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Painting stolen from Paris Museum total up to 500 million euros
The paintings are estimated to be worth just under 500m euros. They were taken overnight on Wednesday and reported missing early on Thursday, officials say. The paintings were stolen from the Museum of Modern Art and included works by Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, French police said.
The five valuable canvases include Le pigeon aux petits-pois (The Pigeon with the Peas) by Pablo Picasso, La Pastorale (Pastoral) by Henri Matisse, L’olivier pres de l’Estaque (Olive Tree near Estaque) by Georges Braque, La femme a l’eventail (Woman with a Fan) by Amedeo Modigliani, Nature-mort aux chandeliers (Still Life with Chandeliers) by Fernand Léger.
The theft was committed by “one or more individuals who were obviously organised”, Mr Girard said. He added that investigators were looking into how the museum’s security system and several guards were outsmarted by the thief or thieves.
Police said it would be virtually impossible to sell the stolen paintings to museums or at art auctions because they are too well known. They said, however, that thieves sometimes try to extort money from insurance companies, which may be willing to recover stolen goods at a fraction of their value, instead of paying full compensations to museums.
“We underestimated the degree of damage that they would suffer,” said Albert Asseraf, the marketing director of JCDecaux. The scale of the Paris scheme had consequences that his firm had not encountered with its operation in Lyons, the second-biggest in the world but with still only one fifth of the Paris bikes, he said. Many were being stolen because tourists and first-time users were not docking them carefully when they returned them to their computerised stations, Mr Asseraf said. Some have turned up in Eastern Europe and Africa, according to the media.
Picasso is the most stolen artist in the world because of his prolific output, recognisable signature and valuable works. His Weeping Woman was stolen from Melbourne’s National Gallery in 1986. It was recovered at Flinders Street railway station more than a fortnight later.
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Henri Matisse speaking about drawing and painting