Yostivanich

Over this week­end there was a won­der­ful devel­op­ment in the world of art. The Scream a paint­ing by Edvard Munch, that is famous world­wide was stolen just over 2 years ago. The rob­bery itself is some­thing that makes any­body who works secu­rity cringe exam­in­ing how eas­ily the paint­ing was pur­loined. The details of the rob­bery are fairly sim­ple, two masked men grabbed The Scream and The Madonna from the wall of the art gallery and walked out of museum, threat­ing staff with a gun to make their escape. They then jumped into a car and drove off, never to be seen again. Three men were even­tu­ally con­victed in May of this year of charges related to the theft, although the actual rob­bers have never been caught and the paint­ings had not been recov­ered, until this week­end.

On Thurs­day, Nor­we­gian police reported that the paint­ings had been dis­cov­ered and were both rel­a­tively undam­aged. This was one of the largest fears of museum cura­tors, own­ing to the fact that when the paint­ings were stolen, one of the paint­ings was observed being banged around in the theft. After experts observed the paint­ings on Fri­day, reported on the paint­ings authen­tic­ity and that the works were returned “with hardly any dam­age” and that all dam­age could be com­pletely repaired.

The largest fear with any famous art­work that is stolen and not recov­ered is not that it would be sold on the open mar­ket and the museum would be unable to col­lect its right­ful prop­erty, rather, that the art­work would reside in someone’s pri­vate col­lec­tion for decades and would be treated improp­erly and would in time be dam­aged to the point of no return. Any famous art­work such as The Scream could never be sold openly sim­ply because the piece is too widely known to be stolen and any rep­utable auc­tion house requires both proof of own­er­ship and of authen­tic­ity. A pri­vate auc­tion would also cause prob­lems for the world of fine art­work in this price range is a small one, and any paint­ing that is known to be stolen and goes up for auc­tion faces exactly the same prob­lems as a pub­lic auc­tion. So, since you can’t sell the paint­ing all that you could do with art this expen­sive and valu­able is to hold onto it until the statue of lim­i­ta­tions run out, which in many Euro­pean coun­tries for art­work can be sev­eral lifetimes.

The police in this case deserve the extol­ment of both the art world and the pub­lic at large, The Scream is con­sid­ered by many to be one of the most rec­og­niz­able pieces of art in the world. A large part of the whole world’s cul­ture today now is safe once again. Hope­fully the Munich Museum will this time take bet­ter and more through secu­rity con­sid­er­a­tions in place when the paint­ing is put back on pub­lic dis­play. Tomorrow’s post will dis­cuss what are some very sim­ple tech­niques to pro­tect famous art­work while still allow­ing the gen­eral pub­lic to see and inter­act with art and not cost muse­ums mil­lions of dol­lars on security.

The Scream

The Madonna