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November 21, 2024

Museum Theft: During the Musée Cognacq-Jay - Luxe de poche" Exhibition

Yesterday, thieves executed a daring daylight robbery at the Musée Cognacq-Jay, a museum located in the Hôtel Donon formerly owned by the eponymous family, and located in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.                                                                                Around 10:30 a.m., four individuals armed with axes and baseball bats shattered a large glass display case in the museum, while wearing gloves, hoods, and helmets in order to conceal their identities.  The heist unfolded in front of visitors during regular opening hours, though no injuries were reported among staff and exhibition attendees.                                                                                                                                                            The thieves took several objects from the temporary exhibition "Luxe de poche. Petits objets précieux au siècle des Lumières" extended because of its popularity to run through November 24, 2024.  

The event showcased perfume bottles, candy boxes, music boxes, snuff boxes, and sewing kits decorated with gold, precious stones, mother-of-pearl or even enamels, highlighting objects from the 18th and early 19th centuries, representative of the Age of Enlightenment, when precious objects like these were in vogue in France.  The event included objects loaned from the Château de Versailles, the Musée du Louvre,  the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Palais Galliera, the English Royal Collections and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 


Five objects were taken by the culprits, four of which ARCA has identified, before the thieves departed on scooters. 

Stolen material described as being taken in the robbery include the following: 

A gold snuff box dating from the 8th century and encrusted with agate cabochons made by Johann Christian Neuber , known for his gold snuff boxes, which he called Steinkabinettabatiere.  This object was on loan from the Musée du Louvre. 

A snuff box made of agate plates dating from 1760-1770, with hard stone reliefs, joined by a gold cage mount, and a lid encrusted with numerous brilliant-cut diamonds,  made by Daniel Baudesson, also on loan from the Musée du Louvre. 


A diamond-covered box belonging to King Charles III, described as a green jasper snuff-box, mounted with gold borders, finely chased with flowers and foliage in vari-coloured gold with panels and borders richly overlaid with baskets and sprays of flowers, trophies and foliage.  This object has nearly three thousand diamonds backed with delicately coloured foils in shades of pink and yellow.


A chrysoprase snuffbox made in Berlin, Germany, in ca. 1765, associated with Frederick II, the Great, of Prussia (1712-1786), previously on display at the Somerset House as part of the Gilbert Collection ©,  The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The fifth item was not identified at the time this article was posted and prosecutors have indicated that the French police are treating this as an armed robbery by a criminal gang. 

It should be remembered that due to their intricate craftsmanship and historical significance, snuffboxes made of gold and other precious materials, have long been prized by organised criminals, in part because they are small enough to easy move.   

"The Fulford Thefts" occurred in 1981 when Temple Newsam House in Leeds was burglarised in a nighttime heist, resulting in the loss of 24 exquisite snuffboxes.   In that incident, the culprits, operating under the cover of darkness, targeted these highly valuable items due to their intricate craftsmanship and historical significance. The incident was named after the notorious criminal gang linked to the thefts, and remains one of the most notable art crimes in UK history from a stately home.  The recovery of some pieces from this theft took decades. 

On June 10, 2003, the Johnson Gang carried out a high-profile theft at Waddesdon Manor, a historic estate in Buckinghamshire, England. The gang broke into the Rothschild collection housed at the manor and stole over 100 priceless items, including a significant collection of antique gold snuff boxes. The meticulously planned raid lasted only minutes, during which the thieves targeted small but immensely valuable £5 million collection, due to their portability and worth. 

The Cognacq-Jay museum specifies that it is closed while the investigation is underway and that it will reopen on Tuesday, December 10, 2024.  People who have purchased advanced tickets for the “Luxe de Poche” exhibition or for other activities will be automatically refunded.

November 17, 2024

Crossposting: What happened during WWII at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris?


From time to time ARCA hosts blog posts found on other blogs, (with the permission of the author) to highlight blogs of importance in this under-studied field.  This Sunday's entry comes from Plundered Art, a perspective from the Holocaust Art Restitution Project and is written by one of that organisation's founders, who also teaches Provenance during ARCA's programmes. 

What happened during WWII at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris

 by Marc Masurovsky

I have to admit that historians are a strange lot, especially in the choices they make on what to research and write about. Whether they are aware of this or not, their choices, once published and commented on, shape our popular understanding of history and their omissions (what they are not interested in) deprive us of a fuller understanding of historical events, large and small. 

Take the Museum of the Jeu de Paume in central Paris. It is a typical example of this. Aside from the work of Emmanuelle Polack, there is not a single book that has been exclusively devoted to the history of the Jeu de Paume during the years of German occupation (1940-1944) of France. But there are at least 12 non-fiction books solely devoted to Rose Valland’s heroism and work as a French spy and a cultural property recovery officer for the French government.

The outside world may have experienced the historical Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries through the eyes of Rose Valland’s hagiographers. If you are a movie buff, you may catch a glimpse of it in “The Train” by John Frankenheimer, a paean to French railroad workers during WWII who tried their utmost to prevent France’s cultural treasures from being removed to Nazi Germany in the closing months of the German occupation of France. 

The rooms of the Jeu de Paume have been a regular feature on the French Ministry of Culture’s website for over a decade, illustrating its many rooms through contemporaneous black and white photographs made interactive so that you can discover the looted objects displayed there for Hermann Goering’s pleasure.

Do you really know what happened at the Jeu de Paume from Fall 1940 when it opened as a depot and processing station for confiscated Jewish cultural property to early August 1944 when it ceased to function as such? Do you know who worked there, what their jobs were, what objects they handled, how decisions were made day-to-day, why they chose certain objects and not others, their likes and dislikes, who hated who, who slept with who, the internal cliques? This is "perpetrator history" and it should not be ignored. Otherwise, you, we, end up knowing little about a fundamental cog in the machinery of cultural plunder devised by a perpetrator in the 20th century. History tends to repeat itself like an old cliché.

The Jeu de Paume was a laboratory of cultural plunder created by the perpetrators—the German occupying power and a Nazi plundering agency, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), its employees, experts and agents. It is therefore logical to dissect its internal mechanisms so that we can understand how looted, confiscated, misappropriated cultural assets are “handled” by those who carry out these crimes.
Alfred Rosenberg, founder of the ERR

To this day, the Jeu de Paume and the four-year long campaign of confiscation, processing, and dispersal of Jewish-owned cultural property reflects the dark side of the museum world and its cultural workers. Your involvement in the arts and cultural activities, whether as a producer or consumer, does not shield you from engaging in heinous acts as a deliberate cog in a machinery of racially-motivated exploitation, grand theft, and persecution. These people are your typical “collaborators”, persons who intentionally cast their lot with the new sheriff in town—in this case, the Nazis and their local Fascist supporters (in this case, partisans of the collaborationist Vichy government).

PS: The only "depot" of cultural objects that has received proper scholarly treatment is the postwar Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP) which supplanted Hitler's Führerbau as of May 11, 1945, as a central processing station for recovered looted objects. American cultural officials referred to in pop culture as the "Monuments Men and Women” managed the site. Dr. Iris Lauterbach of the Munich-based Zentral Institut für Kunstgeschichte is the author of that study.

The next article will be devoted to inventories, basic didactic instruments that document cultural plunder.

For more on WWII films with some mention of cultural plunder, check out:
For more on Rose Valland, see:
For more on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, see:

 


November 8, 2024

In the news again: Vittorio Sgarbi’s art collection is again under scrutiny for more (allegedly) stolen artworks.

According to a story which was first broke via news reporters affiliated with Italy's  TV program Report and news agency Fatto Quotidiano, the Carabinieri TPC have seized two additional suspect works of art, found to be in circulation via Italy's former undersecretary for culture, Vittorio Sgarbi. 

The first is an altarpiece, entitled Compianto sul Cristo Morto, a 17th century work measuring 118 by 86.5 cm.  The painting represents one of several copies completed by the same artist, Giovanni Battista Benvenuti (also known as Ortolano) which feature more or less the same composition, the newly dead Christ, after his crucification, surrounded by mourners, with Golgotha in ancient Jerusalem, in the background.  This version matches most closely to one which was previously housed in the church of Porta di Sotto, known as the "Madonnina", in Ferrara, which is now in the Villa Borghese collection which is pictured here, at left. 

The altarpiece version connected to Sgarbi has been talked up as "an unpublished copy," like so many of Sgarbi's newly discovered, artistic discoveries are.   It had been scheduled to be hung at an ongoing exhibition Il Cinquecento a Ferrara: Mazzolino, Ortolano, Garofalo, Dossa which has been curated by the art critic scheduled to run through 16 February 2025 at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region.

Following law enforcement investigations, which continue to be carried out, by the Carabinieri TPC, the altarpiece was removed from display at the Palazzo dei Diamanti just three days before the start of the exhibition, due to a "provision from the judicial authority for an ongoing investigation" according to Pietro Di Natale, director of the Ferrara Arte Foundation.  

In the exhibition's dossier, the missing painting is described as being the property of the Collezione Cavallini Sgarbi.  Unfortunately however, for the ex politician, his altarpiece is suspected to be an artwork which was stolen from a noble palace in 1984 belonging to journalist Paganello Spetia in Bevagna. 

In addition to this new suspect painting of Christ after his crucifixion, officers also are investigating the theft of a 1939 terracotta sculpture, titled Madre e Figlio, by Raffaele Consortini, an artist from Volterra, which had been in Sgarbi's possession for many years. 

As can be seen at the end of this video, Sgarbi displayed a sculpture, depicting a mother holding her infant child, during an exhibition titled Giotto and the Twentieth Century which ran from 5 December 2022 to 4 June 2023 at the Mart in Rovereto, another public museum presided over by the art critic.  In this instance, he indicated that the sculpture was the property of the Fondazione Cavallini-Sgarbi.  That said, this artwork too seems to be tied to another theft, as it apparently matches a sculpture reported as stolen twenty-seven years ago. 

In that instance the artwork was apparently taken from the burial chapel of the Nannipieri family, in Cascina, in the Italian region Tuscany, located about 60 kilometres west of Florence.  According to Antonio Nannipieri, a former judge of the Court of Appeal of Florence, the sculpture had been placed on the altar inside his family chapel by his mother shortly after the death of his son Lorenzo Nannipieri,  who died, along with his girlfriend, in an accident in 1987.  Ten years later, in 1997, the chapel was broken in to and the sculpture and two candelabras were stolen. 

In Judge Nannipieri's own words when informed that his son's sculpture was in Sgarbi's possession, he stated: “Maybe he didn’t know it was stolen, but a collector should check the provenance of the things he buys, especially if he then puts them in an exhibition.” 

Leaving aside for a moment that an art historian is more than an average collector, and is fully trained in how to research the origins of works of art, and leaving aside the fact that Sgarbi is now claiming that he too is an "injured party in the proceedings," this leads us to a second critical question, who Sgarbi got all these stolen works from in the first place. 

November 7, 2024

From Gallery to 'Washing Machine': How One Art Dealer’s Love for Banksy Served as Cover for an International Drug Ring

On 11 May 2022, officers involved in the Eurojust 'Arkan' operation, assisting in the investigation begun by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate, deputy prosecutor Silvia Bonardi), and the Italy's Polizia del Stato raided 47 locations in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.  Their goal, the simultaneous arrest of as many as 31 suspects allegedly involved in an international narco trafficking ring.  One of the suspects on police radar was the much-hyped, Italian art collector and street art enthusiast-turned gallerist, Andrea Deiana.     

Prosecutors and law enforcement officers working the investigation had determined  that multiple organised crime groups (OCGs),  involved in the highly profitable illegal trade, were utilising a protected communications tool called EncroChat, which offered its subscribers and the drug syndicates the use of modified smartphones for encrypted communication which offered self-destructing messages, an encrypted vault and a panic button in the event the user believed their device had been compromised.

White Hat cyber-exploit hackers in the European police had cracked the EncroChat phone system and began listening in, striking more intelligence gold that miners working South Deep in Africa.  By 2023, officers had intercepted some 115 million criminal conversations, by an estimated 60,000 users in which criminals openly negotiated, sometimes in extremely granular detail, money laundering, murders, counterfeiting, drugs, and firearms trafficking.  By 2023, law enforcement's analysis of these messages and photos resulted in some 6658 arrests worldwide following the interception and analysis of over 115 million criminal conversations, by an estimated 60,000 users. 


Key members of one identified OCG which traded cocaine, ketamine, and cannabis on a large scale used the nicknames: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Pinocchio, Grandma Maria, Milly, Nestor, (the name of a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary, Nestor Ivanovic Machno) and the street artist "Banksy".  The latter being the nom de plum used by Andrea Deiana.

According to reconstructions by prosecutors, decrypted messages sent by Deiana in 2020, discussed ways to "clean the money" made through the network's drug trade, using sales of works of art and, in at least in one case, through the purchase of a lithograph by the street artist Banksy brokered via Deiana and his gallery in the heart of Amsterdam.  

Speaking to then-fugitive-from-justice Vincenzo Amato, a member of the Coluccia clan of Galatina in the Salento hinterland, Deiana wrote, "you can clean money without paying expenses, on the contrary, earning" and openly boasted about using his Dutch art gallery as a "washing machine." 

The Italian art dealer then is alleged to have funnelled €500,000 in proceeds from drug dealing into the purchase of an important autographed lithograph by the street artist Bansky which depicts the famous mural painted by the artist in Jerusalem on the wall between Israelis and Palestinians, known as The Flower Thrower.  Afterward, Deiana flipped the lithograph via his cuban girlfriend, to Pier Giulio Lanza, the controversial founder of The Dynamic Art Museum, for €200,000, plus a future balance of investments of digital NFTs, which apparently never took off. 

As part of a prosecutorial action, in May 2020 the Dutch judicial authority sealed Art3035,  Deiana's and his girlfriend Chiara D'Agostino's contemporary gallery on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht, one of the three main canals in the Dutch city  in compliance with an international rogatory.  On or around this date their socials also went dead.

After a year and a half on the run, Deiana was dragged back to Italy from Mexico City on 13 January 2024 in order to stand trial on drug charges in Italy.  Sentenced quickly  thereafter, in the court of first instance, to 16 years and 8 months in prison as the promoter of the criminal association, his lawyers quickly appealed.  This week, the Court of Appeal of Milan upheld a sentence of 12 years incarceration plus the confiscation, at the request of the deputy attorney general Paola Pirotta, of  The Flower Thrower lithograph by Banksy. 

Deiana's conviction is a textbook example of how the subjective valuation of art can make it an effective tool for money laundering. Criminals and “prestanome” (or front) dealers can move large sums of illicit money through art transactions without attracting the scrutiny of banks or regulators, effectively masking the money’s illegal origins. Artworks are also highly portable, making them ideal for transferring illicit funds across borders and further complicating efforts to track and control the flow of illegal money.

By:  Lynda Albertson

November 1, 2024

Edoardo Almagià Wanted: Manhattan DA Seeks Arrest of Dealer in Major Antiquities Smuggling Case

Just over a year ago, ARCA published a post highlighting suspect artefacts which passed through Michael L. Ward's variously named galleries which were worth further exploration.

In that blog post, it was noted that, according to Edoardo Almagià's Italian sentencing document, the convicted Italian dealer sold Michael Ward the following artefacts:

a. A black figure kylix;
b. A marble lion mask;
c. A  marble sculpture depicting a draped woman; 
d. A terracotta mask;
e. A torso of Aphrodite;
f. A romanesque capital;
g. A cameo female bust in marble;
h. A Roman marble urn;
i. A python crater from  Paestum  + 2 bronze vases;
j. A black figure olpe and marble torso;
k. 2 Attic craters, a hydria and abell crater.

Almagià, a Princeton-educated antiquities dealer, was born in New York to prominent Jewish Italian immigrant parents.  Once a high-profile dealer, between 1980 and 2006 he conducted lucrative sales to numerous museums and collectors, mingling with fallen-from-grace art-world elites like Marion True, Dietrich von Bothmer, and Michael Padgett.

Triade Capitolina on display at the Palazzo del Quirinale

1992

Almagià first became a person of interest in 1992 during Italian investigations. Facing charges for his own crimes, notorious capozona Pietro Casasanta revealed to interrogators that he had shopped the freshly looted Triade Capitolina to Almagià for his U.S. clients.  Casasanta told Carabinieri officers that he had sent the dealer a Polaroid of the recently excavated sculpture which depicts the tutelary deities of Rome—Jupiter, flanked by an eagle, Juno, and Minerva in a Corinthian helmet—shortly after it was unearthed in Guidonia Montecelio, near Rome. 

Almagià reportedly offered to pay Casasanta a meagre $20,000 for the multi-million-dollar statue, and after a bit of drama between the pair, Casasanta declined on the offer and sold hislooted marble sculpture to the owner of Atelier Amphora, Mario Bruno, another suspect intermediary dealer operating in Lugano, who also had zero compunction about buying suspect art and selling it onward. 

1996

By 1996, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) had seized two dozen Etruscan ceramics from the New York Upper East Side gallery of Renee and Robin Beningson which had ties to Edoardo Almagià.  According to that investigation, all 24 artefacts at New York's Antiquarium Ltd., had been looted from what is now known as the Parco Archeologico di Crustumerium. This site represents an ancient city which once overlooked the Tiber between Eretum and Fidenae north of Rome.   

Later evidence would determine that following the seasonal closure of an authorised excavation at Crustumerium in July 1987,  Almagià had hired tombaroli—professional looters—to pick up where the departing archaeologists had left off. 

The dealer is then alleged to have had the goods, extracted by the looters, smuggled out of Italy, passing first through Switzerland, before ultimately travelling overseas to New York where they came into the control of the Beningsons.

2000

Almagià’s next brush with the law came when he was stopped at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International airport in Queens, New York in 2000 with two stolen Italian frescoes from the ancient city of Vulci that he had falsely declared.  

Six weeks later, one of his commercial shipments was also stopped in Newark, New Jersey.  That shipment contained five stolen Italian antiquities and was again accompanied by false documentation. 

2006

By 2006, Almagià’s high life as a prestigious dealer cracked completely when, in April 2006, Special Agents with the US Department of Homeland Security, with intel assistance from officers with Italy's Carabinieri, obtained the legal authorisation to enter and photograph the contents of the dealer's New York apartment on 169 East 78th Street, as well as his rental storage space at Manhattan Mini-Storage, located at 420 E 62nd Street in New York.  There, officers documented dozens of antiquities and stacks of business records which coldly outlined the extreme excesses of this dealer's trafficking operations.   

Like Giacomo Medici's and Gianfranco Becchina's earlier archives, the "Almagià Archive" recovered in this law enforcement operation includes sales transaction ledgers, written in the dealer's handwriting, referred to by officers as the "Green Book" and the "Yellow Book" encompassing transactions  in 1997 and 1998.

In the "Green Book" Almagià listed, in concrete details, a total of 1,698 artefacts which he had sold out of his New York apartment. To do so, he often grouped artefacts by the tombarolo from whom he had purchased the material (identifying the supplying tombarolo by his nickname or initials).  Some entries listed in these ledgers designated both the price Almagià paid to his source, as well as the price he subsequently sold the artefact for.  On occasion, some entries even list to whom the looted artefact was sold onward to.

For example, one entry for an "Attic red fig. Lekythos w panther" shows that Almagià bought the object for $1,000 from "Mau," whom researchers identified as the tombarolo Mauro Morani).  He then asold the vessel onward to "antiq", the abbreviation for the previously mentioned New York gallery, Antiquarium, operated by Renee and Robin Beningson for $2,000.  

The extant pages of the "Yellow Book" document an additional 84 stolen antiquities or groups of stolen antiquities known to have been trafficked by Almagià  and/or his cousin Peter Cesare Glidewell who operates a gallery space registered in the UK and operating in Spain known as Caylus Fine Art Limited.  The level of detail in both of these ledgers ultimately created a strikingly clear blue print, which, along with seized Day Planners, invoices, and lists, has given authorities a clear map to follow which has proven critical to this complex and lengthy investigation, and to tracing where each of the suspect artefacts handled by Almagià went after he cashed in. 

Through the initial work on this US investigation, seven antiquities were quickly identified as having been looted from Italy.  But while the review was still under way, Almagià used the intervening time to shift more suspect objects and their documentation from his apartment and storage facility into a shipping container which was then placed on a ship bound for Naples.  Afterward, he fled the country.

When the ship was intercepted at the port of Naples on December 14, 2006, Italian authorities recovered 37 paintings and numerous archaeological objects as well as thousands of documents and, the now tell tale Polaroid photographs used by traffickers during this time period.   

Immediately after the 2006 seizure in Naples,  Italian prosecutor Paolo Giorgio Ferri brought charges against the dealer, Princeton University Art Museum’s then-curator Michael Padgett and Mauro Morani a tomb raider and caposquadra who provided Almagià with first dibs on looted antiquities, for knowingly committing crimes against the cultural heritage of Italy.

Acquittal, Seizures, and Restitutions

Unfortunately, Almagià's criminal case in Italy was dismissed in 2012due to the statute of limitations, though the Italian courts upheld the confiscation of all relics previously in his possession.  IN making that ruling the presiding judge stated that his activities contributed to "one of the greatest sacks of Italian cultural heritage based on the sheer amount of stolen goods."

In connection with the U.S. side of the investigation, New York’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has diligently worked to identify over 2,000 stolen antiquities trafficked by Almagià.  To date they have recovered 221 of them, worth an estimated  $6 million. 

Of these, 150 objects were seized as part of the Michael Steinhardt investigation, with the New York billionaire having purchased a total of ten known and restituted items from the Italian. 

Arrest Warrant

Yesterday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office obtained an arrest warrant for Edoardo Almagià based upon three charges:

  1. Conspiracy in the Fourth Degree under Penal Law § 105.10(1)
  2. Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree under Penal Law § 190.65(1)(b)
  3. Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in the Third Degree under Penal Law § 165.50

This arrest warrant, totaling 80 pages, details the grave extent of this trafficking network and ultimately the harm he caused to Italy’s cultural heritage. As New York authorities await their day in court with this trafficker, the hope remains that dealers, collectors, and museums, with outstanding pieces purchased via this dealer or their subsequent handlers, will come forward and disclose the remaining pieces which are tied to Almagià.

Explosion Rocks MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk, High-Value Warhol Artworks Stolen

A powerful explosion at 03:05 am tore through the MPV Gallery on Dorpsstraat in Oisterwijk, a city in the south of the Netherlands.  This in turn allowed burglars to enter the art gallery and steal several high-value Andy Warhol artworks in what appears to hae been a strategic and thought out art heist.  According to Dutch regional broadcaster Omroep Brabant, the blast was so strong that it ripped the gallery’s front door from its hinges, shattering windows in ten neighbouring buildings and damaging signage throughout the vicinity.  No injuries were reported; however, the blast caused extensive property damage and raised security concerns among local residents.

Gallery owner Mark Peet Visser revealed that the thieves targeted four silkscreens from the iconic Reigning Queens series by American pop artist Andy Warhol. Released in 1985, two years before Warhol’s death, the portfolio depicts four reigning queens from that era: 

Released as a portfolio in 1985, just two years before Warhol's death, the series of images is one of the artist's  largest and most iconic portfolios, with sixteen silkscreen prints depicting four of the reigning queens from that period:

Queen Ntombi Twala who has been the Queen Mother of Eswatini (present day Swaziland since 1986);

Queen Beatrix who reigned from 1980 to 2013 in the Netherlands;

Queen Elisabeth II who reigned from February 1952 until her death on 8 September 2022 in the United Kingdom;

Queen Margrethe II who took the throne in Denmark in 1972 after the passing of her father, Frederick IX, and who is still in power today. When she succeeded her father, she became the first ruling queen of Denmark since 1412. As of Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022, Queen Margrethe is currently the only queen regnant in Europe.

In the explosion's aftermath, the thief or thieves left the silkscreens of Queen Ntombi Twala and Queen Beatrix on the pavement but, having ditched the frames of the remaining two, managed to successfully make off with the silkscreens of Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Margrethe, fleeing the scene in a Peugeot, which officers later discovered abandoned on Wolvensteeg.

The gallery's owner, Mark Peet Visser declined to disclose their value when asked by the Dutch press, although he did relay that  the works were well insured.  Andy Warhol defined his silk screening in the most traditional of ways. Each of these were produced using Lenox Museum Board and we signed  in pencil and given numeric designations which will make them difficult to sell on the licit market. 

At this stage, no suspects or motives for the burglary have been disclosed and evidence collection and analysis of CCTV footage from nearby locations remains  ongoing.  Police are urging anyone with information to come forward as the investigation continues.

Founded in 1992, the MPV Gallery specialises in contemporary and modern art and has operated internationally, drawing art collectors from across the globe. The explosion and theft, which has shocked the local art community, also underscore rising concerns about the security of high-value artwork in small galleries.