They called him Spider ManAnd the name was honestly earned. Vjeran Tomic stepped things up. Walls, roofs, sides of Parisian apartment buildings. On the night of May 19, 2010, he climbed through a window at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, whose security sensors had been broken for weeks. No one at the museum got around to fixing it. Tomic left with five paintings: a Picasso, a Matisse, a Braque, a Leger, and a Modigliani. Together they were worth an estimated $123 million. The whole thing was set in motion by an antique dealer named Jean-Michel Courvez, who wanted a lager in particular and hired Tomic to restore it. The other four canvases were, for all practical purposes, an afterthought. The men involved in the scheme were eventually arrested. However, the paintings were not recovered. During the investigation, a colleague’s mother told police that she panicked and threw it in the garbage. If her account is correct, five major works of early modern art are decomposing in a landfill somewhere outside Paris.
Kunsthalle Museum, Rotterdam, 2012
What happened at the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam on October 16, 2012, would be hard to believe if the evidence were not so overwhelming. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, thieves broke in and stole seven paintings. The list of artists is amazing: Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Gauguin, Lucian Freud. Each painting was on loan for a temporary show from a private collection, the Triton Foundation. The police identified and arrested the suspects without much difficulty. Recovering what they stole is an entirely different matter. Radu Dogru, one of the convicted thieves, eventually told police that his mother, Olga, had taken the pictures and fed them to the wood stove at their home in a small village in Romania. She did this, he said, to destroy evidence once the arrests began. The investigators went to the house. They sifted through the ashes in the stove. What they found was consistent with what you’d expect if someone had burned old oil paintings: traces of pigment, binding oil, tiny nails that held the canvas to its stretcher bars. Olga later took it back. She said she actually buried the paintings in a cemetery near the village. No one has been able to confirm either version. But if the first story is true, then a Monet, a Gauguin and a Picasso all ceased to exist in the same night, in the same room, in a house in the Romanian countryside. It is one of the most disturbing possibilities in the recent history of art.
