Two armed men stole more than a dozen works of art, including some by Henri Matisse, on Sunday from a library in Sao Paulo, the latest robbery to rock the art world since the theft of jewels from the Louvre in October.
At least eight works by Matisse were taken from the Mário de Andrade Library during viewing hours of an exhibition that was set to close Sunday, according to a spokesperson at the Brazilian Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Five works by Brazilian modernist painter Candido Portinari were also stolen, the domestic news media reported.
It was not immediately clear early Monday which pieces had been stolen or whether authorities had apprehended the suspects. Neither the library, the museum nor the local police responded immediately to requests for comment.
The library had been hosting a joint exhibition with the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo called “From book to museum” since October. The show included works by more than 30 artists, including Matisse, Portinari and French painter Fernand Léger.
One of Matisse’s pieces on display at the exhibition was a copy of “Jazz,” a book of prints and calligraphy that includes 20 colored stenciled images of a circus, a cowboy and various animals, according to the exhibition catalog. The book was published in 1947.
In October, thieves made off with more than $100 million of French crown jewels from the Louvre Museum in Paris during visiting hours. The robbery was the most brazen at the institution since the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa. French officials have arrested at least eight people but recovered only one of the nine stolen pieces.
Christopher A. Marinello, a London-based lawyer and chief executive officer at Art Recovery International, said thieves often view museums as easy targets because of a lack of funding for security. “They don’t fear security or law enforcement and are, in some cases, getting violent,” he said of recent crimes that have made headlines.
And stolen works sell for a fraction, sometimes as little as 5% to 10%, of what they can fetch when sold in an auction or to a legal buyer, Marinello said. Similar prints by Matisse have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and one of his paintings, “Odalisque Couchée aux Magnolias” sold for nearly $81 million.
Theft can also impact how art buyers behave, said Naomi Oosterman, an assistant professor of arts and culture studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Buyers are likely to view owning that artist’s work as riskier, said Oosterman, who analyzed data about auctions and stolen art over a 15-year period. The higher the risk, the less money a collector is willing to pay, she said.
Matisse, who died in 1954, is a national treasure in France. He is credited with leading fauvism, a modern art movement defined by paintings with vivid colors and bold brushstrokes that moved away from the impressionist style of the 19th century.
Some of his most famous works include “The Dance” (1910), a large scale painting of five people dancing in the nude; “The Red Studio” (1911), a reflection of the artist’s studio in the French suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux; and “The Piano Lesson (1916),” an oil painting with muted colors that depict a boy sitting at a piano. Those paintings were not part of the exhibition at the Mario de Andrade Library.