all that.
"Hey, I don't have any idea how it got there, but I heard some guy talking about a famous stolen painting that's stashed right here in this neighborhood. Apparently a Renoir."
From the documentaries I've watched it's usually the other way around. There's either already a known buyer, or the thief has someone in their circles that already knows how to sell it. So there's a middleman between already trusted entities.
There is specific Italian law about return of art. This would normally apply to people who stole the art but a careful lawyer could use this law to negotiate a reduced punishment for organized crime charges. If the art theft is described as a part of a larger criminal enterprise, then the return of that art could trigger a 2/3 reduction in punishment. See below (translated by google).
"is committed by the person who has collaborated in identifying the co-conspirators or has ensured evidence of the crime or has effectively worked to prevent the criminal activity from being carried to further consequences or has recovered or had recovered the cultural property subject to the crime (penalty reduced from one third to two thirds)."
> the number of people willing to purchase a black market painting worth ~$millions is probably like a dozen
Right, but what about your local brick dealer who has 10-50K to waste on whatever? Definitely way more common and easier than you think to unload these sort of things, once you go down in price a lot because of the circumstances.
Maybe I've seen too many movies—but you can now sell fakes of those paintings to all dozen of your customers (so long as the customers keep their purchase secret from the other purchasers).
There are some “criminals” and criminal gangs and such, but I think the increase we have seen is due to Russia, Iran, and others who are giving extra resources and intelligence to some of these groups to deprive western institutions of their cultural heritage as part of the “hybrid war”.
Notice how things aren’t being stolen at this magnitude in China? Japan? If we’re Russian or Iranian for example I think this would be a great strategy if you view yourself at a civilizational war. Most of Europe is still asleep or in denial.
> Notice how things aren’t being stolen at this magnitude in China
Stealing from a Chinese museum would be extremely difficult. Cameras and security staff monitor exhibits during the day, and even after hours, extensive surveillance everywhere, makes it hard to get away unnoticed.
The risk is simply too high
There was a recent theft in a European museum. Smash and grab of jewels and coins with a hammer. They didn’t have a metal detector or any real security there.
You could make an argument some artwork is relatively less protected than its value but that at best still only explains China (per the OP). Why not other countries?
Formally-protected cultural heritage is disproportionately located in Europe compared to other continents, if anything because we effectively invented the practice. Italian, French, Greek, Egyptian museums store more artefacts than they can expose at any given time - we're talking 2x-3x.
