Art Lovers discussion
Do You Know Your Art Heists?
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Does this Art need to use the Facilities?
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Clue #2 the paintings were found three days later down the street in a boarded up, graffiti-covered restroom the police labeled “The Loo-vre”
Well I don’t have many more clues to give without giving you the whole story. Does nobody have an idea? No questions? It didn’t make breaking news how three paintings ended up in a bathroom?Clue #3 This happened in England
Clue #4 It happened in 2003I will divulge the whole news within the next day if nobody gets it today. There’s not much more to say. It’s quite humorous, but I’ve pretty much told you. We’ll move on.
Thieves who stole three masterpieces in an apparent protest against lax security at a gallery, and then dumped them outside a disused public lavatory, were condemned by the art world yesterday as "wholly irresponsible".The paintings by Gauguin, Picasso and Van Gogh are thought to have sustained only minimal damage from torrential rain but a detailed examination was still being conducted last night.
They were taken in what police described as a sophisticated robbery after the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, closed on Saturday.
The thieves managed to bypass or disable the alarm system, then unscrewed the paintings, carried them to a back door and left the grounds via a hole in a chainlink fence. CCTV cameras would have been running inside the gallery at the time. However, since no security staff were on duty to monitor them the robbery went undetected until Sunday.
The works of art, valued at around £4 million, were found shortly after 2am yesterday following an anonymous 999 call.
They had been rolled up inside a brown cardboard poster tube, then placed amid rain-sodden leaves and litter beside a disused public lavatory block 100 yards away.
A note scrawled on the side of the tube bore a message: "We did not intend to steal these paintings, just to highlight the woeful security."
Nicola Walker, the gallery's paper conservator, took several hours painstakingly removing the paintings from the tube. Van Gogh's The Fortifications of Paris with Houses was the first to emerge. Police confirmed last night that it had suffered water damage. The other paintings are Picasso's Poverty and Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape.
Det Chief Insp Peter Roberts, who is leading the investigation, appealed to whoever took the paintings to return the frames too.
Art experts initially believed that the paintings had been stolen to order by an international collector.
Eric Knowles, of Bonhams auction house in London, said: "There are other ways of proving a point. I would tar them with the same brush as the common thief."
Jo Beggs, the gallery's development officer, said that security at the Whitworth was "at least up to the standards of the best" in the art world.
The Whitworth collection, in common with other major public galleries, is not insured.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...






They devised a rather sophisticated robbery and disabled the alarm system, unscrewed the paintings from their frames, rolled them up and put them into a cardboard tube.
They carried them out the back door. The cameras were running but no guards were attending them. These clever people slid through a hole in the chain link fence and took off.
Sunday the police received an anonymous phone call notifying them that the paintings could be found in an unusual location. One where phone numbers are sometimes written on the stall walls and favors are exchanged for money.
Upon arrival, they found some paintings rolled up in the cardboard tube with a note saying something like ""We did not intend to steal these paintings, just to highlight the woeful security."
They didn't find the humor in the situation. What happened here?
Where did this take place?
What happened?
What was stolen?
Was this crime ever resolved?
When did this happen?