Stolen masterpieces that are still missing | Hacker News Reader

Stolen masterpieces that are still missing

thecollector.com

113 pointsTomte84 comments

> Spitzweg’s piece is often seen as comedic because of the old umbrella that’s shown as magically floating in the air.

Isn't it completely obvious that the umbrella is attached to the ceiling by strings, and that it hangs there because the roof leaks?

Yes, from looking at it for a couple of seconds.

Yes. Nobody thinks that it’s magically floating. Was this written by AI? This reads like ChatGPT nonsense to me: “Many art historians think that Spitzweg wanted to depict a starving artist.”

Probably. In the FAQ, for example, there is a repetition that is usually generated by LLMs:

> What is the current status of the investigation into the missing Ghent Altarpiece panel?

> The current investigation status of the missing Ghent Altarpiece panel (...)

> Is there any information about the security measures that were in place at the Mohamed Khalil Museum during the thefts of Poppy Flowers?

> Regarding the security measures at the Mohamed Khalil Museum during the theft of Poppy Flowers by Vincent van Gogh (...)

> What is the value of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee today?

> The value of The Storm on the Sea of Galilee by Rembrandt, if it were to be sold today, is challenging to estimate (...)

Thank you. I always assumed he hanged it on the ceiling to dry. Which doesn't make a lot of sense when you think about it.

For me it was not so obvious

Interestingly, the Mona Lisa wasn't considered to be anything special until after it was stolen. It was the headlines and the frenzy surrounding the news that caused it to be so popular once it was found.

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made...

Rarity is like an illusion

Not even rarity, because every painting is basically unique and non-fungible (modulo replicas). Instead, it's memes that make unique things more valuable than other unique things.

Paintings are unique the way people are unique. Each one is different but there are a LOT of them.

Some are objectively in another league, but 99% of it can be swapped out for something that appeals to you more personally.

Memes don't make a Rembrandt valuable, but equally the Rembrandt name matters more than the picture. So more "branding" than meme.

I subscribe to the notion that if it takes an expert to tell the difference between a fake or real Rembrandt, then (value aside) you have a Rembrandt. Or Rembrandt-quality painting.

> So more "branding" than meme.

Agreed, but it's worth examining how branding is itself memetic. Why is Rembrandt associated with value? Because of a perpetuating idea that Rembrandt was highly skilled, and thus his paintings are higher quality. But why do we say that Rembrandt was highly skilled? Because of a perpetuating idea that tells us what skill at classical painting should look like, and then a perpetuating idea that tells us that Rembrandt was an exemplar of that artificially-defined category.

It seems more likely that Rembrandt defied some of the standard art style at the time and is remembered for his innovation. For example, his paintings look quite realistic but tend to exhibit unusually dramatic lighting. Perhaps nobody did that before him, or not with the same quality, or only in a small number of artworks.

I like the concept of Mana - https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m... (the link might not be to your taste as it is sort of criticism but written in a fictional universe)

"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."

It is like having a Bob Ross painting. Which is surprisingly actually decently difficult to do as he kept most of them even though he made thousands of them. They are mostly in a Bob Ross museum. But 100 years from now? Without that show and the people who grew up watching it? Will they be worth anything?

Those of us that don't know anything about art still don't consider it anything special. I wouldn't even put it on a wall at home. Looks crusty, for one.

Meanwhile, there are works of immeasurably lesser technical talent hanging on my walls that I spend much time admiring. Good art is good art, and it's best to not let anyone tell you what that means or doesn't mean.

My favorite painting is by my wife’s grandmother’s childhood neighbor who only showed one painting in her life (circa 1963). I’m sure that an art critic would tear it to pieces, but to me it’s beautiful. I feel lucky to have it in my house. It’s starting to deteriorate and I need to find somebody to restore it, but I don’t want to entrust it to anybody I can afford.

Make it a hobby project. First to figure out is what is it on and then the paint type. From there you can research how to maybe restore and to preserve and slow or stop the degradation. Find books use AnnasArchive if they aren't in your library after researching books about restoration and preservation.

You don't know how unhandy I am. I would not be able to DIY this without making it worse, but today I contacted a restorer to at least find out what it will take. I assume that it will be multiple thousands of dollars, but have never even verified that assumption.

I think it was the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario talking about “art” in an interview who said (roughly) “Art is the match - your mind is the cigar”.

It's not art snobs who made it famous, either. It's just famous for being famous, at that poin. In the same room at the Louvre there's Veronese's "The Wedding at Cana" and several Titians that art snobs would also linger over, but the room is 90% tourists who want to see the Mona Lisa.

There is a restored copy, possibly made by a student of Leonadro, that you may find less crusty: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa_(Prado)

It was still a painting by one of the most renowned artists and individuals of all time. Maybe it wasn’t the mega-hit that it is today, but “not anything special” isn’t accurate either.

Yes it was. It's a masterpiece by one of the greatest artists of all time. There's a Great Art Explained episode [1] on it that's worth a watch.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElWG0_kjy_Y

There are other works by Da Vinci in other museums too but again the Mona Lisa had become uniquely and superlatively special over his other works, and indeed, all other works of art.

This reminds me of Stanisław Lem's literature theory / theory of everything monograph The Philosophy of Chance [1]. One of the many claims defended in the book was that which works ultimately become famous art depends to a great degree on random chance.

The Mona Lisa is an unusually clear example. It doesn't even stand out among da Vinci's other paintings. Another example is music. Whether a piece becomes famous, isn't just influenced by whether it sound good. It also has to hit a specific nerve in the current zeitgeist. If the best House track of all time came out tomorrow, nobody would notice, because the genre isn't popular anymore. The artwork has to be at the right place at the right time, or it will be forgotten by history.

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

Eh, I think it caught on because it's simple to describe. Da Vinci's other pieces in the Uffizi are a lot more elaborate and can't be summed up by "portrait with a smile". People like simple.

Yes, I prefer "Woman with a ferret[1]" myself. A better work in almost every way.

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

The thief of the Ghent Altarpiece was a big fan of the detective books on Arsene Lupin. In real Lupin style, he sent 14 letters to the paintings' owners containing all kinds cryptic hints about the location of the work, before dying unexpectedly. Right before his dead, the thief confesses to his lawyer he had stolen the work. He still tries to give some more details, but it is too late and he passes away.

It's crazy how much the theft of The Just Judges is part of the local collective consciousness/imagination. Just about everybody in the wide Ghent area claims to know someone who knows for certain that it's buried beneath so-and-so's basement.

Inspired by similar tales, my friends and I made a game about it (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/474859/artful-an...) with the twist that the art is stealing itself.

Ross Anderson's _Security Engineering_ has a chapter on physical security. Given the poor quality of security at most art galleries, one might expect more art to be stolen. However, it seems that it is often too difficult to sell.

Not to state the obvious, but -all- art, old and new, cheap and expensive are difficult to sell.

Stolen, famous works come with addition costs and restrictions, not to mention jeopardy.

Art is one of those things with a really long tail. Sure there are the famous artists, who are rightly admired, but I don't want a (legitimate or stolen) Rembrandt on my wall.

I do buy art occasionally. Usually it's cheap. It's always just because it's a piece I like. Honestly, the limiting factor is wall space.

You might enjoy Regina Spektor's song "All the Rowboats", which seems to posit (maybe like your game) that art objects don't enjoy being kept in museums, and would like to "escape".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CZ8ossU4pc

The whole concept of art gaining perceived value after it's stolen is interesting to me.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend "Exit Through the Gift Shop" by Banksy that explores this concept. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVXThss1z4

I wouldn't be surprised if most of these robberies are staged in an attempt to raise prices/launder money.

The Art World makes a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of a giant money laundering operation

Yep. It's just a token used to move money around.

If I owe you $100 million for some criminal or nefarious reason... Hey, nice painting you got there, it's worth $100 million you say?

Now I have the token and when someone needs to pay me, I can just pass it along. The token isn't worth anything.

As an aside, funny that "broad daylight" is seemingly only mentioned when someone gets away with doing something nefarious.

Stealing renowned art like this is an interesting phenomenon as it becomes largely impossible to ever display it or claim it let alone sell it. There are some cases whre the motive doesn't seem to be theft for the black market (eg the ransom case mentioned).

So the psychology is that someone with a lot of money wants to pay to take an artwork and put it in a vault, never displaying it. So the reward is to know something other people don't (ie the art's location) and to exert power over people by denying them the ability to see that art. That paints what seems to be a fairly accurate psychological profile of the ultra-wealthy as a whole.

The other side of art theft is looting, usually in war and particularly by the Nazis in WW2. The interesting part of this one is how the art and auction world enabled and profited off this trade where they willingly participated in the resale of stolen artwork even though there's clear provenance back to the original owners that no one involved in auctions seemed inclined to ever research and find out. Never ask a question you don't want the answer to. Greed is such a powerful motivator.

Basically all museums beyond galleries are filled with stolen stuff (Elgin marbles anyone?).

I don't think _anyone_ other than the owners who suffered the theft cared about "legit origins" until very recent times.

That's not really true. You know about the Elgin marbles precisely because they're vigorously contested - unlike 90% of artefacts that left Greece, Egypt, Italy, etc in perfectly legal circumstances.

It's true that colonial powers (chiefly Britain and France) have a particularly bad record, but not "all museums" contain looted stuff.

but a lot of the artefacts left their countries in circumstances which sounded legal but were not.

Consider the example of Euphronios Krater[0] which the Metropolitan Museum of New York "legally" acquired, and it took 40 years to convince the museum that it was not actually legal.

Or the Ishtar Gate[1] parts which were smuggled out of Egypt by the germans and then bits were sent off to museums in the US, Denmark, Canada etc.

Or the parthenon marbles owned by the Vatican and recently "gifted back".

And that's big stuff! The smaller stuff is just less noticeable, but it's obvious if you think about it that a lot of stuff acquired before 1900 has not being acquired in a way that would be considered "proper" today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphronios_Krater [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate

I imagine a number of stolen works are hanging in powerful people's penthouse suites. None of their confidants are going to rat them out.

A number? Likely all of them. These paintings in the end are only important enough for those who can buy it, or who can steal them for themselves (museum employees).

I imagine a good number of stolen art ends up destroyed or abandoned/lost after a generation or two.

Even the stuff bought legitimately is stashed away in tax-friendly warehouses, maybe never to be seen by human eyes again

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/arts/design/one-of-the-wo...

It is crazy how the German Nazis looted German paintings.

It's more crazy that "German Nazis" are sometimes described as an alien, non-german race, that came from the moon.

Nazis were German.

But even at the time, most germans were not nazis.

Germans who supported nazism were elected by german citizens by a democratic vote. Nazis came to power in a democratic system. Millions of germans voted for them.

They lied, didn't implement most of their program except the racist and nationalist parts, and still weren't the majority party in the end. The bourgeoisie, as usual, when in front of the choice to govern with fascists or socialists/union leaders, will always (almost always) choose the fascists. The only time they didn't was because they saw what happened in Germany and Italy a few years prior (it didn't end well either, but at least Spain can say they didn't choose Franco).

> didn't implement most of their program except the racist and nationalist parts

So if they would implement the other parts of the program, then the existence of the "racist and nationalist" part would be all fine?

I mean, Germany had a lot of profit from the wars anyway. The construction of Autobahns, for example, was heavily accelerated during Nazi rule, in order to help to move nazi tanks across the country. I don't recall anyone complaining about autobahns today.

> So if they would implement the other parts of the program, then the existence of the "racist and nationalist" part would be all fine?

I did not say that. Forgot "anticommunist" though in the list.

The racist part of their program was actually not their main point, and it was as racist as all non-communist parties, in most western countries (the Front Populaire was probably the less racist of all, and it was still pretty racist). Germans did not vote for Nazis because they were particularly racists.

The nationalistic part might have been a reason they caught some vote, but the true reason they got 33% of the vote was because they would "save the economy" by unspecified means, and remove the communist party, which pushed small business owners, landlords/slumlords and well as big land owners in their arms.

The Soviet-directed communists (not all communists, but all German elected communists) did not help their case, being droned around by Moscow to do stupid shit (They also shat the bed in Spain. Better to have as enemies than as allies to be frank).

Still, Nazi only got 33%, it wasn't a majority. They they did a coup, and the rest is well known, but they absolutely did not have a majority: 33% of the voting population, with most of those convinced by populist lies about economics and moral panics.

Wikipedia tells me that they got 44% and had the ability to form a coalition (so, a like-minded other party was there to support them). One can argue that this isn't the majority, but I guess this is open to interpretation. Also I know that Germans didn't support Nazism in order to build gas chambers, but rather because they wanted to have their country fixed in the first place, but enabling degenerates to fix something by any means seems like a degenerate action to me.

Not entirely, the elections were influenced by considerable street violence where people in unfavorable places were threatened and beaten.

> Nazis came to power in a democratic system.

Actually, the constitution was broken. Also actual move to take complete power was parliamentary vote where brownshirts came to the room and surrounded it. It was, again, literal threat of violence.

Like, yes, nazi had a lot of support, but democratic is not exactly how they gain complete power.

I wasn't there, so I don't know who was threatened by who. There are a lot of sources that do support the claim that no law was broken, and that judges could challenge the nazi agenda. But they didn't. Were they bought, intimidated, convinced? It's not really my job to prove it.

So it was just a regular ordinary political party, with a few extremist agendas in their campaign platform.

Rose to dominance doing whatever it takes, not entirely by popular demand.

Used a political machine to leverage growing new mass-media availability, to craft a cult-of-personality whose rhetoric over the media creates a feedback loop, empowering the cult to grow, simply in blind support of the figurehead. The followers gain a sense of belonging, and are constantly reinforced and assured they need to follow their idol's wishes, wherever that may lead. Ending up following way beyond the extent which could be in the citizens' best interest.

Another day, another misguided political party, and their attention-seeking media-exaggerated influencer acting as if they possess leadership ability.

Literal historical books written by historians describe these events in details.

> There are a lot of sources that do support the claim that no law was broken,

Not really, there are not. Most sources just simply do not go into details.

> and that judges could challenge the nazi agenda. But they didn't. Were they bought, intimidated, convinced?

In the actual stage I am writing about, no they could not oppose anything. Violent crack down on any political opposition happened right after takeover of power. The first nazi victims were pro-democratic and left wing politicians or sympathisers.

Moreover, lower government was overfilled by ex-soldiers, per law. That made them biased toward whoever they perceived patriotic and generally right wing.

> It's not really my job to prove it.

No body is asking you to prove it.

> Not really, there are not. Most sources just simply do not go into details.

The question is do such details even matter. Even Stalin's communism can be disregarded if we'll start detailing it out: we can arrive at the conclusion that it was not real communism, therefore communism is good.

> The first nazi victims were pro-democratic and left wing politicians or sympathisers.

And not communists? Unless you think communism is leftwing and pro-democratic, I know there are people who think this way.

Not most I think... At the time there were some

I think you will find rather a lot of them were Austrian old chap.

True, but Germany was the birth bed of nazism.

> Germany was the birth bed of nazism

Perhaps history isn't your strong point, however I assure you the winner of the 1932 Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest was most certainly Austrian.

Do you blame only one person for the popularization of national socialism in Germany (nazism)? Because one person couldn't pull it off. A large group of people did this. The fact that one person from this group was born in Austria, but lived in Germany since his early 20's, changes nothing.

It's like saying that Stalin (who also wasn't Russian) was the only person responsible for the horrors of communism, but in reality, there were lots of like-minded people near him.

I remember an article/documentary about a criminal, who explained he wanted to have a piece of art as his personal insurance.

A highly valued piece of art is irreplaceable. No matter how much money you spend, you won't get that specific piece back. Logic of this person was, that governments could go to extremes in order to get such work back to the museum so this could act as his "get out of jail" -card.

Quite likely it was this documentary, but it is hard to find the details. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pqx4r

> So the psychology is that someone with a lot of money wants to pay to take an artwork and put it in a vault, never displaying it.

From what I've read, much contemporary art is purchased with that in mind. Some collectors have warehouses filled with artwork that nobody sees. It's like collecting baseball cards.

Edit: See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40000250

The section about the Ghent Altarpiece is awful and clearly written by someone with no knowledge of the subject. I didn't read further.

You're implying you have knowledge of the subject, so rather than just a short dismissal, perhaps you could satiate our curiosity with some of your knowledge and/or some links to some non-awful information that you approve of?

Wikipedia. Probably any of the first page results on Google would be better than this.

How do you know which source is more accurate, if any of them are?

My point is that nearly any mainstream source will be better than this article, it's that bad.

Indeed, the last paragraph seems totally made up. The whole panel was stolen, not half of it. And Goedertier never demanded any ransom, the thief did but the article assumes he's definitely the thief. It's still unclear whether he was involved, he was a suspect because during the final minutes of his life, he mumbled some words about being the only person who knows where the stolen panel is.

The paragraph in question, for posterity:

>The artwork was stolen yet again in 1934 by stockbroker and businessman Arsène Goedertie. He sent a group of men to the cathedral one evening to steal the bottom left panel known as The Just Judges. Goedertie had sliced the panel in half, leaving the other half for the police to find, and demanded a ransom for the panel. The Belgian Minister refused, so the panel is still missing to this day. You can still check out the entire 12-panel Ghent Altarpiece on display, with an impressive replica of the missing panel.

The most funny thing is that sometimes the museum workers know where the stolen paintings are, but they don't want to be in any trouble by saying who has them. Maybe it's not true for the AAA-tier paintings, but those smaller ones, less popular but still valuable and with historical heritage, could be tracked, in theory.

There was this one case near the place where I live, where a retired oldtimer who was very politicaly influential in his prime time had a few paintings, matching the paintings of the museum 100 kilometers away. When the museum worker was confronted about the missing paintings, the worker did not want to continue the conversation and quickly went away.

The retired oldtimer is not with us anymore, so I imagine the paintings were moved to another members of the family. But tracking them would be rather easy. OTOH, retreiving them wouldn't be easy at all.

I could imagine a number of them even ending up in the trash. My wife's family threw away most of their mother's odd collections because (a) they didn't have the space for it and (2) nobody knew how to take care of them because she wouldn't let anyone touch them.

In UK, quite a bit of art donated to smaller museums in the XIX century is now missing. Chances of curators and local workers helping themselves to these collections through the decades, are very high. Same for modern art in Italian public buildings, some even from big names like Guttuso.

While it's true, as the article says, that the frames in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum are still left hanging empty on the walls, it leaves out that a major reason for that is that they can't be replaced with anything.

When she created the museum, Gardner stipulated that nothing could ever be added to or removed from the collection. Thus, even if they removed the empty frames from the walls, they would just be left with empty spots instead.

In order to somewhat get around this, the modern museum has built an entire annex (outside the original museum) where they can have more of a flexible collection.

> The center panel, also the largest one, shows people paying homage to their god.

This seems like it was written by AI. The description of the panel sounds like something that would be an AI image caption.

Also see Bloomberg Businessweek's excellent "You Could Fill a Museum" graphic — every item with dimensions listed in the FBI's stolen art database illustrated, to scale. You could fill a museum indeed!

https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/3266-y...

> One was Radu Dogaru, whose mother claimed that she burnt the paintings in her

> stove in order to hide the evidence. The Irish Times reported Forensic

> investigators tested the remains of the ashes and made a surprising discovery

> They found wood, canvas, staples, and paint fragments that support her

> statement. This meant that the forensic investigators would need to test these

> remains further.

No, that means the painting was burnt. This is a very peculiarly written article.

That some painting was burnt.

This list is not as interesting as it could be. All five stolen paintings seem to be preserved as high quality color photos, but there are other artworks that are only preserved as black and white photos, as an imperfect copy made at the time, or even just as sketches made from memory after the fact. For others we only have text descriptions, like some lost artworks of antiquity.

Some of the masterpieces (not paintings, but still) stolen from the Green Vault [1] have not been returned, yet, even though the criminals were caught.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Vault#21st_century

It's worth mentioning that there are three versions of The Poor Poet -besides the one stolen from Berlin, one is on display in Munich, and one is privately owned and used to be on display in Nuremberg (but not anymore).

War time is an especially bad time for art, libraries and archives, either because of the ensuing chaos, destruction and opportunism, or the systematic plundering and destruction of the invaded territory. As an example, take the truly staggering amount of art and cultural artifacts looted or destroyed, often systematically, during WWII by the Nazis and the Soviets. The Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, for example, has a division[0] that specializes in cataloging and attempting to recover such looted art. It is interesting how many suriving works are located in known private or public collections abroad, even periodically showing up at auction. ArtSherlock[1] (in Polish) also has some interesting articles about some of these works. They used to maintain a smartphone app that let you take pictures of artwork to determine whether it is a known missing piece, and then report it, if it is.

[0] http://dzielautracone.gov.pl/

[1] https://artsherlock.pl/

Absolutely, wartime often poses significant threats to cultural heritage... It's such a pity that war still exists

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