This spectacular theft occurred at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam during the predawn hours of Sunday, April 14, 1991.  It is considered to be the largest art heist in the Netherlands subsequent to World War II, as well as the fastest recovery time for stolen works of art from an important collection.

Twenty paintings by the Dutch master Vincent van Gogh, including one of his iconic Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (1889) were stolen from the museum by thieves; one who concealed himself in the gallery the previous evening and another, who was let his accomplice into the museum during the theft.

At the time of the robbery, the value of the stolen art was estimated at USD $500 million. 

Listed below are all the artworks taken during the theft, some with photos.

At the time of the robbery, two night watchmen heard sounds coming from inside the museum at approximately 3 AM local time, indicating that there was in intruder in the building.  Upon investigating, they were confronted by a man brandishing a pistol and wearing a balaclava to disguise his face.  This individual then forced the guards to disable the museum's security devices and allowed his accomplice access into the museum.  

Both thieves then reportedly confined the guards before setting about removing the twenty works of art.  In less than an hour they had filled two expandable garment bags to the brim with the Dutch Post-Impressionist artist's works.  The criminals then used one of the guards cars as their getaway vehicle, scrunching all the artworks inside before hopping in with them to make a fast get-away.

At 4:48 am, one minute after the thieves departed, the guards called-in the robbery to Amsterdam authorities. A grey Volkswagen Passat, matching the description of the guard's stolen car was located unlocked and abandoned at the site of the Amstel train station at 5:23 A.M.  A search of the car, revealed that all the paintings were accounted for, all still stuffed into the garment bags the thieves had used when removing them from the museum.

Three paintings, including Wheatfield with Crows, were severely damaged. 

Three months later, on July 18, 1991, authorities announced that they had arrested four Dutchmen for their roles in the botched predawn April robbery. One of the four men charged turned out to be one of the two security guards working inside the museum at the time of the theft.   A second accomplice was a former employee of the museum's security firm.  The two remaining joint principles to the crime were the apparent masterminds, each of whom had made promises to the museum insider and former contractor that they would receive a substantial fee for facilitating the robbery. 

Subsequent to the arrests, police stated the thieves had abandoned the paintings in the guard's car and fled the scene when their second get-away vehicle failed to arrive, apparently due to a flat tire. 

All four perpetrators were sentenced to prison terms.

By: Lynda Albertson

On May 19, 1998 Rome's prestigious Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna was robbed just after the 10 pm closing time. Armed with guns, three thieves entered the museum just before closing time. Moving about the galleries barefoot and having donned gloves and balaclavas to hide their identities, the thieves then stormed the control room.

There they gagged two of the three female guards and forced a third to disable the museum's security system and hand over its accompanying CCTV footage. They then locked all three security staff in a bathroom before proceeding to the Impressionist hall.  

L'Arlésienne, 1889 (one of five versions)

by Vincent Van Gogh  (unsigned)

oil on canvas, 60x50 cm

Completed in  Saint-Rémy

Le Jardinier, October 1889

by Vincent Van Gogh (unsigned)

oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm

Completed in  Saint-Rémy

and

Cabanon de Jourdan, 1906

by Paul Cézanne

oil on canvas 65 x 81 cm

The last artwork completed by the artist before his death in Aix-en-Provence

From the beginning of their investigation art crime detectives in Italy suspected that there had to be an insider working with the thieves; someone who had firsthand knowledge of who would be working in the museum that evening and possibly familiarity with the museums security apparatus. 

Law enforcement officers with the Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale and the Squadra Mobile di Roma began their investigation by conducting a prolonged examination of all 160 individuals who worked at the museum.  They needed to narrow down who might be inclined to collaborate with criminals or who might benefit from the proceeds to be made from stolen art. 

Tentative suspects were kept under surveillance and as the squad honed in on each of their culprits, phones were tapped.  Police bided their time for more than a month listening and analysing information as they gathered evidence on who and how many people were involved and most importantly, just where the paintings might have been stashed. 

While they waited, they learned that some of the suspects had met one another serving time in a Brussels prison, one of them for a violent robbery of a postal truck. This further helped to paint a clear picture that the group was not beyond the use of violence.  

Proceeding carefully officers were sure that the theft was not merely an opportunistic crime by an impulsive group but a crime carried out by a individuals who knew one another well and who weren't afraid of getting their hands dirty.

As days passed the thieves faced difficulties finding a buyer.  The criminals began to get irritable and at one point started fighting amongst themselves.  In one instance one of the suspects was so sloppy that he openly complained during a tapped phone conversation that he knew the police were on to them. 

As the band of criminals began to fray law enforcement knew they had to move quickly before they completely unravelled and did something desperate.  The investigators' intel also revealed that the paintings had been split up. Van Gogh's Le Jardinier and Cézanne's Cabanon de Jourdan had been brought back to Rome after the purported sale fell through, while L'Arlésienne was left behind in Turin possibly as collateral for the one criminal not originally from Rome.   

But where? 

After 48 days, investigators decided they had sufficient evidence to identify probable locations for the three paintings and the ability to make simultaneous arrests of all accomplices at the same time.  This was done to ensure that no one got away and that no one could shift the artworks to a new hiding spot or destroy them to avoid prosecution. 

On July 5, 1998 officers moved in and arrested 8 suspects, some with a small arsenal of firearms. The motley team was a hodgepodge of run-of-the-mill criminals including a husband and wife team, one of whom was the insider at the museum.  Others in the band seemed the type only Hollywood characters are made of. 

During a raid of one apartment in the periphery of Rome Van Gogh's Le Jardinier and Cézanne's Cabanon de Jourdan were recovered in good condition One painting had been crudely packaged in a cardboard box and hidden under a bed. The other had been wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in a closet.

L'Arlésienne was recovered in an apartment in Turin along with 6 weapons, including a machine gun. 

The criminals convicted and their sentences imposed

Oeneus Ximenes - considered the mastermind of the theft received a sentence of 8 years imprisonment

Roberto Petruzzi - received a sentence of 8 years imprisonment

Stefania Viglongo - the museum insider received a sentence of 8 years imprisonment

Maurizio Possetto - received a sentence of 7 years imprisonment 

Claudio Trevisan - received 6 years and 4months imprisonment 

Anna Rita Sinti (daughter of Alexander Sinti and the suprisingly young partner of Ximenes) - received 4.5 years imprisonment

Alessandro Sinti - (father of Anna Rita Sinti) - received 3 years and 4 months imprisonment.  

Alfonso Di Febio (husband of Viglongo) - received 2 years and 8 months imprisonment.

By Lynda Albertson 

At around 12:30 in the morning on June 28, 1990 three early Van Gogh paintings were stolen from the Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch, Netherlands. s-Hertogenbosch is the actual official name of the city, but colloquially almost everybody calls the city Den Bosch, which translates in English to mean 'the Duke’s Forest' .

The artworks taken were: 

Brabant Peasant, seated Study for the Potato Eaters (also known as Farmer's Wife Seated)  Dec 1884 - April 1885

oil on paper on panel 36 X 26.5 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Digging Farmer (also known as Digging Farmer's Wife), 1885-1887

oil on canvas, 37.5 X 25.7 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Wheels of the Mill, Genneper, 1884

oil on canvas,  61.5 x 80.5 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Van Gogh painted about a quarter of his entire body of works, including these three artworks, in Nuenen, less than 20 miles from the Het Noordbrabants Museum.

On the morning of the theft, the culprit(s) profited from a relatively sophisticated, but nonfunctioning, alarm system.  Set to go off when it sensed movement, on the day of the theft the system failed to signal the unauthorised entry and failed to signal a malfunction in the sensors.  The burglar(s) entered the unmanned museum undetected simply by breaking an unalarmed ground floor window which in turn allowed access the museum's collection.

Once inside the criminal(s) quickly absconded with the three early 19th-Century Dutch Impressionist artworks.  At the time of their theft they were estimated to be worth from USD $ 2.7 million to $5.4 million.

The theft marked the third theft of Van Gogh works in just two short years. 

All was not lost however.  One year later, after an anonymous tip-off, The Digging Farmer was found in a safe deposit box rented under a false name in a bank located in Eeklo, a Belgian municipality in the Flemish province of East Flanders .

The other two paintings, Brabant Peasant, seated and Wheels of the Mill, Genneper, were returned in relatively good condition to the museum via a prosecutor, Mr. D. van der Bel Middelburg working in The Hague and a lawyer representing a defendant in a totally unrelated case from Amsterdam. Listed in the judicial records as simply an 'informer' the defendant was not believed to have been one of the original thieves but rather an opportunist who had hoped to influence the outcome of his own case by providing information on other criminal's handiwork.

By: Lynda Albertson

At a time in the late 80s when Van Gogh's paintings were listed on the "Top 10 Prices Paid for Paintings" at two of the world's two premiere auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, stealing Vincent's artwork might have seen like a fast way to make money. Van Gogh's touchingly poignant Irises, painted in 1889 during the last year before his death at the asylum at Saint-Rémy had just sold (on November 11, 1987) for $53.9 million, the highest price ever paid for an artwork in an auction at that time. 

Perhaps with this in mind, and perhaps because the Kröller-Müller Museum holds the second-largest collection of the Post-Impressionist master in the world, with almost 90 paintings and over 180 drawings attributed to Vincent Van Gogh, the thieves decided to hit the Otterlo museum on December 12, 1988. TO commit their crime, they entered the museum by breaking one of the windows and then made off with three artworks worth an estimated €113 million euros.

The works stolen included: 

The second of three painted sketches titled 

De aardappeleters, (the potato eaters), April - May 1885

oil on canvas mounted on panel, 73.9 x 95.2 cm

Completed in Nuenen

Loom with Weaver, 1885

oil on canvas, 70 x 85 cm

Completed in Nuenen

and

Four Cut Sunflowers, August-September 1887

oil on canvas,  60.0 x 100.0 cm

Completed in Paris 

Loom with Weaver was returned, possibly as a gesture for negotiation in April 1989.  The two thieves then tried to exact a $2.5 million ransom for the remaining two paintings which led to the police recovering the works on July 13, 1989. 

While no ransom was paid, the artworks did sustain damages.  Two men were sentenced to 3.5 and 5 years respectively for their roles in the crime.

By: Lynda Albertson

In the early morning hours of May 20, 1988, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, located on the Museumplein, was hit with its one and only museum theft to date. The value of the stolen works, which became part of the collection between 1949 and 1951, were estimated by the museum's director Wilhelmus Beeren at the time to be between 25 to 100 million Dutch gilder, the currency of the Netherlands from the 17th century until 2002. 

The Stedelijk was equipped with an electronic alarm system but at the time of the break-in the museum was unmanned.  The alarm went off at five in the morning which prompted the private security service hired by the museum, and who monitored the alarm system from a central office, to contact the Amsterdam police 20 minutes later.

Upon arriving on the scene, law enforcement found a broken window. During an inspection of the museum after the break-in, staff reported that three paintings had been taken from a room close to the entrance of the museum. 

The paintings stolen during the burglary were:

Vase with Carnations, 1886 

by Vincent van Gogh 

oil on canvas, 46.0 x 37.5 cm

Bouteilles et pêches (Bottles and Peaches), 1890

By Paul Cézanne

oil on canvas, 49 x 51 cm

and

La maison du maître Adam Billaud à Nevers (The House of Master Adam Billaud at Nevers) 1874 

By Johan Barthold Jongkind

oil on canvas, 56.5 x 42.5 cm

Interviewed shortly after the theft, Director Beeren stated that the theft could have been done by experts perhaps on a "made to Order" basis.  His hypothosis was based upon the fact that the museum contained many other, more valuable works of art and given the thief also chose to make-off with the paintings' frames. 

Eleven days later, on 31 May 1988, all three paintings were recovered undamaged by police, who had posed as potential buyers interested in Post-Impressionist art when dealing with the criminal. The culprit was then arrested for the burglary and convicted.

By: Lynda Albertson

While the Galleria d'Arte Moderna got its collection returned, by giving in and paying a thief's ransom, they encouraged further robberies.   Just three months later, on May 15, 1975, thieves struck the museum for a second time.

As if to add insult to injury, the second theft made use of the same security vulnerabilities.  Thieves entered the museum via the exact same avenue taken earlier, as if the first theft was a dress rehearsal for the second grand performance.

To break into the museum they came in over the high wall around the museum and then penetrated the building by climbing a ladder and entering through an upper floor window which had not been fitted with a burglar alarm. 

Once inside they reportedly overpowered four night watchmen.  Two were bound and gagged while making rounds and two were subsequently subdued in the Grassi Gallery where the criminals again made off with a substantial cache of paintings.

This time, even more Impressionist and Postimpressionist works of art were stolen, 38 in total. Many of the artworks stolen, including Van Gogh's watercolour Breton Women (after Emile Bernard), were the same ones taken during the previous robbery.

Perhaps because the thieves were banking on a ransom having already been paid?

One month later, on June 17, 1975, police got a break.  During an routine traffic stop, Giuseppe Pennestri was arrested by Italian authorities while driving a Mercedes with New Zealand license plates under an assumed name.  With him was a Yugoslavian also travelling with false identity papers.

Pennestri would turn out to be a truly unsavoury character, with a record that included not only masterminding the theft of the museum, possibly on both occasions, but also a rap sheet that included homicide, drug dealing, facilitating prostitution and apparent ties to organized crime. 

While the Galleria d'Arte Moderna got its collection returned, by giving in and paying a thief's ransom, they encouraged further robberies.   Just three months later, on May 15, 1975, thieves struck the museum for a second time.

As if to add insult to injury, the second theft made use of the same security vulnerabilities.  Thieves entered the museum via the exact same avenue taken earlier, as if the first theft was a dress rehearsal for the second grand performance.

To break into the museum they came in over the high wall around the museum and then penetrated the building by climbing a ladder and entering through an upper floor window which had not been fitted with a burglar alarm. 

Once inside they reportedly overpowered four night watchmen.  Two were bound and gagged while making rounds and two were subsequently subdued in the Grassi Gallery where the criminals again made off with a substantial cache of paintings.

This time, even more Impressionist and Postimpressionist works of art were stolen, 38 in total. Many of the artworks stolen, including Van Gogh's watercolour Breton Women (after Emile Bernard), were the same ones taken during the previous robbery.

Perhaps because the thieves were banking on a ransom having already been paid?

One month later, on June 17, 1975, police got a break.  During an routine traffic stop, Giuseppe Pennestri was arrested by Italian authorities while driving a Mercedes with New Zealand license plates under an assumed name.  With him was a Yugoslavian also travelling with false identity papers.

Pennestri would turn out to be a truly unsavoury character, with a record that included not only masterminding the theft of the museum, possibly on both occasions, but also a rap sheet that included homicide, drug dealing, facilitating prostitution and apparent ties to organized crime. 

After negotiations that stretched from the UK, to the Netherlands and beyond two paintings stolen by masked gunmen during a daylight robbery have been recovered thanks to the work of private investigators. 

Snatched from the Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, once located in the village of Spanbroek in northwest Holland on May 01, 2009, the robbers made off with “Adolescence,” 18 x 12 inches (45 by 30 centimeters), a 1941 gouache by Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí featuring the Catalan artist and his one-time nanny and “La Musicienne,” 46 x 29 inches (116 by 73 centimeters), a 1929 oil painting by Polish-born art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.

In 2009 the museum closed; a direct result of the collapse of the Dutch DSB Bank owned by the Museum's founder and owner, Dirk Scheringa. Forced into liquidation by its creditors, Dutch bank ABN Amro, whose removal men can be seen in the video below, seized 130 paintings from the museum's collection, reportedly to cover a $48 million loan that the museum’s namesake owner had failed to repay. The sale of the museum's collection, both stolen and on site achieved € 2,880,075. 

In a post published on Twitter Dutch art historian Arthur Brand released a statement saying  

Brand further reported that the two artworks had been given to a criminal gang as collateral, in lieu of payment. 

Dali’s surrealist landscape painting depicts a woman’s lips and nose superimposed onto the back of a seated woman,  her eyes and eyelashes are formed by two hills in the background.  The Lempicka artwork shows a bohemian woman in a vivid blue dress, playing a mandolin against the backdrop of a cityscape. 

After an intense months-long negotiation, the two paintings have now been handed over to UK police at New Scotland Yard.  The current owners, who purchased the art as a result of the museum's sale, have yet to be identified publically. 

Murdered in North London, then bound and tied to a shopping cart in attempt to keep his copse submerged under water, Sebastiano Magnanini's badly decomposed body was discovered by a passerby near an Islington tunnel on the Regent’s Canal not far from King's Cross a little over a week ago. The area where the victim's body was recovered is popular among boaters, some of whom live in houseboats which dot the sides of the canal.  The footpath is also popular among walkers and cyclists looking to escape the capital’s busy streets.  

This is all authorities have released about the grisly demise of Venetian art thief once jailed for 18 months for his part in the 1993 theft of the 1732 painting The Education of the Virgin by Italian Rococo  artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo from the church of Santa Maria della Fava, also originally known as Santa Maria della Consolazione, in the sestiere of Castello in Venice, Italy.

Described by his friends and family as a free spirit, Magnanini, was a resident of the Cannaregio quarter in Venice but lived outside of Italy. He changed countries as the mood or work suited him.  In 2003 he moved to Plaistow, east London, then later to Thailand and Vietnam embracing a free-spirit hippy lifestyle and making ends meet by teaching English.  Later he moved to Cambodia where he worked briefly as a tour guide for an Italian company.  Then this summer he moved to the UK capital where he had begun working as a carpenter. 

Surveillance cameras in the area, used for the purpose of observing the zone show assailants attacking and then killing Magnanini.  Investigators with New Scotland Yard, who are handling the investigation do not believe that Magnanini's homicide is linked to organised crime, moreover his brother Matteo Magnanini also insisted his brother “Seba” was not involved in any criminal activity.  In an interview with The Evening Standard Matteo said 

"The press is painting as a criminal just because of its past, but my brother was a romantic spirit and he lived his life fully, seeking peace and happiness." “For us and all [who knew him] he was a unique and very special person, always there to cheer anybody up and make their day a memorable one." 

Magnanini was sentenced in 1998 to 18 months in prison for his role as a bumbling one-time art thief in the theft of the Tiepolo artwork. Like many of Italy's churches, Santa Maria della Fava had no alarm or surveillance system and during the heist Magnanini simply hid inside the church until it closed for the evening, then cut the canvas painting from its altarpiece frame, and exited the church before heading to a nearby bar to smoke.   

The slightly damaged painting was recovered 3 months after the theft, rolled up and tied with a simple shoelace, hidden in a farmhouse near the city’s Marco Polo airport. 

Italian newspapers are speculating that Magnanini may have been the simple victim of a drug deal that went wrong.  Anyone with any information is asked to contact Detective Chief Inspector Rebecca Reeves via the incident room on 020 8721 4868,  alternatively, the police non-emergency line on 101 or, if the wish to remain anonymous, via the UK's Crimestoppers line at 0800 555 111.

Expressionist artist Edvard Munch created four principle versions of Der Schrei der Natur, one of the world's most recognisable works of art.   Known in popular culture as The Scream, the artwork has become an agonised symbol of modern anxiety and alienation.

But how do you tell the differences between four of the world’s most talked about works of art when the dynamic composition and its enigmatic character remain so similar from version to version? Each of the works of art contain minor differences in the spectacular skyline, with figures in the background of a foot path, a prominent wooden railing and a view overlooking the peninsula extending into a fjord with a cityscape beyond.  But what truly sets these celebrity artworks apart from one another is the fact that two versions were stolen from different Norwegian museums in 1994 and 2004 and a third has been the subject of an ownership controversy that dates back to the Second World War. 

On February 12, 1994, two men climbed a ladder and smashed through a window to enter The Nationalgalleriet in Oslo.  Using wire cutters, the art thieves clipped the framed painting free from the wall and made a speedy getaway.

The painting was recovered on May 7, 1994 with the help of an undercover operation by British detectives.  Tony Russell, and Dick Ellis of New Scotland Yard's famed Art and Antiques Squad worked closely with Detective Charles Hill who posed as an American art dealer representing The Getty.

Some individuals argue that this version of The Scream is Munch’s first attempt at rendering his historic image.  Its unfinished elements present as a more preliminary work and is remarkable in that one of the figures in the background appears to be looking out towards the fjord. This version is housed at the Edvard Munch Museet (Munch Museum) of Oslo and is the only one of the four "Screams" to not have had a checkered past. 

Sold for $119,922,500 at Sotheby's on May 2, 2012 billionaire Leon Black's purchase set the record for the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. Mr Black is a trustee of MoMA and The Met. 

This version is Munch's most vibrant and some consider it more valuable due to a handwritten inscription the artist wrote on its frame.  

At the time of the sale, Sotheby's listed the seller as Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, whose father Thomas was Munch's patron and friend.  But the provenance of this painting post-sale is not so clearly black and white. The descendants of the German banker Hugo Simon say that the Jewish collector was likely forced to sell this artwork under Nazi duress.

This version and "Madonna", another of Munch's iconic works, were snatched from the Munch Museet (Munch Museum) by two masked men dressed in black and brandishing guns, who forced museum staff to take the paintings down from the wall and hand them over.

When both artworks were recovered two years later, The Scream was found to have sustained worrisome damages.  Despite the efforts of conservators, who worked tirelessly to repair most of the damage, the bottom-left corner of the painting was left washed out and scarred by a dirty brown watermark. Some say the damage and the artwork's theft only add to its value. 

Perhaps envisioning the success of his artwork or a premonition about their popularity with thieves Munch created approximately thirty Der Schrei der Natur lithographs in 1895, all with black ink, most on either white or cream paper. 

To get an idea of what landscape inspired this iconic painting, one need only read the inscription etched into the frame of the 1895 version.  It reads "I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. -TM"

Norwegians believe the artist was describing an overlook from a road called "Valhallveien" overlooking Oslo, the Oslofjord and Hovedøya from the vantage of Ekeberg Hill.  If you want to know where that is why not check out pop culture detective Bob Egan's fantastic website.  He has also pinpointed the exact spots where some of the most famous album covers of all time were photographed.

By Lynda Albertson

Street entrance to the Oratorio of San Lorenzo in Palermo

Leafy courtyard of the Oratorio of San Lorenzo

The copy of the stolen Caravaggio painting of the Nativity

By: Judge Arthur Tompkins

Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum, Wellington, New Zealand

Ceremonial Greenstone Mere I

Ceremonial Greenstone Mere II

Raul Espinoza

He [Espinoza] was asking $700,000 for works he said were worth $5 million, though the paintings have since been valued for as much as $23 million, said Ricardo Santiago, a spokesman for the Los Angeles district attorney.

This collection was accumulated over a lifetime by Susan Roland and her husband, the late Anton Roland. A teary-eyed George Roland paid tribute to his parents’ passion for art collecting: “Father was born in Carpathia [Czechoslovakia]. Mother was born in Hungary. They married in Budapest. In 1946 they moved to Paris and dreamt of owning paintings…. In 1949 they bought a Chagall in Israel [and] kept on buying paintings all over Europe. When [Dad] bought the Francis Bacon painting, his wife remarked that it was immoral to pay so much money [for it]. He pacified her by saying that it would eventually go to the Tel Aviv Museum…. It was their greatest wish to have a collection and to donate it after our passing, to share it with the Israeli people.’”

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/156143/lucette-lagnado-recalls-jewish-egypt-at-american-f/#ixzz3RilCm7po

"My parents were opposites," George said. His mother came from Hungary and father from the Carpathians. Dad studied in a yeshiva in Prague when the war broke out.

He found his future wife on the street wearing a Jewish star. "Why are you wearing that?"

"They told me to."

"Just because they told you to do it doesn’t mean you do it."

He ripped the star off her coat and took her to the underground where he was working as a forger for the resistance against the Nazis. They stayed together ever since.

In April 2014 the stolen art world ignited when a press conference conducted by General Mariano Mossa of Italy’s Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale art crime squad and the country’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Dario Franceschini, announced that Italy had recovered two stolen paintings worth more than 33 million euros.

Originally owned by philanthropist Mathilda Marks, daughter of Michael Marks, who founded the Marks and Spencer retail empire and her husband, Terence Kennedy, the two paintings, Fruits sur une table ou nature au petit chien (Still Life with a Small Dog) by Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard’s La femme aux deux fauteuils (Woman with Two Armchairs) had been stolen from a opulent London flat in Chester Terrace in 1970.  The art thieves, posing as burglar alarm repairmen, gained access to the house on the pretext of verifying the owner’s alarm system.  Pretending to go about their work, the criminals quickly removed the artworks from their original frames and bolted while the housekeeper was distracted preparing tea.

After their theft, the art works were smuggled out of England and on to France where they were later abandoned on a Turin-bound train arriving from Paris.  The culprits were never identified though police speculate that whoever was transporting the paintings may have abandoned them when they were spooked by customs officials on the train.

Found by railway inspectors, the two paintings languished for more than a year in the Turin train system’s lost property section before being auctioned off by Italy's national railway network in 1975 as unrecovered lost property.  This time period is significant because the sale occurred five years before the Carabinieri's famous art crime tracking database came into existence.  Unaware of their importance, the pictures were sold for a mere 45,000 lire – €26 in today's money, to a Fiat employee identified only as Nicolò, who later moved back to Siracusa, Sicily when he retired from the auto industry job as a metal mechanic in Turin. 

The Antiques Trade Gazette, reported that Rome’s public prosecutor Marcello Cascini, has stated that the Carabinieri TPC had been alerted to the paintings when a friend of the Italian buyer tried to sell them.  Other news services have reported that the autoworker’s son, Salvatore voluntarily contacted the Carabineri TPC directly when he began to suspect that his father’s paintings where not merely bargain basement knock-off’s.  In either case, the family members have been cooperative and have avoided the lime-light while the paintings were sequestered in 2014 until rightful ownership could be established.

Who is entitled to proceed for restitution and is possession really 9/10ths of the law?

Despite EU efforts to reach uniformity, each domestic law system in the EC provides specific regulations that may vary between Common Law and Civil Code approaches in determining who the rightful owner of a stolen object is. 

Following Art.1153 of the Italian Code, "Effects of the acquisition of possession”, in order to resist a forfeiture claim and protect his interests, the bona fides Sicilian buyer first would have to establish that he acquired the artworks and currently holds the items under dispute.  Second he would need to prove that he had a "valid" title upon which the goods have been acquired and third he would need to show that he was acting on good faith when he purchased the paintings.

Based on Italian civil code criteria the paintings would have had to have been owned by the Fiat worker for 10 years if he was unaware they were stolen goods or twenty years if he had any knowledge that the artworks he had purchased were hot art.

On the basis of the civil code in Italy,  information provided by the Carabinieri TPC that specializes in art and antiquities and given more than forty years had passed since the time of the London theft and subsequent purchase, the Italian courts ruled in the autoworker’s favor last month.  The property was returned to its Italian owner who reported that he planned to sell the Gauguin.

His victory proves there is some truth to the old adage, ownership is easier to maintain if one has possession of something and difficult to enforce if one does not.

Italian law. UK law. Swiss Law. 

But while Mrs. Marks and her American husband, Terence Kennedy, had no children they did have heirs to their vast fortune.

Terence Frank Kennedy met Mathilda Marks in Paris and were married shortly thereafter on 23 August 1951.  A flashy couple, they travelled frequently and spent their money on jewellery, cars, dogs and art. They would buy the Guaguin painting in 1962 from Sotheby’s in New York.

Speaking with Richard Ellis, director of the Art Management Group and a former head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad, ARCA learned that when Mathilda Marks died 01 September 1964 she left her widower as the principal beneficiary to her personal estate, leaving him the pictures, which remained in his Chester Terrace home in Regents Park until the high profile art theft in June 1970.

Later he would close the house and travel between Switzerland, London and the South of France where he met John Henderson, then a young actor, who would go on to serve as his personal assistant after he suffered from a major stroke.  Henderson would become Kennedy's lifelong friend, support person  and constant companion for the next twenty years.

When Mr. Kennedy died in 1997 he made Mr. Henderson his sole heir under a will administered in Switzerland. In addition to a will, Mr. Henderson can produce the complete provenance of the paintings and their original frames, complete with exhibition history.

According to Ellis, the terms of Kennedy’s will means that all of Mr Kennedy's possessions, whether in his keeping at the time or not, now belong to John Henderson, inclusive of the now contested stolen pictures and the paintings' frames which he still has. The fact that investigations revealed no insurance payout having been made on the pictures, means that at least under UK law, Mr. Henderson retains clear title to the art works.

Where do the “owners” go from here?

Mr. Ellis reported that he is attempting to schedule a meeting with Roberto Matarazzo, Italian legal counsel to the 70-year-old retired Fiat factory worker arguing that this evidence seems to dictate that the Carabineri TPC and Italian Courts may not have satisfactorily investigated the claim to ownership with regards to these valuable artworks prior to their ruling in the retiree’s favor.  Ellis would like to set up an appointment to discuss the matter in Naples as soon as possible but definitely before any potentially, controversial sale.

This may be a perfect opportunity for all parties to consider the advantages of extra-judicial methods of dispute resolution through the use of a mediator. By sitting down to talk and finding an agreement via mediation on this matter, both parties may be able to arrive at a satisfactory resolution for all parties via Directive 2008/52/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 May 2008.  This directive is specifically intended to encourage amicable dispute resolution vs. long litigious drawn out battles, particularly in civil and commercial matters.

Its the appropriate recourse for art and cultural heritage dispute in the event of an art theft where both the heirs and the purchasing party have vested interests, financial or emotional, in the artworks.

By Lynda Albertson, ARCA

References used in this article:

http://www.antiquestradegazette.com/news/2015/jan/28/british-heir-challenges-italian-factory-worker%E2%80%99s-claim-over-stolen-%C2%A325m-gauguin/

http://www.boglione.eu/it/chi-siamo/focus/item/216-re-getting-back-stolen-valuable-goods-the-eu-perspective.html

http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/justice_freedom_security/judicial_cooperation_in_civil_matters/l33251_en.htm

Italian Studies in Law: A Review of Legal Problems, edited by Alessandro Pizzorusso

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/arts/design/two-stolen-paintings-are-found-in-italy.html?_r=0

http://www.panorama.it/cultura/gauguin-bonnard-capolavori/

http://www.thepeerage.com/p36836.htm