The heist: down to a fine art

‘The Judgement’, stolen from a California museum last week, wasn’t the first Rembrandt to fall victim to a heist, and it won’t be the last. But what drives art thieves, and how do Irish galleries safeguard against them?

HOW SAFE are Ireland's artworks? At the gallery in the Louvre that houses the Mona Lisa, there is no doubt about which is the most important painting in the room: it's the one with the extra protection around the frame, the barrier to keep visitors at arm's length and, of course, the security guard. Crowds cluster around, making you wonder how easy it might be to lift another of the ignored artworks in that space and walk away with it. When the Mona Lisawas stolen, 100 years ago tomorrow, on August 21st, 1911, that is exactly what happened.

The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, simply took it off the wall and wandered out of the galleries with the wooden panel hidden under his smock. He later claimed it was an impulse crime, committed on a whim.

No alarm bells rang. No one noticed it was missing for 24 hours. They thought it had been removed for cleaning or to be photographed.

As soon as the news spread, thousands of people arrived and queued at the Louvre to stare at the brighter patch of wall the painting had left behind. When it was recovered, two years later (it had been hidden in a trunk in Peruggia’s room), it returned to the gallery in triumph as the world’s most famous painting.

The problem with fame is that it makes a piece of art more vulnerable. It is not simply a question of theft; iconic works of art also need to be protected from damage. Earlier this month, Susan Burns was arrested in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC, for attacking Matisse's The Plumed Hat.

In April this year, the same woman had similarly attacked a painting by Gaugin, Two Tahitian Women. This is not a logical crime, or vandalism born of disaffection or anger, as was the case when Marcus Harvey's portrait of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley was attacked twice in the same day during the Sensation exhibition in 1997, once with red and blue ink, and once with eggs. Whatever the psychological or social causes, the artwork suffers.

In Ireland, our two most valuable paintings held in national collections are Caravaggio's The Taking of Christand Vermeer's Woman Writing a Letter.

Both are in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, although the Vermeer is also famous as coming from the Beit Collection at Russborough House, Co Wicklow, which has been targeted by thieves on four occasions. In the most recent of these, in 2006, a car was used as a battering ram to smash through a window. There’s little chance of this happening to the Vermeer in the National Gallery, although anyone involved in security is aware of the development by which thieves now use JCBs to break down bank walls to remove ATM machines.

The specific security measures used at the National Gallery or at the Irish Museum of Modern Art are, unsurprisingly, a closely guarded secret, with both institutions refusing to comment on the details. However, all of the country’s leading galleries follow international museum standards, not just as a safeguard for their own works, but also in order to be able to borrow art for temporary exhibitions. These standards include not just security against theft, but also environmental protections, climate control and monitoring systems.

Imma's New Galleries (in the former Master's Quarters) meet those standards, as the loan of a Mark Rothko painting last year from the Menil Collection, in Houston, for the Vertical Thoughtsexhibition demonstrates. In 2007 another Rothko set a record by selling for $72.84 million at auction in New York. The New Galleries are the only climate-controlled spaces in Imma capable of showing such a work.

The Heritage Council runs a museum-standards programme, and Irish museums and galleries wishing to borrow internationally must also regularly complete facilities reports for various international organisations, demonstrating that they have such security systems as motion sensors, magnetic or weight-based contact detectors that sound an alarm when contact between the artwork and wall or plinth is broken, infrared, CCTV and general alarm systems.

As well as the bells and whistles, there is also the physical security of a person standing in a room. At the National Gallery last September, the security staff threatened to go on strike because their jobs had become so boring after a change in work practices meant an attendant could spend an entire day in a single room. Bored or not, gallery attendants are quick to stop visitors should they get too close to a painting.

Artists and aficionados who like to get close to paintings to examine the pigments and brushstrokes face barriers and overzealous attendants moving them away again. This relationship of artist to artwork, and the interventions of security staff who may or may not have a background in art, was investigated and parodied by the Irish artists Connolly and Cleary in their series of videos, Touchy(connolly-cleary.com). In the films, the artists transgress the physical and institutional boundaries of some of the world's major museums, including the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao, the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums in New York and the Louvre in Paris.

While the barriers are there to protect, they can also interfere with how we see an artwork. A rope or rail placed in front of one painting makes it stand out as more important, more worthy of attention than its fellows. We may linger longer in front of it for that reason. For subtle works, such as Rothko’s paintings, a barrier can change their mood. At the Tate Modern exhibition of Donald Judd’s minimalist sculptures in 2004, wooden lines on the gallery floor, meant to make the public stand back from the sculptures, interfered with the spare lines of the work, causing them to be less than they could.

Barriers of some sort are nevertheless important. Judd’s aluminium sculptures are easily damaged by the oils in our skin and ruined by finger marks. You’d be amazed at the number of people who reach out to “poke” paintings. Perhaps we feel we can somehow experience more by engaging all our senses.

Although some art works carry multimillion-euro valuations, pieces are seldom stolen for resale. They may be used as collateral in criminal deals or, as in the case of the 1974 Beit theft, as a proposed exchange for IRA prisoners. Whatever the reason, the lure of art is strong. Were it always possible, the best time to see an artwork is before it has left the artist’s studio, where it can viewed before the museum, the market and the world at large have determined its value, and before security changes our relationship to it.

The Art Loss Register at artloss.com is the largest non-police database of stolen art works. For more on this subject, read Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures (2008), Robert K Wittman’s story of the FBI agent who set up the Art Crime Team

Dutch courage: On the trail of the art thieves

Last weekend Rembrandt's The Judgmentwas stolen from an exhibition at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, in California. Having distracted the curator in the hotel, the thieves escaped with the pen-and-ink drawing, valued at about €175,000.

Later in the week, The Judgmentwas recovered in a church 20 miles from the crime scene, after an anonymous tip-off.

So, who sits down on a Saturday night and decides to steal a Rembrandt, then a few days later gets the heebie-jeebies and goes looking for a church to purify themselves of a delicate piece of art?

According to Tom Mashberg, an investigative reporter and former Boston Herald Sundayeditor, it's unlikely to have been ordered by some criminal mastermind. "It's more likely to have been an opportunistic thief who got himself involved in something that was way above his head," says Mashberg, who, with Anthony M Amore, wrote Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists."The idea that a criminal mastermind was behind it is just another version of the Dr No myth and all of these images we are used to seeing of the debonair thief in such films as The Thomas Crown Affair. It's all Hollywood."

The Dr Noanalogy goes back to events 50 years ago this August, when Goya's The Duke of Wellingtonwas stolen from Britain's National Gallery in London. A year later, in 1962, the James Bond film Dr No hit the big screen. In it, 007 visits Dr No's lair and does a double-take when he notices Goya's painting on an easel. "So that's where it went," says Bond.

Another evil genius, this time Mr Burns from The Simpsons,has also been cast in the role of multibillionaire paymaster behind an art theft: Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galileeand Vermeer's The Concertended up in his clutches. In 1990, The Storm,Rembrandt's only known seascape, and The Concertwere stolen in a $500 million raid from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where Anthony M Amore is the director of security. Never recovered, the Rembrandt masterpiece is now worth about €105 million; The Concertis valued at about €170 million.

On the trail of the art thieves, 20 years later, Amore says he spends “every working day following leads to recover these paintings, researching criminals past and present, and I’m confident we will recover them eventually”.

Some Rembrandts have been stolen more than once. For instance, Jacob de Gheyn III,a 1632 oil portrait of the Dutch Golden Age engraver, is famous as the "Takeaway Rembrandt" because was stolen four times between 1966 and 1983.

But the popularity among art thieves of this 17th-century artist doesn't stop there. At a heist at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, in 1972, two men stole St Bartholomew.Three years later, at Boston Museum of Fine Art, two men stole Portrait of a Girl Wearing a Gold-Trimmed Cloak.Then, in 2000, thieves broke into the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm, stealing a Rembrandt self-portrait and two Renoirs and escaping on a boat moored in front of the buidling.

Among the heists mentioned in Stealing Rembrandtsis Martin Cahill's 1986 raid on Russborough House and the infamous 1973 Taft Museum heist, in Cincinnati, which could have been lifted from a Coen Brothers film.

All week, Amore has been telling reporters the thieves in California were likely to ditch the sketch in a church once they realised “fencing it” wasn’t an option.

“Like all Rembrandt thieves, they were incredibly shortsighted and unable to move it, fence it or sell it . . . Once the police made it known that they had clear video footage of the theft, that had to play on the thieves’ minds. So leaving the Rembrandt in a church, in the end, was the safest place to leave it, because churches are usually free from surveillance, and it was probably the thieves who gave the police the heads-up as well.”

Ironically, The Judgmentdepicts a scene in a court of a man prostrating himself before a judge, possibly begging for clemency.

What advice would Amore give to anyone thinking of stealing a Rembrandt? "Examine the recent Marina del Rey case very closely, or better still read our book and study every case, and you'll see that no one has ever made money or advanced their life by a dime by stealing a Rembrandt, and that is not going to change now." PAUL O'DOHERTY

Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heistsis published by Palgrave MacMillan