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Showing posts with label Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Show all posts

August 28, 2011

Sunday, August 28, 2011 - ,,, No comments

The Journal of Art Crime, Spring 2011: "The Skylight Caper: The Unsolved 1972 Theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts"

Catherine Schofield Sezgin's article "The Skylight Caper: The Unsolved 1972 Theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts" has been published in the fifth issue of The Journal of Art Crime (Spring 2011).

Rembrandt Stolen from MMFA in 1972
This article examines previously published articles on Canada's largest art theft, the 1972 unsolved theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and compares the information with two principals involved with the museum and the investigation. It explores the ideas proposed in the last four decades as to who may have committed the theft and the alleged whereabouts of 39 pieces of jewelry and silver and the 17 missing paintings, including art by Rembrandt, Corot, Rubens and Courbet. This article describes the history of museum thefts in Canada, how the crime was committed, and some characteristics that may have made this museum and those paintings a target for theft.

Catherine Schofield Sezgin, a graduate from ARCA's Postgraduate Program in International Art Crime Studies in 2009, worked closely with Bill Bantey, retired journalist and director of public relations for the museum at the time of the theft, and Alain Lacoursière, retired Montreal police officer specializing in art crime.

You may read updates about the case on her blog, The Unsolved 1972 Theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The Journal of Art Crime is available via subscription through ARCA's website and from Amazon.com.

May 27, 2011

Friday, May 27, 2011 - ,, No comments

Part Two: Alain Lacoursière's Biographer Sylvain Larocque Writes about the Unsolved 1972 Theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Museum image of Courbet landscape stolen
 from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972.
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin,
ARCA Blog Editor-in-chief

In the sixth chapter entitled “Le vol du musée des beaux-arts” (“The theft of the Museum Fine Arts”) in his biography of retired art police officer, Alain Lacoursière: Le Colombo de l’art, journalist Sylvain Larocque speculates about the fate of the 17 stolen paintings from the 1972 theft in Montreal.

Larocque echoes what Lacoursière told me in November 2009, that some people believe that the thieves were unable to sell the works and afraid of being caught, destroyed the evidence by throwing the paintings into the St. Lawrence River. However, Larocque writes, that is hard to image as the paintings could be worth $50 million today and few instances of thieves destroying the art has been known to have happened. Larocque writes that most experts expect that the paintings will reappear some day. Lacoursière has said to both Larocque and I that he believes that the paintings are still in the hands of the people who planned or sponsored the theft and that they are aware that due to the notoriety of the theft cannot sell the paintings in the legitimate market. Possibly, Larocque writes, the heirs to those paintings will donate the works back to the museum.

Larocque writes that governments could help solve the crime by granting immunity to anyone who would be able to recover one or more of the paintings stolen in 1972. While such an offer would preclude punishment of the perpetrators of the burglar, Larocque writes, is that really a concern almost four decades later? Even if the criminals were convicted, there is no guarantee that the paintings would be returned, Larocque writes.

According to Larocque, the Civil Code in Quebec says that after three years a buyer who acquired a painting in good faith may keep the stolen work. Only works from the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, the Museum of Civilization and the Musé d’art contemporain de Montréal are exempt since those are national museums.

In 1989, when Alain Lacoursière was finishing his degree in art history, according to his biographer, he proposed to that the Government of Quebec duplicate the policies of France and Italy that would require anyone who acquired an artwork, whether in good faith or bad, would be forced to return the object to its rightful owner, regardless of how long it has been. ‘Aprés tout, personne ne peut contester que ces oeuvres appartiennent au patrimoine’/’After ll, no one can deny that these works belong to the collective heritage,’ Larocque writes.

Yet, Lacoursière’s proposal was not well received and he abandoned the idea in 2002.

Larocque retells the story of the 1990 theft of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, then tells readers that some stolen artworks have been recovered 50 to 80 years after their disappearance.

Then Larocque tells the story of the May 2, 1965 theft of what is now the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec on the Plains of Abraham. Around 9 p.m. two guards on duty settled in the boiler room to watch an episode of the television series Perry Mason. A bell rang at the door. One guard went to see what was happening and saw a hand holding out a card on which he could read the name of a museum curator. He opened the door and saw a masked man who pushed him back inside. Two other assailants burst in and the trio tied up the two guards, evening though one of them had been a professional wrestler. The thieves escaped with 28 paintings worth $800,000, including works by Pierre-August Renoir, Krieghoff, Suzor-Coté, Horatio Walker and Frederick Simpson Coburn. Most of the paintings had been in the collection of the former Premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis, who had been in office in the 1930s and from 1944 to 1959. Four years later, the wife of Eric Kierans, a native of Montreal and a member of Canada’s House of Commons, contacted the police because a stranger had tried to sell to the couple a few of the paintings that had belonged to Duplessis.

According to Larocque, the theft of the paintings from the Duplessis collection had been committed to finance the Christian Nationalist Party that advocated “the sovereignty of the French-Canadian Catholics” and demanded the departure of Jews from Quebec. The 28 stolen paintings were found in a large bin at the home of one of the thieves, Leo Tremblay, who was found guilty of receiving stolen goods, a verdict that would be appealed two yeas later.

You may read more about Canada's largest art theft on the blog "Unsolved '72 Theft of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts."

May 26, 2011

Thursday, May 26, 2011 - ,, No comments

Part One: Alain Lacoursière's biographer Sylvain Larocque Dedicates Sixth Chapter to The Theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Alain Lacoursière, Photo by Robert Skinner, Archives La Presse
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin,
ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Sylvain Larocque, an economic journalist with La Presse Canadienne, wrote a book about my favorite retired Quebec art cop: Alain Lacoursière: “le Columbo de l’art” (Flammarion Quebec, 2010). His sixth chapter is titled “Le vol du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal” (The theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts).

With patience, I used Google Translate to read the chapter as I have written on the 1972 unsolved theft (to be published in the upcoming Journal of Art Crime).

Three burglars entered through the unsecured skylight of the Montreal museum on Labor Day in 1972 and selected 35 paintings to steal. However, when one of the thieves inadvertently tripped a security alarm in the garage housing the museum's van that they planned to use as their getaway car, the three men grabbed only 18 of the paintings and ran down out of the museum and down Sherbrooke Street in the early morning hours. Sherbrooke Street is a main east-west thoroughfare that stretches through metropolitan Montreal in some of the most exclusive real estate so I have always found this an amazing sight to picture as three thieves carry $2 million worth of paintings by Rembrandt, Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Peter Paul Rubens, Honoré Daumier, Jan Davidszoon de Heem, Jean Bruegel the Elder, Eugene Delacroix, Thomas Gainsborough, and Jean-François Millet.

According to Larocque, the fleeing thieves fled on foot presumably to join a car parked nearby although no witnesses, according to journalists reporting at the time, commented on any such reports. It does not make that assumption incorrect, only that it could be speculation. The newspapers at the time did not write about how the thieves might have left the scene. The police records are not available to the public.

A few weeks after the theft, the museum received a request for $500,000 and a polaroid of all the stolen art before lowering the ransom to $250,000. Subsequently, one painting was returned and another negotiated ransom failed, ending all contact with the thieves. The insurance companies paid almost $2 million in restitution to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. With those proceeds, in 1975 the museum purchased what they hoped would be the largest Rubens to be held in a Canadian collection, The Leopards. However, in the 1990s, Marie-Claude Corbeil of the Canadian Conservation Institute established that The Leopards was a copy. According to Larocque, Corbeil's analysis revealed that the red pigments found in the painting were invented in 1687, almost four decades after the death of Rubens. The museum now attributes this work to the Studio of Peter Paul Rubens.

In subsequent years, Larocque writes, a $10,000 paid reward in 1973 failed to produce the paintings; an FBI tip that the works were possibly in South America resulted in no recoveries; and in 1982 an offered reward of $250,000 was also unsuccessful.

Lacoursière, then a police officer in Montreal, decided in 1984 to review the file on the museum theft which he requested from the department's archives where the file had languished for years. "In fact," Larocque writes and I translate, "the documents were not far from the shredder./En fait, les documents n'étaient pas loin de la deechiqueteuse."

Five years later, Larocque writes, Lacoursière was contacted by an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who told him that a drug addict said that the paintings were buried in the backyard of the residence of a lawyer but the lead was useless as the would-be informant could not say precisely where the lawyer lived.

In 2002, Larocque writes, Lacoursière attended an opening at the Maison de la culture Frontenac in Montreal East and met an art collector and manufacturer of wooden boxes from a community located about one-hour's drive by automobile outside of Montreal. Larocque does name the man, the community and the municipality, however, when I was writing my article on the museum theft, Alain Lacoursière asked that I not reveal the man's identity.  I do not know about the agreement between Larocque and Lacoursière for the book, however, I shall honor the original agreement with Lacoursière until he notifies me otherwise.  In addition, the man has not to my knowledge been arrested or officially questioned in connection with the museum theft.  In the biography, Larocque writes:
L'homme aborda de son propre gré le vol de 1972 en racontant qu'il fréquentait l'UQAM au même moment et que les étudiants d l'institution se faisaient régulièrement expulser du Musée des beaux-arts./The man brought up the subject of the 1972 theft on his own and said that he had frequented the UQAM (the Université du Québec à Montréal) at the same time and the students of the institution were regularly expelled from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Lacoursière told me in November 2009 that the reason the art students were regularly expelled from the art gallery was that the staff kicked them out to enjoy their afternoon tea.

According to Larocque (and what Lacoursière told me two years ago), Lacoursière was intrigued by his encounter with "Smith" because he knew that after the theft that the police had followed and photographed student from UQAM (I was given the institutional name of École des beaux-arts) in connection with its investigation. He then led "Smith" to believe that approaching the 30th anniversary of the theft that there might be a million dollar reward to anyone who could provide information to retrieve the stolen paintings.

In 2003, Larocque writes, Lacoursière, a Detective Sergeant with the Montreal police, went to visit "Smith" at his home. Although "Smith" gave him a tour of his studio and his property, he did not say anything more about the museum theft.

Over the years, Larocque writes, Lacoursière kept in contact with "Smith" 'juste au cas' (just in case) and in 2007, while filming a documentary, le Colombo de l'art, Lacoursière filmed a visit to "Smith's" home and this time offered a "two million dollar" check as a reward for information leading to the recovery of the paintings but with the camera filming, "Smith" remained silent and did not react. "Smith" denied that he had even been watched or questioned by the police investigating the museum theft in 1972. Larocque writes:

À l'été 2010, au cours d'un entretien téléphonique, [Smith] a toutefois réfuté avoir joué quelque rôle que ce soit dans l'affaire du Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal. Selon lui, le vol a été perpétré par des employés de l'UQAM, possiblement des professeurs et des appariteurs qui avaient été soupçonnés d'avoir effectué un important cambriolage à l'université, quelques semaines auparavant./In the summer of 2010, during a telephone interview, [Smith], however denied having played any role whatsoever in the case of the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal. He said the theft was perpetrated by employees of UQAM, possibly professors and porters who were suspected of having carried out a major robbery at the university, a few weeks previously.

You may read about this book here and more about the 1972 unsolved theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on my blog here.


May 20, 2011

Friday, May 20, 2011 - ,,,, No comments

Part Two: Alain Lacoursière, the Mercedes-Benz Commercial Video, and Madonna and the Yarnwinder

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Recently Alain Lacoursière’s favorite suspect for the unsolved 1972 theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts sent the retired police officer a link to a Mercedes-Benz commercial video that fictionalizes the theft of a brief case from a bank vault. At the end of a high speed chase involving a very sleek German sedan, the brief case is delivered to a third party who later open to show that the contents of the brief case is a painting. The newscaster in the video reports under the headline: “Stolen Da Vinci Re-Emerges”:
The Paris National Art Collection was handed over a long-lost masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci today. The Da Vinci piece was being hidden for years by backers of the mafia in a safe deposit box. The FBI estimates the value of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder at approximately 70 million euros.
“The Madonna of the Yarnwinder is the subject of several oil paintings after a lost original by Leonardo da Vinci “(Wikipedia.org).

The Lansdowne Madonna
A copy of this painting, known as The Lansdowne Madonna, by the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci is in a private collection in New York. It was likely completed by another artist in da Vinci’s studio after another painting of the same subject. (Universal Leonardo)

Another version of this painting, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder (Duke of Buccleuch), and considered to have been painted under Leonardo, was stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch’s home in Scotland in 2003. Two men posing as tourists during a public tour of Drumlanrig Castle overpowered a female staff member and carried the painting out the window. The painting was valued at 30 million pounds.

Madonna with Yarnwinder
 (Duke of Buccleuch)
The painting was recovered four years later – but a month after the death of the 84-year-old Duke -- when police raided a meeting at a respectable law office in Glasgow who claimed to be an innocent third-party. The solicitors were eventually cleared of extortion. The painting is reportedly on display at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh however the website for the institution does not show the painting in either its permanent collection or as a loan.

The original is lost, but how do the experts describe these two ‘copies’? I found an interesting source here. Martin Kemp wrote about the paintings in 1992 (Leonardo da Vinci and the Mystery of the Madonna of the Yarnwinder (exhibition catalogue, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland):
How much of the Buccleuch copy was painted by Leonardo was a matter of scholarly debate until recently. Scientific studies indicate that in addition to the work's underdrawing (with its pentimenti or small changes), the genius was most likely responsible for its overall design, the figures and the skillfully rendered rocky foreground. The landscape is uncharacteristic of Leonardo; it was probably painted a bit later by another artist, perhaps a workshop assistant. The flesh tones of Mary's face were executed using Leonardo's typical sfumato or smoky technique. A second brighter copy of The Madonna of the Yarnwinder belongs to a private collector.

May 19, 2011

Thursday, May 19, 2011 - ,, No comments

Part One: Suspected art thief uses the Internet to tease retired art crime investigator Alain Lacoursière about the location of the paintings stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972

Rembrandt's Evening Landscape stolen
 from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1972
by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor-in-Chief

Alain Lacoursière, retired art crime police officer in Montreal, recently received a link to a video from a suspect involved in the 1972 theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that Lacoursière has perused for more than a decade./Alain Lacoursière, sergent détective responsable des crimes relatifs aux oeuvres d’art à Montréal, a récemment reçu un lien vers une vidéo produite par Mercedes Benz qui semble fermer les yeux sur un vol de banque. La vidéo a été envoyée par un suspect du vol de1972 au Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal que Lacoursière a pourchassé pendant plus d'un décennie.


The video, an advertisement for Mercedes Benz that appears to condone bank robbery, contains gorgeous scenes of Hong Kong but I won't spoil the ending today.  Tomorrow I'll add my comments and more information about Canada's largest art theft.


You can read more about the 1972 theft of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts here.

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