MUSINGS: The Art Heist

The enduring romantic appeal of the art heist. 

Transcript

The art heist. It came to mind - again - not just because of the robbery at the Louvre, but because of the recent news emerging from Italy of the theft of paintings by Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse, which were stolen from a museum in northern Italy, earlier in March, but which the museum did not disclose until recently, apparently in the hope that the thieves would return again and be caught. It was a brazen, highly-planned operation which took less than three minutes from start to finish. 

Taken were Renoir’s 1917 oil painting “Les Poissons,” Cezanne’s 1890 watercolor “Tasse et plat de cerises” and Matisse’s 1922 piece of work “Odalisque sur la terrasse”, removed from the Magnani Rocca Foundation, near the city of Parma. 

Interestingly, Italy has an elite Carabinieri art squad, which retrieves - they say - a remarkable 100,000 stolen artifacts from all over the world each year. They say that this is down to a highly sophisticated network that tracks stolen art, which is almost certainly highly sophisticated not in technological terms, but in an expansive network of informers with their ear to the ground, because of course one of the defining factors of stolen art - at least when financial gain is involved - is that you can’t just sell it to just anyone, and need to contact potential clients, which are few in number, and in so doing, the culprits open themselves up to risk.

The anomaly, however, lies in thefts to order, where no speculative sale will take place, and where there is a pre-existing client who just wants the piece for themselves. Sometimes, even, in the most romantic stories, the buyer is the thief. In the standard narrative, the challenge is the heist itself, not what is to be gained from the heist. It doesn’t come from a film about an art heist, but there’s a scene in Michael Mann’s 1995 film Heat when De Niro’s gang is talking about the risks involved in their final operation, when the character of Michael Cherrito (played by Tom Sizemore) says to De Niro’s character: “For me, the action is the juice.” That’s about right.

It probably also garners our attention and sparks something in us because we almost certainly regard these kinds of heists as victimless crimes, assuming that whoever has Cezannes, or Matisses, or Renoirs won’t miss a few masterpieces. The essence of the Robin Hood action is stealing from the rich - it’s a kind of social redress. And not social redress undertaken at the end of a gun, ugly as that is, but redress undertaken by gumption, vim, endeavour, creativity and gall. The wealthy aren't beaten, they are outwitted.  

As Catherine Banning says in The Thomas Crown Affair, “This is an elegant crime, done by an elegant person. It's not about the money.” And perhaps that’s the most galling thing of all, for the rich, when they are outwitted out of something of great value - notional value, not utilitarian value - by someone with no fundamental interest in its value, beyond “the action”, and “the juice.”