$163 Million in Art Taken in Zurich Robbery
 Associated Press
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| | The Bührle collection director, Lukas Gloor, speaking to reporters in Zurich on Monday. (Christian Hartmann/Reuters) | | |
Zurich - Armed robbers stole paintings by Cézanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet worth $163.2 million from a Zurich museum, the police said Monday.
The robbery of the four paintings occurred Sunday at the E.G. Bührle Collection, a private museum for Impressionist and post-Impressionist art, the police said.
A police statement said the three robbers, wearing ski masks and dark clothing, had entered the museum a half-hour before closing Sunday. While one of the men used a pistol to force museum workers to the floor, the other two collected the masterpieces.
A reward of $91,000 was offered for information leading to the recovery of the paintings - Claude Monet's "Poppy Field at Vétheuil"; Edgar Degas's "Ludovic Lepic and his daughter"; Vincent van Gogh's "Blooming Chestnut Branches"; and Paul Cézanne's "Boy in the Red Waistcoat."
The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $6 billion annually, and Interpol has a list of about 30,000 pieces of stolen art in its database. While only a fraction of the stolen works are ever found, the theft of masterpieces, especially by force, is rarer because of the intense police work that follows and because the works are so difficult to sell.
The theft Sunday came days after the Swiss police reported that two Picasso paintings, "Head of Horse" and "Glass and Pitcher," had been stolen from an exhibition near Zurich.
In 1994, seven Picasso paintings worth an estimated $44 million were stolen from a gallery in Zurich. They were recovered in 2000, and a Swiss man and two Italians were jailed for the theft.
In the late 1980s, three armed men robbed a Zurich art gallery, making off with 21 Renaissance paintings worth hundreds of millions of dollars. |
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | February 2008 
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