Top Ten Most Audacious Art Heists

Whether for the thrill of a rare challenge, the allure of cold cash, or hundreds of unique personal causes, art heists go down ever year. Of course, all art heists aren’t like the others. Here are ten of the most brazen, bold, and downright bizarre capers in history:

1. Mona Lisa, 1911

In modern times, it seems shocking and inconceivable — one does not simply walk into the Louvre, take The Mona Lisa under one’s coat, and walk back out again undetected. In 1911, however, this is exactly what Italian immigrant and Louvre employee Vincenzo Perugia did, in a bid to reclaim the famous DaVinci piece for his homeland. The jig was up two years later when Perugia tried to sell the piece to an Italian museum, and the thief got off light wih a one year sentence (though likely not his job back). The Mona Lisa, on the other hand, was treated to her own room in the Louvre, doubled security efforts, and a sensational story that skyrocketed her to the fame she enjoys today.

2. Gardner Museum, 1990

Boston heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner knew a thing or two about art. She spent many years traveling through Europe, accumulating exquisite rare and coveted pieces along her journeys, and upon her death she asked that her home be preserved for the public as a small museum. In 1990, the public betrayed her: two men dressed as police officers barged in, overpowered security guards, and waltzed out with a collection of pieces topping out at a value of $300 million, including three Rembrandts, five sketches by Degas, a Manet and a Vermeer. What makes this heist a true tragedy? Even after almost twenty years and a $5 million reward offer, none of the stolen artwork has ever been recovered and the mystery continues to go unsolved.

3. The Scream, 2004

Between 1893 and 1910, Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch painted four different versions of his seminal piece The Scream. Unfortunately, half of those have been stolen at one time or another. The most dramatic theft was in 2004: two gunmen brazenly lifted a version of the painting plus another, Munch’s Madonna, off the wall at the Munch Museum in Oslo and walked out as museum patrons looked on helplessly in horror. Though the artwork (and the art thieves) remained at large for two years, in 2006 they were finally caught and brought to justice. Unfortunately, the theft wasn’t done out of any love for art, and the pieces were torn and subjected to water damage over the course of their outside adventure.

4. Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, 1961

When an American oil tycoon tried to buy Francisco de Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, the public outcry was so intense that the government scrambled to match the $392,000 offer and keep it in the National Gallery. This move did not sit well with Kempton Bunton, a retired bus driver barely scraping by on pension while the government spent thousands on a single painting. Three weeks after Duke of Wellington was ceremoniously returned to the National Gallery, Bunton absconded with it through a bathroom window and sent a ransom letter demanding $392,000 – the sum of which Bunton intended to spend on television licenses for the poor. Eventually he returned the painting and gave himself up; in a bizarre twist of a trial, however, his lawyer successfully argued that Bunton had only meant to steal the painting’s frame, and Bunton only received a three-month sentence.

5. Van Gogh Museum, 2002

In 1991, two thieves broke into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and stole 20 paintings, including the world famous Sunflowers; much to the delight of law enforcement and art lovers everywhere, however, something in the plan went wrong and—rather than risk being caught—the thieves sacrificed their spoils, leaving all of the paintings intact in the getaway car to be found mere hours later.
No one in the 2002 heist would be so lucky. This time, two thieves smashed a window and made off with two paintings, View of the Sea at Scheveningen and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen, making a swift escape but leaving plenty of evidence behind in the process. The two men—a Dutch international art thief known as The Monkey, and his accomplice—were captured and sentenced in 2003, but the whereabouts of the paintings themselves remain unknown.

6. Swedish National Museum, 2000

Many thieves manage to pull off art heists, but very few pull them off like henchmen from a James Bond movie. In December of 2000, three masked robbers made a serious bid for the latter: bursting into the waterfront Swedish National Museum with a machine gun, they made a sweep through the galleries while decoy car bombs deployed around the city, spreading Stockholm’s police force all too thin. After gathering three $30 million worth of paintings, the men leaped into a waiting speedboat and sped away to freedom. Eventually eight men were arrested, tried, and convicted in connection with the heist, and one of the missing works — Renoir’s Conversation With the Gardner — turned up in the course of an unrelated drug raid. The other two works, another Renoir and a Rembrandt self-portrait, were recovered five years after the crime.

7. Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco, 1969

The Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Italy, still holds a place for the Nativity. Carvaggio’s moody Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco scene was torn from its frame and spirited away in 1969; its frame and setting still stand in place, with a reproduction giving viewers a hint of where a classic work of art once stood. Given Palermo’s history with the mafia (and the rest of Sicily, for that matter), it was no surprise when, in 1996 during a trial, an ex-thug confessed to stealing the piece—despite the confession, however, the piece remains missing and remains among the FBI’s top open case art crimes. Theories abound regarding its ultimate whereabouts, but the most likely conclusions are that it was either irreparably damaged somewhere along the line, or that it rests in the hands of a “private collector.”

8. The Last Judgment Triptych, 1473

There have been many art heists over the centuries, but this is the first on record after emerging from the Dark Ages. It is also the only heist on the list to involve an actual pirate, who happened to board the ship transporting Hans Melming’s tableau The Last Judgment to the Medici Chapel in Florence. The seafarer swiped the loot and gave the painting to the Gdansk cathedral in Poland. Unfortunately for its original Florentine commissioners, laws were tenuous at best in times when pirates roamed the seas: despite plain knowledge of its origins, The Last Judgment remains in Poland to this day.

9. Paraguay National Fine Arts Museum, 2002

Normally when one attempts an art heist, one simply smashes in a window or waltzes in guns a-blazing. The gang of thieves involved in the National Fine Arts Museum heist in Asuncion, Paraguay, took a decidedly more rugged and hands-on route. After using fake names to rent out a store close to the museum, the thieves started digging. The resulting 80-foot tunnel — 10 feet underground between the store and the museum — is estimated to have taken months to dig, but the payoff was huge. Creeping in through the tunnel after closing, the thieves made off with over a million dollars’ worth of art, including a Gustave Courbet landscape. Both the culprits and the paintings are still M.I.A.

10. Manchester Whitworth Gallery, 2003

When thieves evaded alarms, security guards, and closed-caption cameras to steal a Gauguin, a Van Gogh, and a Picasso, the police assumed that they were dealing with some heavy-hitters who meant business. Their surprise, therefore, was great when the paintings were found crammed behind a toilet in a public restroom less than a quarter mile from the museum, with a handwritten note attached:

“The intention was not to steal, only to highlight the woeful security.”

The authorities took the note lightly, figuring instead that the thieves realized, after the fact, that the sheer value and fame of the pieces they stole made them unsellable to any reputable buyer – still, the Whitworth Gallery have ramped up their security measures ever since.