Art of the Heist

In 2000 two Renoirs and a Rembrandt worth $80 million were stolen in an armed daylight raid on the National Museum in Stockholm . It was a well-planned heist with the thieves making their escape by boat through the labyrinth of canals in the Swedish capital. When the ringleaders were finally traced, police discovered that the plot to carry out the robbery had been hatched by two inmates in a prison many miles away.

When the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum was robbed in 1990 it was the biggest art theft in history. Up to $500 million worth of art was ripped from the walls of the gallery in a single night, including rare masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt.

For more than a decade two Englishmen conned a gullible art market with fakes and forgeries. Art teacher John Myatt produced over two hundred fake paintings by leading 20th-century artists. John Drewe forged the provenance of the paintings to make Myatt’s fakes seem genuine.

Edvard Munch’s the Scream is one of the most famous paintings in twentieth century art. In 2004 two robbers burst into the museum dedicated to the great Norwegian artist and ripped The Scream and another Munch masterpiece, the Madonna, from the walls.

Nearly thirty years ago thieves walked into a remote Massachusetts home and stole seven paintings. Among them was a Cezanne, one of the most influential paintings in art history.

In 1974 in war torn northern Cyprus a priceless mosaic is chipped from the walls of a Greek orthodox church by Turkish looters. It is smuggled out of the country into the underworld of stolen antiquities and broken into pieces before being sold to the highest bidder.