High-Profile Art Heists
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, remarkable for its audacity, unfolded in the early hours of March 18, 1990. Disguised as police officers, the thieves gained entry by citing a bogus disturbance call. Once inside, they swiftly overpowered the guards and absconded with thirteen masterpieces valued at around half a billion dollars. Despite exhaustive investigations and substantial rewards, none of the artworks, including Vermeer's priceless The Concert, have been recovered.
In another high-profile case, Edvard Munch's iconic work The Scream was stolen from Norway's National Gallery on February 12, 1994. Masked men entered through broken windows and left a mocking thank-you note to the lax security. The painting was later recovered in a daring sting operation, exposing vulnerabilities in museum security protocols.
More recently, Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre, stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in 1985, resurfaced at an estate sale in 2017. Priced at a mere $2,000, a far cry from its estimated value of over $100 million, the painting's surprising reemergence raised questions about the seemingly ordinary nature of its keepers.
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