Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2010)
On March 18, 2010, the day after St Patricks Day, an unknown vehicle slowly approached and parked near the side entrance of the Isabella Stuart Museum. Two men posing as police officers in full uniform, got out of the car and they approached and pushed the Museum buzzer. They stated clearly that they were responding to a disturbance, and that they requested to be let in.
They were allowed through the employee entrance by the guard on duty. At the criminals request the guard stepped away from his watch desk. He and a second security guard were then handcuffed and tied up in the basement of the Museum. The criminals then departed and got away with 13 of the Museums works of art in just 81 minutes.
Among the works of art stolen were; the Concert (1664), one of just 34 known Vermeer paintings, a 1633 Rembrandt picture of a boat crossing stormy waters, and a Manet painting of a gentleman in a café were among the treasures the burglars made off with in the hours that followed.
The masterpieces, which according to the FBI are still missing as of 2022, are worth a staggering total of $500 million. The Museum is still offering a $10 million dollar reward for information leading directly to the safe return of the stolen works.
The Mona Lisa gets stolen from the Louvre (1911)
The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci could be the most famous painting in the entire world, and one of the things that contributed to its notoriety was this art heist. Before 1911, not many people paid much attention to the painting. However, an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia and two of his countrymen spent the night hiding in a closet at the Louvre and fled with the painting after boarding a train leaving Paris on a Sunday morning.
The situation quickly developed into a global mystery, making it impossible to sell the piece because no one would be interested in purchasing a work of art that was attracting so much attention.
Peruggia then hid it under the floorboards of his Paris apartment before attempting to flog it once more 28 months later, this time to a dealer from Florence.
Peruggia claimed he was assisting in the repatriation of culture since he believed Napoleon had stolen an important aspect of Italian history and was resolved to return it to his country. After Leonardo died in France in 1519, King Francis I purchased the picture that he had been working on.
The director of the Uffizi Galleries, Giovanni Poggi, received the call from the Florentine merchant and accepted the piece, saying he would keep it secure and called the police. Peruggia was only imprisoned for seven months in total.
Spiderman Art Thief, Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, France (2010)
The “Spider-Man” was a fitting name for one Vjeran Tomic, a superb climber and burglar who spent his youth at Père Lachaise scaling gravestones and cemetery walls with his mates in preparation for robbing apartment buildings. Tomic, who refers to his method of theft as “intuitive,” committed his first burglary at the age of 10 in Mostar, when he entered the building by climbing through a window that was over ten feet above the ground and stole two several hundred-year-old books. He then went on to accomplish the largest art robbery of his generation at the age of 49.
Tomic’s affinity for fine art ultimately inspired him to commit this heist; he went into a manic state and stole a Matisse, a Picasso, a Braque, a Léger, and a Modigliani from the Musée d’Art Moderne in 2010.
On May 14th, Tomic began working on a window of the museum, using a black sheet of cloth as a curtain, a task that took six nights. Then in the early morning of May 20th, he entered the museum, leaving briefly to see if the alarms would go off (alarms that had been waiting to be fixed for several weeks at the time), then returned. Originally intending to take just one painting, he ended up leaving with five worth more than €100 million. Tomic was arrested in May 2011 and jailed for eight years. As for the paintings, they’re still missing.
$30 Million worth of Art Stolen from Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden, (2000)
Every good crime needs a distraction, and for this art heist, it came in the way of explosions. In 2000, burglars blew up cars in various parts of the city of Stockholm to distract police from an armed robbery at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Three raiders entered the museum on December 22nd at about 5:15 pm; while one armed with a submachine gun set about terrifying and threatening museum-goers and staff in the lobby, another two ran upstairs to grab three artworks worth a collective $32 million.
The thieves took only what they could carry and focussed on small-scale works they could tuck under their arms, including a self-portrait by the Dutch master Rembrandt and two works by the French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Escaping in style, they tore away in a small speedboat from the institution’s waterfront locale. Thankfully, by 2005 the paintings were all returned safely.
Edvard Munch’s The Scream gets stolen during the Winter Olympics, National Museum, Oslo (1994)
In 1994, two art thieves left behind a hand-written note that read: ‘Thousand thanks for the bad security!’ when they stole Edvard Munch’s The Scream from the National Museum in Oslo.
The thieves snapped the wire that held the paintings to a wall, literally nothing else, and departed with it.
The search lasted two years, with the police finally finding four pieces of the painting’s frame in Nittedal, a suburb north of Oslo, and what may have been a cryptic message that the thieves wanted to discuss a ransom.
The Scream was recovered in a sting operation, found in a hotel in a city north of Oslo. In 1996, four men were convicted in connection with the heist.
Impressionist masterpieces are taken from a Paris museum as the public looks on (1985)
The artwork that gave its name to the Impressionist art movement was stolen from Paris’s Musée Marmottan in 1985, in one of the most daring heists ever committed.
The thieves who stole the work entered in broad daylight, having bought tickets like everyone else, and they took Claude Monet’s iconic 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise, along with works by Berthe Morisot and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Nine guards and 40 visitors were held at gunpoint as some of the works were yanked from gallery walls. Although the nine stolen works were valued at $20 million, some said that Impression, Sunrise was priceless.
In 1990, all nine works were recovered at a villa in Corsica, and seven people were arrested.
A heist in Frankfurt leads to a fortune for the Tate (1994)
Insurance—never a sexy topic when it comes to museums—played a key role in the fallout from a theft at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle in 1994.
After two guards were bound and gagged, thieves removed two J. M. W. Turner paintings on loan from the Tate in London and one Caspar David Friedrich painting on loan from the Kunsthalle Hamburg.
Although two thieves and a dealer were arrested soon after the heist, the search for the missing paintings took more than a decade to complete.
In 2000, investigators said that the Turners were being held by a Serbian gang.
Then, in 2002, the Tate revealed that it had, in fact, secretly retrieved the Turners—and made £38 million in the process, thanks to an insurance gambit.
Meanwhile, the Kunsthalle Hamburg got its Friedrich back in 2003 via a lawyer who coordinated with the thieves. In the end, three men were convicted for the theft of the Turners, and two men who gave the thieves the keys to the museum were acquitted.
Whitworth Art Gallery Treasures Wind Up in the Loo (2003)
Three paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin, worth an estimated $8 million, spent a rainy night in a disused public bathroom after vanishing from the nearby Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.
Police investigating the theft received an anonymous tip, that led them to the missing artwork’s unlikely hiding place a day after their disappearance on April 26, 2003.
The paintings were found stuffed in a cardboard tube inscribed with a note claiming that the thieves had engineered the caper to highlight poor security at the museum.
The thiefs were never caught.
