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In 2001, wanted posters were fly-posted on walls all over Berlin. Below the large, Wild West-style “WANTED” banner in red, the image on each poster was not of a terrorist or a murderer; it wasn’t even a photograph. Instead, it showed Lucian Freud’s 1952 painting of his friend Francis Bacon. Underneath the portrait, in which Bacon’s large eyes are downcast and doleful, the text read: “For clues leading to the recovery of this small painting there is a reward of up to DM300,000. Messages will be treated with absolute confidentiality.” The painting had been stolen from the Neue Nationalgalerie on May 27, 1988. It has never been recovered.
The FBI estimates that between $4bn-$6bn of art is stolen every year. While this number might be vague (a billion here, a billion there) it suggests a staggering kleptomania. Christopher Marinello of Art Recovery International, a specialist in retrieving stolen works, tells me that the FBI’s number has been bandied around for decades. Its accuracy is debatable, Marinello says, more a case of, “Stick your finger in the air and see what way the wind is blowing. But the number is certainly in the billions.”
The FBI’s Art Crime Team was established in 2004 in response to the plundering of Baghdad museums after the US invasion of Iraq — it is still institutions like these that are most at risk from theft. Even the august British Museum is not immune: in 2023, the theft of up to 2,000 objects from the collection was discovered. Many had been sold on eBay. Such is the size of the BM’s collection (only about 1 per cent of it is on show at any one time) that the thefts had been going on for years before being discovered.
When I ask Marinello what is principally being stolen these days, he laughs and booms: “Gold, gold, gold!” With the price of the metal now at more than $3,800 an ounce, precious artefacts are being targeted. Some thieves even begin the process of breaking down the gold in the getaway van, ready for smelting.
When we think of an art thief, we picture someone suave and calculating who will stop at nothing to amass a collection of priceless masterpieces. While thieves like this do exist (between 1994 and 2001, Frenchman Stéphane Breitweiser stole more than 200 artworks from collections across Europe), Bill Anderson, founder of the security company Art Guard, tells me that more common are unscrupulous collectors who are happy to own artefacts of dubious provenance. Marinello concurs, recalling Russian and Chinese collectors whose walls boast Nazi-looted paintings with Third Reich labels on the back.
But how to guard against today’s thieves? As Michael Finkel writes in The Art Thief, his gripping book about Breitweiser, “all forms of security have a weakness”. Smaller museums in particular, Marinello says, should be careful to what extent they advertise their collections, especially if they don’t have sufficient security. Referring to the stolen Maurizio Cattelan sculpture “America”, a solid gold commode which was stolen in 2019, he says: “Blenheim Palace didn’t even have a guard by the toilet!”
The art market has also changed dramatically in the past 40 years, and criminals now have many more options than mere theft. Collectors can wind up being robbed before they’ve even taken delivery of an artwork. One art crime specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity, tells me about investors who had bought shares in paintings but did not have physical control of the work. Later, when the dealer absconded, the crate in which the painting was meant to have been stored was found to be empty. “It’s Schrödinger’s artwork,” he says ruefully.
The same expert advises clients not to flaunt their collection on social media. Prominent collectors with valuable paintings are increasingly having them expertly copied and keeping the originals in storage. And Anderson’s company Art Guard, which has worked with mega galleries such as Pace and Gagosian, provides sensors that track any movement of individual artworks — a kind of Find My iPhone for your Picasso.
It can be hard, of course, to shed tears for a plutocrat’s missing Picasso. One of the many reasons I failed as an art dealer was that the higher the prices climbed, the less I believed in the art and the less able I was to convince buyers. If today’s art thieves are more focused on melting gold and pulling off devious financial scams, then perhaps they too have stopped believing in art. It’s enough to make one long for the return of criminals who stole art to enrich their lives — assembling clandestine collections of Renaissance masterpieces — not just to swell the coffers. At least those thefts had meaning.
Orlando Whitfield is a failed art dealer and the author of ‘All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art’ (Profile)
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