| | |  Vallarta Living | Art Talk 
On (Surprisingly Quiet) Parisian Night, a Picasso and a Matisse Go Out the Window
 Doreen Carvajal - New York Times
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May 22, 2010
| | The burglary raised fresh questions about museum security in the French capital. | |
Paris — A lone hooded man who squirmed through a broken window and evaded security alarms stole five paintings by Picasso, Matisse and other artists overnight Wednesday from the Paris Museum of Modern Art in a brash theft of art valued at $114 million to $127 million.
Museum officials discovered the theft shortly before 7 a.m. Thursday. They said they had captured video images of the black-clad burglar as he stole into the museum, housed in the Palais de Tokyo, the 1937 Art Deco showpiece that sits across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
The burglary — which triggered no electronic alarms — immediately raised fresh questions about museum security in the French capital.
Last summer, a thief snatched a red sketchbook of 33 Picasso drawings from the Picasso Museum while it was undergoing renovations. Security alarms did not sound in that case, either.
The Museum of Modern Art was closed to visitors and cordoned off by investigators on Thursday.
The stolen works, part of the museum’s permanent collection, were “Dove With Green Peas” by Picasso, “La Pastorale” by Matisse, “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque” by Georges Braque, “Woman With a Fan” by Amedeo Modigliani and “Still Life With Chandeliers” by Fernand Léger.
The stature of the paintings would make them extremely difficult to sell in the art market, raising questions about whether the theft was a form of kidnapping to demand ransom from the museum.
The police and museum officials said little about the security failure, particularly about whether the alarm system had malfunctioned or had been disabled.
A French newspaper, Le Parisien, quoted an unidentified source from the museum who claimed that the security alarm had not worked for two months and that management had been notified of the problem.
But in a hastily called news conference outside the museum, Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor of culture for Paris, told reporters that the museum was equipped with security alarms and that three armed guards who were patrolling the museum on Wednesday night said that they had not noticed anything amiss.
“We must leave it to the police to determine how the security system was evaded,” Mr. Girard said.
The theft, he added, was carried out “by one or more individuals, obviously very organized,” who entered by breaking a window at the rear of the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo.
Police officers carried out the original frames left behind by the burglar to search for fingerprints, passing them through the broken shards of a museum window.
According to the authorities, surveillance images show a hooded man, dressed in black, who smashed through a window and then used bolt cutters to remove a grid.
Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, expressed his shock and sadness at a “theft that is an intolerable attack on the universal cultural heritage of Paris.”
He announced that the museum, which is owned by the city, would remain closed while the investigation continued.
On Thursday, the museum posted a simple notice on its heavy double doors, blaming “technical reasons” for forcing it to close temporarily.
Carol Vogel contributed reporting from New York. |
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