Category: visual

Worldwide attention for the theft of Munch’s Scream should increase the value of his work, say experts. The top price for a Munch work at auction was $7.7 million for “Girls on a Bridge,” sold in New York in November 1996, according to Sotheby’s Holdings Inc.

“Museum theft has historically been a genteel sort of crime, conducted, for the most part, with legerdemain and nimble-footed alarm evasion. But among those who follow the topic closely, the Munch robbery is seen not as an anomaly, but as a sign of things to come. Over the past decade, an increasing number of art thefts have taken place in the daytime during business hours.”

“Art thefts, though not often as high-profile as the broad daylight robbery in Oslo, are persistently on the increase worldwide. This latest heist once again spotlights the holes in international law, the high costs of insurance and security, and the delicate balance that institutions must strike between protecting works of art and displaying them openly.”

It’s bad that The Scream was stolen. But even if it never turns up again, it’s not like the image is lost. “It is not as if the world would forget what it looks like. The Scream is one of the most photographed and copied paintings of all time – and how many of us can honestly claim to be able to tell the difference between a good copy of a painting and the real thing?”

“Investigators specializing in stolen art – many of them based in London, the center of Europe’s art markets – say that art thieves in Europe, where most of the high-profile thefts take place, tend to fall into two categories. Some are low-level criminals who are more likely to bungle the operation and dispose quickly of the works, often for a fraction of their value; others are members of organized gangs who use the paintings as collateral or bartering chips in underworld deals involving drugs, forged documents and weapons. In such cases, recovering the paintings, if they are recovered at all, can take years, even decades.”

A couple of researchers test out David Hockney’s theory that Old Masters used optical devices to assist in their work. They registered a van Euck painting using a computer. “If the two arms had been painted in perfect perspective they would align well; they did not. Therefore the Arnolfini chandelier is not painted in perfect perspective. If van Eyck had used a concave mirror to project an image of a chandelier onto his canvas and had then traced the image with a pencil, later covering over the evidence with paint, his chandelier should be really accurate. Why cheat if you can’t get good results?”

The Scream joins about $5 billion worth of art that has been stolen and not recovered. “Most often, high-profile works of art are never recovered, insurance experts say. According to the Art Loss Register, which tracks stolen art worldwide, among the missing are 467 works by Pablo Picasso and 289 by Marc Chagall.”

Not much progress in the Munch painting theft. The Oslo museum had had plans to upgrade security, but those plans hadn’t been carried out. Meanwhile, witnesses say the thieves treated the paintings with violence as they were stealing them: “I saw the robbers kick, wrench and hit the paintings in order to loosen them from the frame. They didn’t treat the paintings well and unfortunately I believe that the odds are high that the pictures were damaged or destroyed.”

London’s Royal Academy is in trouble, and the outside world is peering in. Many are wondering if “a management structure that was created in the 18th century seems ill-suited to meet the challenges of today’s fiercely competitive London art world. Is an academy of 80 artists up to the job of running a staff of 200 and an annual budget of £18 million?”

Athens’ Olympic stadium, designed by Santiago Calatrava, has been a big hit, breaking with a dismal Olympic tradition. “The Athens approach—making an architecturally bold, camera-ready stadium an Olympic focal point—is less an anomaly than a sign of things to come. In the past, many host cities simply added a few thousand new seats to the biggest stadium they had; others used the games as an excuse to build a new home for a local pro franchise, as Atlanta did for the Braves with the less-than-exciting Turner Field. But these days, every potential host city’s Olympic plan seems to include an attention-getting stadium designed by a well-known firm.”