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29th May 2010
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contents
The end of the sleeper in France? The biggest ever regional sale Salander stock to sell at Christie’s
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news
Failure to repair alarm costs Paris museum dear
FIVE modern paintings, thought to be worth a total of over €100m, were stolen during the night of May 19-20 from the City of Paris Modern Art Museum. The works stolen were Picasso’s Cubist Pigeon
aux Petits Pois, Matisse’s La Pastorale,
Braque’s L
’Olivier près de L ’Estaque,
Léger’s Nature Morte au Chandelierand Modigliani’s La Femme à l’Eventail.
Paris Mayor Bertand Delanoë has admitted that museum authorities had been aware since March 30 that the alarm system was not working properly in certain rooms, but that the spare parts needed for repairs had not been delivered. Video surveillance cameras were,
however, operating, and – although the museum’s three night-time security guards apparently saw nothing – have revealed the presence of a hooded man inside the building. He is thought to have entered the museum through a window after breaking a padlock, before cutting the canvases from their frames and rolling them up.
Police have noted inadequate
protection of Paris museums on several occasions recently, but this is thought to be the most serious heist in French museum history, and follows the theft of an album of Picasso drawings from the Musée Picasso in June 2009. The theft was discovered before the museum opened on May 20, and the
Domenichino’s St John saved for the nation
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CONSIDERED the finest work by the Italian Baroque master Domenico Zampieri, Il Domenichino (1581–1641), in private hands, this painting of St John the Evangelist, right, has been saved for the nation. It has gone on display in the National Gallery’s Baroque rooms. The Domenichino was sold at Christie’s Old Masters sale on December 8 for £8.2m (plus 12% buyer’s premium) to an American buyer (a sale overshadowed at the time by the mighty £26m bid for the Raphael drawing Head of a Muse), but an export licence was deferred by the Reviewing Committee on the basis of its history in this country. St John was painted for the Giustiniani collection in Rome in the 1620s but had been owned for more than a century by the Christie family of Glyndebourne opera fame. The National Gallery itself is still
recovering from the titanic effort of buying the Duke of Sutherland’s Diana
museum was closed for the day as police launched their investigation.
France’s over-worked Office Central de la Lutte contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels
(currently pondering more arrests in the Drouot Cols Rougesscandal) has been put in charge of the case, and immediately posted images of the stolen works on its Treima database (which contains 80,000 stolen artworks). The stolen pictures have also been listed on the smaller Interpol database. Sources say the ‘sophisticated’ theft is probably the work of organised crime, and that the pictures may have been taken with a ransom in mind, or to exchange for arms or drugs, as they will be impossible to sell on the market. The much-touted €100m valuation of the five pictures would doubtless be conservative were they ever offered for sale legitimately, but their black market value would be negligible. The Paris Modern Art Museum – which has no connection with the Pompidou Centre – opened in 1961 and owns 8000 works, mainly French paintings and sculpture from the first half of the 20th century. It also stages major temporary exhibitions. Its most spectacular permanent exhibit is Raoul Dufy’s La Fée Electricitéwhich, at 33ft 10in x 203ft 5in (10 x 62m), takes up a whole room and is probably thief-proof.
Simon Hewitt
and Actaeonby Titian with the National Gallery of Scotland, but an anonymous collector has stepped in to make the purchase. Rules allow private offers if public access is available to artworks for 100 days within a 12-month period. The buyer has now loaned it to the National Gallery for the next 18 months and agreed the picture will be put on public display for three months every year.
Roland Arkell
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