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Two thieves cut a fence, climbed through a window and made off with four valuable Renoir paintings on Tuesday from a small museum dedicated to the artist in France, but they abandoned two of the artworks during their escape, authorities said. Investigators have launched a nationwide search for the perpetrators.
The entire operation lasted less than three minutes and targeted the most valuable works at the Renoir Museum in the town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, the regional prosecutor's office said.
The event evoked painful memories of the spectacular theft of crown jewels at the Louvre Museum in Paris last year and reignited calls for better security and funding for the numerous cultural sites, both large and small, that dot the French landscape.
The mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Bryan Masson, estimated the value of the Renoir works stolen on Tuesday at 9 million euros (10.5 million dollars), but art theft experts warned that they will be extremely difficult to sell.
The Renoir Museum is located in the last home of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, where he lived before his death in 1919. It is the most famous tourist attraction in Cagnes-sur-Mer, situated between Cannes and Nice on the Mediterranean coast.
A group of “well-equipped” and “well-informed” thieves entered the museum through the garden, Masson told reporters.
They cut a fence with a knife or an electric saw, entered the museum on the ground floor and then cut the clips securing the frames of the artworks, the mayor noted in statements broadcast by the local station Ici Azur.
The museum's alarm system was activated at 5:48 a.m. and police arrived five minutes later, the mayor said. Their quick arrival “forced the thieves to flee in a hurry and limited the scale of the theft,” the mayor said in a written statement sent to The Associated Press.
Two of the stolen works were found abandoned in the museum's garden — “Portrait of Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading,” both by Renoir — the prosecutor's office said in a statement. The other two remain missing: “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Girl at the Well.”
At least two of the stolen works have a controversial history.
“Young Girl at the Well” is believed to have been looted by the Nazis during World War II, and was recovered in Bavaria in 1949 and brought back to France, according to the French Ministry of Culture's database on looted art.
A German officer in Paris handed “Coco Reading” to a German soldier at the end of the war with orders to take it to Germany, according to the database. The soldier later gave it to a German priest, who handed it over to a Berlin museum in 1972. The German government returned it to France in 1994.
The museum had 12 Renoir works in total, the mayor said. The museum remained closed on Tuesday as the investigation proceeded.
The Marseille prosecutor's office opened an investigation into theft by an organized gang. The national office for the trafficking of cultural goods joined the investigation.
“This incident should serve as a warning about the protection of our museums,” said the mayor.
Art theft expert James Ratcliffe, of the Art Loss Register, told the AP that a lack of funding is the main problem facing museums everywhere, not just in France. And smaller museums are especially exposed due to their limited finances.
“The Louvre theft has shown everyone with criminal intent that museums are potentially easy targets,” he explained. “People are looking at museums differently.”
Unlike the Louvre theft and other recent museum robberies that targeted gold or jewels that can be melted down or cut up, the theft of the Renoirs leaves the thieves in a bind.
“Although they (the paintings) are valuable, and will likely have seven figures associated with them in terms of financial value, trying to find a buyer who will pay that is going to be almost impossible for them,” Ratcliffe pointed out.
“Unless they have a plan for that beforehand, they are not just going to be able to walk into an art dealer's and say, 'Look, I have these two nice Renoirs, would you like to buy them?'”
[Publicidad]