A pair of thieves equipped with just a ladder, a large piece of cloth and a rope managed to break into Amsterdam’s famous Van Gogh museum yesterday and make off with two multi-million-rand canvases by the artist. The stolen pictures were among the most carefully guarded and valuable works of art in the world.
Employing low-tech cunning against the hi-tech security features of a heavily protected modern gallery, the cat burglars thwarted CCTV cameras, alarms, motion sensors and 24-hour security guards by simply leaning a ladder against the back of the museum, climbing in through the roof and taking what they wanted.
Nor did they mess around cutting the pictures out of their frames — they merely lifted the two small paintings off the wall, smashed a side window, muffling the sound with the cloth, before scaling down the rope to make a getaway early yesterday.
The alarm system did go off and police were called, but when they arrived there were only blank spaces where the first and third paintings in the museum’s 97-canvas collection should be.
The two missing oil paintings — Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884) and View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) — are among Vincent Van Gogh’s earliest works. Although not icons, they are paintings with particular significance to the artist’s younger life. They can never be sold on the open market and have probably been stolen to order for a private collector.
The theft marked a crushing blow for the museum as it gets ready to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Van Gogh’s birth next year with a series of exhibitions and special activities.
”It’s the worst thing that can happen to any museum that a property is stolen, but for any museum it’s a risk,” museum director John Leighton said. ”The stolen works do not have a market value as such, because they are not for sale, but comparable works would be valued at around several million euros,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001