Stolen van Gogh painting returned in an IKEA bag | Hacker News Reader

Stolen van Gogh painting returned in an IKEA bag

smithsonianmag.com

248 pointsBrajeshwar88 comments

After watching way too much Baumgartner Restoration, do paintings with such status receive much conservatorship? The varnish on that painting is obnoxiously aged.

They do, but I expect it becomes a big political issue - can you imagine how much it must cost in insurance alone, as soon as you mention the painting might have to be touched...? And then you'll need a committee to agree on how much varnish should be stripped, etc etc.

An experienced conservationist would know exactly what to do, and scope the work accordingly. It would go on show for a short period to capitalise on the current interest and attract foot traffic to the gallery, before being treated.

Conservator 'best practice ' changes pretty much every decade, with each generation of conservators dismayed at all the damage done by their predecessors...

Conservators: the dentists of the art world.

Sounds like software development

That is true, but![1] This is well understood by modern conservators, so they use reversible materials as much as possible. For example paints which can be any time cleaned up with a weak solvent specifically selected such that it doesn't attack the base painting at all. The any time is a very important property here. Normal paints "set" after a while. You might clean them off the canvas a day later easily, with some difficulty a year later, and 30 years later it becomes basically impossible. But conservation paints don't do this. They can be cleaned up a day after the work is done, or 200 years after.

The other important property is that these materials are often designed to show up visibly under UV light. That way they can perfectly blend in the base paint under normal gallery lights (if desired, this is not always desired) but they will always show up for someone who investigates the painting in the future.

1: All my knowledge about the topic comes from the aforementioned Baumgartner Restoration YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/BaumgartnerRestoration

If you watch Baumgartner's channel (as you do) this is a topic he is probably most careful about. He knows his first duty is to do nothing which can not be undone. Conservation paints and isolation layers are critical.

True... But what when the conservators work itself becomes a historic artifact? In the 25th century, there may be no way to separate and keep both the 15th century artwork and the 21st century conservators work.

Only if nobody cleans the thing for four centuries, and also we lose all knowledge of how the conservation was done.

This sounds a lot like software developers, except replace decade with 6 months.

“The first order of business is to blame everything on the guy before me.”

An experienced conservator (such as Baumgartner) would know how little he knows and would proceed with extraordinary caution if faced with the prospect of restoring a Van Gogh.

I suspect, if given the job, he would only do it in incredibly small steps with deep collaboration with his peers.

I've watched how cautiously he approaches paintings which (while admittedly beautiful) don't have 1% of the historical significance of a Van Gogh.

They wouldn't know "exactly" what to do. Just like every discipline there's many different ways to skin a cat, pros/cons, aims.

They'll just have someone do it for free in exchange for IP rights so that nobody can ever take a photo of it.

Similar dilemmas in vintage car collecting circles. Some like them fully restored to pristine condition, others leave patina and every imperfection as is. For example this “King Leopold” Bugatti 59 https://youtu.be/MzZIk05pAJ8?feature=shared&t=1017 sold for $12mil few years back https://luxurylaunches.com/auctions/a-vintage-bugatti-type-5...

After further research, can Gogh might have used paints with ingredients that brown over time. What a pity!

As the name implies Baumgartner is a restorer, not a conservator. Conservators tend to consider his methods rather aggressive, though I imagine part of it is being envious of his popularity. If you just want to spend a moderate sum of money to make your family heirloom look nice, you probably don't care about the .01% of original paint that gets lost.

If you watch his channel, he absolutely considers himself a conservator.

I'm genuinely interested to read some of these critiques that you are referring to.

I'm not the only technical person who likes his channel!

His channel hits this incredible niche between science (his knowledge of how the various cleaning methods, glues, paints and varnishes he uses interact with each other is amazing), the technical (one of the first videos of his I saw was the vacuum table build and the rigs he's built to save some of the wood panel paintings are amazing), and the meditative (as he would say, sometimes there is no better way to clean a painting than sitting there for 12, 24, 72 hours with cotton balls).

I'm a bit sad that they don't allow someone like him to work on paintings of this vintage. I know a Van Gogh is extraordinarily perhaps incalculably valuable but I would absolutely love to see paintings as they were when the artist first painted them (or at least closer), especially Van Gogh. The transformations on some the paintings Baumgartner has done are astonishing and can completely change the tone or meaning of a painting.

It's like a real life adaptation of the book, Goldfinch

One of my favorite novels of all time

Can you give me some thoughts on what you enjoyed about the book? I read it several years ago after reading many many glowing reviews but I just couldn't get much out of the book at all. What did I miss?

I think everything in it is fairly subtle (relative to modern television at least) and there are a lot of them. It'd be reductive for me to refer to it as a coming of age story, but I often do that despite knowing it's wrong, but coming of age stories generally have to hit me over the head with their point before I stop seeing it as a character piece.

For me, the themes in Goldfinch are about art (and the power it can hold over us,) how messy relationships can be despite good intentions (and how much care they require,) the role of beauty in the world, and the search for identity.

In the book. That start… the writing had me feel stress and despair in a way that no other book has managed. I think the technique it used was giving you a heads up on what will happen but then glimpses of hope that would make the hopelessness even more evident. I am not a writer, so cannot distill it fully, but the experience was palpable.

Anyone who enjoys these kind of stories should check out the series "Raiders of the Lost Art". They are on Curiosity Stream and maybe elsewhere. Good stuff.

Someone who is really good at finding lost artworks hey....?

Is there good evidence that this guy or his friends didn't steal the artworks in the first place?

Same thoughts. It's hard to navigate the criminal underworld having clean clothes yourself.

But the painting is back.

He did literally write a book on infiltrating the Nazi underground to get artwork back.

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Horses/dp/1529106109

The thief left DNA evidence at the scene and eventually pleaded guilty. The person in TFA didn't "find" the artwork, someone came to him with it in order to arrange a handover without getting into legal trouble themselves.

>without getting into legal trouble themselves.

How would that work? Police: Hey thanks for returning stolen property, since it was in your possession we will charge you now, that is unless we learn who gave it to you.

I don't see any indication in the story that the police were involved in the return.

The hard part, as with most transactions of this sort, is trust. I'm curious how Brand convinced the returner he wouldn't double-cross them.

>> The art detective “had to gain his confidence” before the man agreed to drop off the canvas in a meeting sanctioned by authorities.

I wonder how that tactic would work for fentanyl? Jailing the ultimate source (or at least highest-level distributor) would seem ideal. Making the charge stick might be harder; does it fall back down then? (Warden Isaac Newton spent years on one counterfeiter.)

Counterfieiting currency is a high-skill activity, distributing fentanyl is not. As soon as they cut the head off of a distribution network, another one will pop up to fill the vacuum; so it isn't worth huge investments to take down any given individual.

i mean, yes, police do in principle try to roll up dealers to higher level distributors.

BTW: those durable plastic carry bags from IKEA are a bit of a lifehack for me. They are just a few USD each and they carry a lot of volume and weight. I keep a couple folded up in my vehicle and in the garage. They are great for carrying lots of groceries, firewood, and other items...such as valuable pieces of art.

Some even make backpacks out of them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13013868

https://web.archive.org/web/20200301084451/http://sandiegomi...

Also syndicated on https://ikeahackers.net/2016/12/ikea-ultralight-backpacking-...

Also dogs! New York banned dogs on the subway unless they fit in a bag or other container, so New Yorkers have been dressing their dogs in Ikea bags with four holes cut in the bottom.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/10yzyq6/nycs_answer_t...

A few USD?? Wow here they're 50 euro cents

$0.99. Probably .9 euro or something.

There's different kinds of those bags. My favorite is a rectangular prism, has a zipper and backpack straps and sells for like $4.99. I think it may have been discontinued in my area, or it is of sporadic availability?

They work well for bullion too.

And laundry! That is what we use them for in sweden!

...and water.

They are exactly the right size to hold a Brompton folding bike. Some people add padding and check their bikes in these as luggage!

Reminds me of that Rembrandt/Renoir heist, a classic documentary by the Internet Historian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPlFdIpgioI

If it came in a yellow and not a blue bag, we should have known.

After some searching it appears that the joke here is that yellow bags are meant to stay in IKEA stores, while one can buy blue ones. So a yellow bag must be stolen.

I was hoping to see the IKEA bag as well when I clicked on the link. Slightly disappointed :(

We have lovely page where you can see them

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/frakta-carrier-bag-large-blue-1...

There’s nothing you can do with a stolen famous painting. It’s essentially worthless as your clientele know it’s worth and that it’s stolen. Stolen art only gains to make the art more famous

What do you mean? There are absolutely people willing to buy stolen art.

In the article it says that the criminals had a hard time selling the stolen painting, and it was mostly used as down payment.

What? Aren't stolen high art pieces used as their own currency in the dark web for "priceless" services. I was told that criminals use stolen art for payment and it just goes around one criminal to another. Is this just an urban legend, is it inaccurate?

If someone steals the Mona Lisa, who are they going to sell it to get cash?

Why would someone accept a stolen Mona Lisa as payment? How are they going to reliably turn it into cash?

I think you misunderstood what I said? They don't turn it into cash, they use it as payment for "priceless" services. Say, you pay someone "Mona Lisa" for an assassination, and they take it, then they themselves use it to hack into some high profile person or Nation State actor etc... So, ultimately these art pieces are just their own currency, they're never turned into cash until they're busted. They go from one criminal to the other for special services. I have no idea if this is accurate in reality but I read this in some sources (blog posts), so just wanted to share.

You can do the only thing you should be buying a painting for: look at it and enjoy it.

True. There was an infamous case in the Netherlands were the Bulgarian thieves realised their mistake and burned a million euro painting in their mother's stove to get rid of the evidence.

Criminals contrary to Batman cartoons aren't geniuses.

I wonder if Nils will get his $9M back?

Authorities arrested the culprit behind the heist in April 2021. . . . A Dutch court sentenced Nils to eight years in prison and ordered him to pay nearly $9 million in compensation to the owner of the Hals.

After Nils’ arrest, the painting circulated in the criminal underworld, where it was used a down payment. But nobody was willing to buy it, as “the thieves had been convicted, and anybody possessing it would risk a hefty fine,” writes Claire Moses for the New York Times.

Tha Hals is a different painting than the van Gogh.

That top image looks like a generated image.

Those hands. Man those hands are wildly big.

Camera angles are powerful.

Yeah but there are 8 visible fingers, not 18.

I wonder if an ethical collector was viewing to buy and said something like “the only way it’s leaving here with you is with the police. Are you staying or leaving it?”

Sort of like a Goya in a Harrod's handbag?

hard, if not impossible to sell it. that is the problem with stolen artwork from the perspective of thief

Hot potato indeed

They bought the wrong VÅNGØGH and wanted to return it

> Prosecutors believe Nils stole the van Gogh on the orders of Peter Roy K., a Dutch shipping mogul involved in drug smuggling, who hoped to use the artwork as leverage for negotiating a reduced prison sentence

Roy K: "Two years for the stolen van Gogh?"

Prosecutor: "Right. On top of what you got for dealing drugs?"

Wait. Am I reading this right?

Did he commit a crime to get less jail time?

Wouldn't this be like kidnapping the police chief's child to try to get less prison time?

Someone please tell me it didn't work.

Meet Gerald Blanchard, who did something similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Blanchard

Sounds like he successfully bargained after this arrest, but didn’t necessarily pre-meditate the theft in order to reduce a future prison sentence.

It's kinda amusing that his last great crime after prison was stealing PlayStations from Best Buy...

I was shocked to learn that this is a thing but it does happen. Organized crime groups steal art that they can use to negotiate lighter sentences.

It is believed that the Mafia stole Rembrandt's "Storm in the Sea of Galilee", among other works from the Gardner Museum for this reason. The documentary series "This Is a Robbery" goes into this heist and is a good watch.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_a_Robbery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Mus...

In the Dutch system the judge has the last word not the prosecution so no it doesn't work.

Of course the judge has the last word. It was just a hypothetic prosecutor joke. I found it quite stupid that Roy K allegedly comissioned another crime, holding a painting hostage to get a reduced sentence. What?! That only put a different person in prison and potentially damaged the painting. I don't understand these people (drug dealers, nazis, climate activists) who keep stealing, looting and defacing Vincent van Gogh's legacy. His life was quite miserable as it is, why tarnish his legacy as well?

An ages old tactic, take someone or in this case something hostage to be ransomed for letting someone get out of jail. The most well-known cases in Germany involved the RAF (the left-wing terrorists, not the British Air Force), but it also works with nation states such as China taking two Canadians hostage to exchange them against a Huawei executive, or in war times with spy and prisoner-of-war exchanges.

The thing is, the stakes for something like that are super high, at least as a criminal as you need someone/something that is immeasurably valuable, stuff like the Crown Jewels or a masterpiece worth many millions of dollars, as a starter for negotiations - and that is usually just as well protected.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...

RAF = Red Army Faction, AKA Baader–Meinhof

If this was all an elaborate ruse to make us want to go shopping at IKEA, then I'll concede that it worked.

I guess the IKEA bag was stolen too

Stolen IKEA bag returned with van Gogh painting in it.

That could be the plot of a Tarantino comedy

Stolen attention returned in a HN comment.

Wait a second, can attention be returned?

Like, I can take attention with billboards and pop-up ads and flashy lights and loud noises, but is there some way I could do something that would do the opposite?

I suppose I could destroy other people's advertising, but that's more reducing the theft. I suppose some organizational tools might count? What's the opposite of taking attention?

Giving attention? Actively investing your attention in someone else’s wellbeing?

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