The Art Thief
I knew a guy who claimed he knew a guy who stole a painting from the Louvre in the early 1970s. This was before the current security systems were installed, and before the tourist hordes clutching copies of the Da Vinci Code had descended on the place. My source claims that as teenagers, he and his friends would go jogging in the museum.
The thief was a very quiet, nondescript, angry man who frequented the Louvre. He was particularly fond of a certain painting, which he visited at least once a week. The painting (not in the photo) was small, the size of a book (A Vermeer?! My source couldn’t remember); it could be tucked into someone’s coat and carried out without attracting attention. One day the angry man decided that his weekly visits were not enough. He needed to have the painting by him at all times. So he walked up to a female museum guard and said, “What would happen if I grabbed a painting and ran out?”
“What?†the guard said, and laughed. Whereupon the man seized the painting and ran out of the Louvre. By the time the stunned guard could react to the theft, he was halfway out of the building. No one stopped him at the exit. He took the painting home and put it in a desk drawer where he could look at it as long and as often as he wanted. He had no intention of selling it; he just wanted to look at it.
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The police conducted a search for the missing painting but they had no leads: the guard’s description of the thief applied to half the male population of Paris, and the fences knew nothing of the stolen art. The painting remained in the thief’s possession for a decade. The decision to return it came as quickly as the decision to take it. He phoned in an anonymous tip to the police and left the painting in a shopping bag on a chair in a crowded cafe. The identity of the thief was never established.
Of course, my source could’ve made up this story.
In the New Yorker, Dutch Master, the story of the man who forged Vermeers, sold one to Hermann Goering, and became a folk hero.
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October 28th, 2008 at 06:05
The French are weird. Imagine, to steal a work of art , hide it in your drawer so that you can enjoy it anytime you want! But they have nothing on the Austrians who would abduct a girl (or their own daughter), hide her in their basement so that they can enjoy her anytime they want
October 28th, 2008 at 09:36
Trevanian, in one of his novels (The Loo Sanction, I think), describes an ingenious way of stealing an artwork from a museum. Apparently, someone tried out his method and successfully stole a painting from a museum. The painting was found months later inside an abandoned car, an “x” slashed across its (the painting’s) surface.
The method of stealing Trevanian describes in his book is vastly different from the one you describe here, though.
Your source’s description of the theft seems a bit far-fetched to me. Now, if it happened in a local museum, that’s another story altogether.:-)