Selling Stolen Art

With the theft of several important works from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam the difficulty of selling stolen artworks again is in the press.  Bloomberg has a good article.  Bloomberg reports that roughly 40% of stolen works re-surface within seven years, and if they are not re-discovered by 10 years, many times they are not seen again.

Bloomberg reports

The plan may be flawless, the booty priceless and the robbery perfectly executed. Yet art thieves seldom consider how they will get rich from their stolen masterpieces, art-crime experts said.

Seven paintings, including works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Lucian Freud were stolen from the Kunsthal museum in the Dutch city of Rotterdam this week. The combined value may be as much as $130 million, yet as long as they are stolen goods, the paintings are effectively valueless, said Olivia Tait, manager of European clients at the Art Loss Register, an online database of lost art.

“On the face of it, art theft seems like an easy way to get money -- after all, you can’t get $5 million by robbing a bank,” Tait said by telephone from London. “Criminals don’t think about the fact that they can’t resell artworks after. Then they realize that they can’t take the paintings across borders because they are listed in all the police databases.”

The Rotterdam burglary ranks among the most spectacular art heists of the last decades. Comparable incidents are the 2010 theft of five paintings -- also including works by Picasso and Matisse -- from the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, and the 1990 burglary from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston of art worth an estimated $500 million.

Hidden, Abandoned

In neither case has the lost art been retrieved. Once thieves wake up to the difficulty of converting stolen masterpieces into hard cash, they often hide or abandon the paintings, which may not resurface for decades -- if ever.

“Forty percent of stolen artworks return within seven years,” said Ton Cremers, who was head of security at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for 14 years and has since advised more than 450 museums on security as an independent consultant. “If they don’t return in 10 years, the chances are very small that they will be recovered.”

Sometimes paintings are even destroyed or damaged by the criminals who took them, said Lynda Albertson, chief executive of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art. The thief who stole Picasso’s “Pigeon With Green Peas” from the Musee d’Art Moderne in 2010 “threw it in a trash container shortly after the theft and the container was emptied before it could be retrieved,” Albertson said.

Even with the difficulty of selling famous stolen masterpieces, Picasso’s works are the victims of theft more often than any other artist’s, according to the Art Loss Register, which lists more than 1,000 missing Picassos.

Source: Bloomberg