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Showing posts with label Mondrian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mondrian. Show all posts

January 21, 2023

Saturday, January 21, 2023 - ,,, No comments

Twitter user @ArtFreak, (George S) sentenced in the theft of a Picasso, a Mondrian, and a Guglielmo Caccia


The thief that burgled Greece’s National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum in Athens eleven years ago has been sentenced.  

Citing that the Court recognised the thief's good behaviour after his arrest for the heist, the Single-Member Court of Criminal Appeals of Athens handed down a six-year suspended probationary sentence with limited electronic monitoring, which will allow Giorgos Sarmantzopoulos, a circulating distance of three kilometres from his residence so that he can hold down a job and care of his elderly and sick parents. Previously, during the trial phase, he had been on complete house arrest.

On 9 January 2012, George S set off the security alarm at the Greek museum by opening a door 6 or 7 times, until the guard believed that the alarm system was malfunctioning and disabled the system. Then, at 4:30 a.m., he entered the museum through an separate unlocked balcony door and swiftly stripped four artworks from their frames, knocking others off the wall in doing so. 

Originally he selected: 

Head of a Woman, 1934 by Pablo Picasso
Stammer Windmill with Summer House, 1905 by Piet Mondrian 
Landscape with a Farm by Piet Mondrian 
St Diego de Alcala in Ecstasy with the Holy Trinity and the Symbols of Passion by Guglielmo Caccia, who was known as il Moncalvo.

But after using a knife to cut the artworks out of their frames, he dropped Landscape with a Farm by Mondrian and left it behind.  He successfully made it out of the museum with the other three artworks in just 7 minutes.   

The case brought widespread attention in Greece due to the high value of the stolen works of art.  The museum estimated the value of the Picasso at 2 million euros, the Mondrian at €200,000 and the Moncalvo drawing at €1,000.  Public outcry at the time of the burglary was so great that the National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum subsequently closed for an 8-year-long, $70-million (€59 million) revitalisation, which included security and risk management upgrades as well as  doubling the museum’s size.

In July 2021 two of the paintings — Picasso’s Head of a Woman and Mondrian's Stammer Windmill with Summer House— were recovered shortly after George S. AKA Artfreak, was arrested as a suspect.  

Undone by an ex, who had informed private investigator Arthur Brand that her significant other had confessed to the museum theft, George S also purportedly told the woman that at one point the stolen Picasso and Mondrian had been stored behind a brown wall in an apartment in Keratea, a town in East Attica, Greece.  

Arrested and taken into custody, George S. quickly confessed to investigators that he was responsible for the 9 January 2012 theft.

George also went on to lead law enforcement detectives to a deep, narrow gorge in an area near the seaside resort town of Porto Rafti, east of Athens.  There he handed a plastic-wrapped briefcase which held the stolen Mondrian and Picasso inside over to officers.  The third artwork stolen in the heist — the pen-and-ink sketch by Renaissance artist Guglielmo Caccia has not not recovered. 

According to In.gr, one of several Greek news sites covering the sentencing, comments attributed to the convicted museum thief relating to this theft were leaked across Greek media, which the suspect’s lawyer, Sakis Kehagioglu, confirmed to be accurate.

George S admitted that "The theft was so simple and stupid that no one could imagine that this would happen from an ordinary citizen. The museum had one guard when he should have had five."  He also claimed that he acted alone and had scoped out the museum and its vulnerabilities for six months prior to committing the actual theft.  He lastly claimed to have no accomplices and to have selected artworks at random with no particular painting in mind.  

But is it as simple as that.  Does a bumbling thief truly spend six months in preparation for a heist? 




January 14, 2012

Saturday, January 14, 2012 - ,,,,,, No comments

CBC Radio's "Day 6" Interviews ARCA Instructor Richard Ellis in "To catch an art thief" about the use of art as collateral or currency "in criminal enterprises such as drugs or arms or people trafficking"

Brent Bambury, host of the show Day 6 on CBC Radio, "talks" with art crime expert Richard Ellis, founder of the Art and Antiquities Squad at The New Scotland Yard.

Bambury begins his show discussing this week's theft of paintings by Picasso and Mondrian from the National Gallery in Athens when thieves prompted security guards to turn off their security system by setting off a series of alarms that made the guards think the system wasn't working and shut the alarm system down. As Bambury recounts, the thieves then entered the museum in Greece and stripped three paintings from their frames; "everything was going according to plan" Bambury says until one of the thieves set off a motion sensor attracting attention of the security staff who watched them flee. [Officially the number of thieves has not been released.) One of the paintings was recovered when a thief dropped it during the escape, according to international reports.

Bambury asks Ellis what happens after a thief pulls off a successful heist that draws international attention.
Ellis: In one particular Picasso theft the chap got into a taxi in London and drove around and delivered it to the person who had asked him to steal it, so it depends entirely who you are and what your intentions are. Looking at the Greek experience recently, it was a well orchestrated theft, so they may have well have gone beyond planning the actual theft and have already worked out what they could do with the pictures. 
Bambury: How does a thief monetize a painting? What is the value of something that is so very difficult to sell? 
Ellis: Value is established unfortunately through the media. I say unfortunately because there is a tendency of following an art theft to try and arrive at the highest possible value because it makes for a better story. Criminals will take the highest published value and they will work anywhere between 3 to 7 or even 10% of that reported value as its black market value. Clearly if it’s a valuable painting it can still be a significant sum of money and they’ll use that as collateral or as a form of currency and it will then just be used as a way to pay for other criminal enterprises such as drugs or arms or people trafficking. 
Bambury: So a painting then becomes a token of value in the larger world of organized crime? 
Ellis: Exactly that. Last year … in October I recovered two Picassos in Serbia that had been stolen in Switzerland in February 2007. Now what I learned from that experience is that art is actually being used as a currency because it is easier to travel across international borders carrying a painting than it is to travel across international borders carrying a lot of money. If you’ve got money on you, the authorities are alert to money laundering and you will be questioned and you will have to justify your possession of that money. With paintings, unfortunately a lot of law enforcement are not to so familiar with the art scene, they don’t have easy access to databases of stolen art and antiques. The chances are that the criminals will be able to travel across international boundaries with a stolen work of art.
In the discussion on Day 6, Mr. Ellis goes on to dispel the myth of “Dr. No” the evil art collector hiring thieves to steal art masterpieces for his personal enjoyment. He then describes the operation to recover Munch’s The Scream, which had been stolen from the National Gallery of Norway in 1994 while authorities were distracted with securing the opening day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. He also describes Canada’s role in the global market for stolen art.

When Bambury asks Ellis to speculate on the whereabouts of the two paintings recently stolen from the National Gallery in Greece, Ellis guesses that the "porous" borders of Greece with the Balkan countries may have provided an escape route to Montenegro or Serbia.

You can read a summary of the interview on CBC Radio’s website here “To catch an art thief” and listen here to the interview between Brent Bambury and Dick Ellis on the show “Day 6: Inside The World of International Art Theft.”

January 9, 2012

Monday, January 09, 2012 - ,,,,,, No comments

Bonne Année: Museum Theft in Greece Ends Holiday Weekend

Picasso's Woman's Head
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Reports from Istanbul bumped by museum theft in Greece.

A few kind and loyal readers have emailed me as to the lack of posts on this blog for the past month. I truly had intended to post from either Ankara or Istanbul but between preparing for a Christmas in a Muslim country (easier than you would think) and re-exploring the cultural institutions of both cities, I fell victim to the charms of Turkish life.

In Istanbul I feasted on roasted chestnuts from street vendors and dreamed of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire as I traveled daily on the municipal ferry which carried me from Asia where I lodged to Europe where I wandered the narrow streets of Pera near the Galata Tower, perfecting the pedestrian survival skills needed to dodge the fearless drivers of this 8,000 year old city of 13 million people.

Sketch by Caccia
Back in my sunny garden in Pasadena, with my back to the dried squirrel blood left by the hawk who had moved into our yard during our absence, I had planned to start this week with a series of posts about Anakara's Anatolian Civilizations Museum and Istanbul's Archaeology Museum; however, the news coming in from The Museum Security Network this morning featured a robbery at Greece's National Gallery.

According to Reuters: After setting a series of false alarms, thieves broke into the National Gallery in Athens and stole two paintings, Pablo Picasso's 1939 painting "Woman's Head" donated by the artist to the Greeks in 1949 and Piet Mondrian's 1905 "Mill", and one sketch by Italian painter Guglielmo Caccia:
"It all happened in seven minutes," said a police official who declined to be named.

To mislead the guard, the thieves activated the gallery's alarm system several times before breaking into the building at 4:30 a.m. (0230 GMT). The guard turned off the alarm only to later spot one of the thieves through the motion detector.

Before escaping, the thief dropped another 1905 Mondrian painting, the "Landscape," police said. [Reporting by Renee Maltezou, editing by Paul Casciato]
Piet Mondrian's "Mill"
(Photo provided by National Gallery/AP)
Reuters reported that the number of thieves is unknown.

CBC News reported that the stolen artworks were "stripped from their frames":
The museum, which features mostly 19th and 20th century Greek paintings, had just concluded the exhibition Unknown Treasures.  On Monday, it has been scheduled to shut down for an expansion and restoration project. [CBC]
BBC News reported that Picasso donated "Woman's Head" to Greece for "the country's resistance to Nazi Germany." According to BBC, the gallery has not established the value for the stolen artwork but closed its doors on Monday as a result of the burglary.

Mark Durney writes today in Art Theft Central that budget cuts may have affected the effectiveness of museum security.  Mr. Durney has also written of the pattern of museum thefts during the holiday season -- and last Friday, January 6, on the Greek Orthodox calendar was the Theophany, or the Epiphany, the celebration of the Three Kings or Wise Men bearing gifts to the Baby Jesus.

In another example of the vulnerability of a cultural institution, the aging National Gallery in Greece was scheduled for an expansion and renovation, just as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was in 1972 before it was robbed (also on a holiday weekend, Labor Day in September in that case).

We can only hope that the thieves will be unable to sell the paintings on the black market and will return the artworks as in the case reported recently by Lee Moran of The Daily Mail when thieves contacted an art expert to return René Magritte's Olympia stolen from Musée Magritte in Brussels in September 2009.

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