Sad news for fine art aficionados the world over. This week marked a big heist in the artsy world, with not one but a total of seven works by some of the art world's biggest players stolen from a Dutch museum.
According to an article in Gawker, the works—which were brought together in a showing at Rotterdam's Kunsthal Museum for the first time, and sadly the last—included canvases by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin.
A museum spokesperson said the painting were of "considerable value." Duh, talk about understatement of the century.
It's the latest scandal to rock the art world, after a Rothko painting was recently vandalized, and a Munch painting that was also stolen in 2004, and recovered two years later, then went on to be auctioned for a cool $120m.
Dutch police are searching for witnesses and viewing videotapes of the theft which apparently took place at around 3 a.m. earlier this week.
Which begs the question: what on earth would thieves do with stolen art of this calibre? It's not like you can flog it at Sothebys, or hang it in your college dorm room. Whoever did this must have done so for kicks, i.e. to show that it could be done.
The exhibition, which featured more than 150 artists, was on loan from the Triton Foundation. Ouch! Imagine explaining that to the lender...
The loot:
I suspect no one will be rushing to loan anything to The Kunsthal for a while. Having no permanent collection of its own, it was obviously an easy target.
An art lover? How do you feel about such crimes?
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