Thieves Steal Paintings Worth $10M by Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir
Italian police are searching for the works after a middle-of-the-night heist at a small museum outside of Parma.
In a heist lasting less than three minutes, thieves nabbed paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse from a small museum in northern Italy, according to local police.
On the night of March 22 and early morning of March 23, multiple suspects reportedly entered the campus of the Magnani Rocca Foundation, a museum dedicated to the collection of the late critic and collector Luigi Magnani, about 12 miles outside of Parma.
The thieves grabbed Renoir’s “Les Poissons” (1917), Cézanne’s “Cup and Plate of Cherries” (c. 1890), and Matisse’s “Odalisque on the Terrace” (1922), together reportedly worth an estimated $10 million.
Local media described the incident as a highly organized operation. However, the suspects were unsuccessful in attempts to take additional masterpieces from the institution’s collection, which includes works by Francisco de Goya, Giorgio Morandi, and Claude Monet, because they were intercepted by the museum’s security system.
The Italian national police, the Carabinieri, responded to the museum promptly and is investigating the crime, local media reported. Police has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s requests for comment.
The incident comes six months after a major art heist at the Louvre in Paris renewed public conversations about adequate security at European arts institutions. At least three other museums — the Adrien Dubouché institute in Limoges, La Maison des Lumières Denis Diderot, and the French national natural history museum — were also targeted by thieves last year.
Bill Anderson, co-founder of the security company Art Guard, which claims to protect works held by the Museum of Modern Art and Sotheby’s, told Hyperallergic that there might be a link between the institutions targeted in the recent spate of heists.
“All of these recent thefts have exposed major weaknesses in protection, more so in Europe, where so many museums and galleries were not purpose-built, but converted from a facility not designed to house and safekeep art,” Anderson said.
Located in the neoclassical Villa dei Capolavori (Villa of Masterpieces) in the Parma countryside, the Magnani Rocca Foundation describes itself as “one of the most important artistic institutions in Europe.” Luigi Magnani, a prolific art collector, founded the institution in 1977 to promote visual arts, music, and literature. He bequeathed the mansion to the foundation after his passing in 1984, and the house opened as a museum in 1990.
All of the stolen works, which are relatively lesser-known among the artists’ oeuvres, belong to the museum’s permanent collection.
A contact for the foundation did not respond to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.
