Up For Grabs

By Richard Lacayo

Willie Sutton, a once celebrated American crook, was partly famous for saying he robbed banks because "that's where the money is." Actually, museums are where the money is. Where else can you find so many portable items of stupendous value within arm's reach? In a single gallery there can be canvases worth more, taken together, than a whole fleet of jumbo jets. And while banks can hide their money in vaults, museums, by their very mission, are compelled to put their valuables in plain sight.

So the theft last week of one of the world's best known paintings was discouraging news not only for anyone who cares about art but especially for museum officials and gallery owners, who know how vulnerable their treasures are. Nothing could be worse than the thought of a canvas as important as The Scream, Edvard Munch's indelible image of a man howling against the backdrop of a blood-red sky, disappearing into a criminal underworld that doesn't care much about the niceties of art conservation. Art theft is a vast problem around the world. As many as 10,000 precious items of all kinds disappear each year. And for smaller museums in particular, it may not be a problem they can afford to solve.

The thieves who snatched The Scream and one other Munch canvas from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, subjected them to rough handling from the start. On Aug. 22, at 11:10 a.m., about an hour after the museum opened, two men wearing hooded sweatshirts, gloves and ski masks burst through a side entrance. One of them waved a pistol, terrifying visitors, then pointed it at the head of an unarmed female guard and barked in Norwegian, "Lie down!" Meanwhile an accomplice dashed through the ground-floor galleries until he came upon Munch's Madonna from 1893-94. The apotheosis of the painter's many femmes fatales, sexually inviting, weirdly commanding and more than a little poisonous, it's probably his next best known image.

In a frenzy, the thief yanked the frame downward to snap the wires that held it. Mary Vassiliou, a tourist from New Jersey who witnessed the robbery, told TIME, "It looked like he was crazy. He was banging it against the wall. Then he got it off the wall, and he was banging it on the floor." Witnesses say the same man next went after The Scream, which he ripped in the same brutal way from the partition--not even a solid wall--it was hung on. "They dragged them and twisted them and did all sorts of things," says museum director Gunnar Sorensen.

Like many great works, neither painting was insured for theft. The high premiums on very famous pictures would be budget busters even for the largest museums. An earlier version of The Scream--there are four--was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo 10 years ago. Three months later, officers from Scotland Yard posing as art experts from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles approached the thieves with an offer to buy the painting, then arrested them when they produced it.

But with some other high-profile art-theft cases, the outcome is still in doubt. Last year two men posing as tourists stole Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna with the Yarnwinder from Drumlanrig Castle near Dumfries, Scotland. That case is still unsolved. So is the most spectacular art robbery in the U.S., the 1990 break-in at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Thieves disguised as policemen made off with 13 pictures, including a Manet, three Rembrandts and Vermeer's magnificent small canvas The Concert.

Although large museums have had their share of embarrassing robberies--in 1911 the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre--the greatest problem is small institutions like the Munch Museum or private homes open to the public. Neither can afford elaborate security. Large museums attach alarms to their most valuable canvases, but a modest alarm system can cost $500,000 or more. Some museums are looking into tracking devices that would allow them to follow stolen items once they leave the premises. "But conservators are concerned that if they have to insert something, it might damage the object," says Wilbur Faulk, former head of security at the Getty Museum.

Meanwhile, smaller museums can barely afford enough guards, relying instead on elderly docents. Just last month A Winter Landscape by the Dutch painter Esaias van de Velde was stolen from the Wallraf Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany. The thief testified at trial that, after finding only two guards for three floors, he simply slipped the painting, valued at $240,000, under his shirt and went out the door. He told the court, "It's probably more difficult to steal a T shirt."

Now that they have The Scream, what can the thieves do with it? The very thing that makes some paintings especially valuable--fame--makes them very difficult to fence on the black market. The Scream, an image nearly everybody knows, is not the kind of thing an unscrupulous buyer could hang in his mansion in plain sight. For that matter, it's hard to imagine some Russian kleptocrat or Colombian drug lord lusting to own anything by the gloomy, sepulchral Munch, not so long as there's an Impressionist landscape to be had instead.

Thieves sometimes try using artworks as collateral for other underworld deals. The masterminds of the 1986 robbery of Russborough House near Dublin, who snatched 18 canvases, tried in vain to trade them for Irish Republican Army members held in British jails. Others demand a ransom from the museum that owns the pictures. Ten years ago, thieves in Frankfurt, Germany, made off with two major canvases by J.M.W. Turner that were on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The paintings, worth more than $80 million, were recovered in 2002 after the Tate paid more than $5 million to people having "information" about their whereabouts. Though ransom is illegal in Britain, money for leads in an investigation is not, provided that police agree the source of the tipoff is unconnected to the crime. All the same, where information money ends and ransom begins is often a gray area.

Famous pictures usually surface in the end, after whoever took them realizes how hard they are to sell. But along the way the thieves can devastate a delicate image. The one who snatched Vermeer's Love Letter from a Brussels museum in 1971 crammed it under his bed, leaving creases that required restoration. The Scream is especially vulnerable because it was painted on cardboard, which is less supple than canvas and also does not absorb paint as well. The slightest bend could cause pigment to flake away. If that happens, the anguished little man in Munch's picture won't be the only one who feels like screaming. --Reported by Walter Gibbs/Oslo, Lina Lofaro and Carolina A. Miranda/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Aatish Taseer/London and Charles P. Wallace/Berlin

With reporting by Walter Gibbs/Oslo, Lina Lofaro and Carolina A. Miranda/New York, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Aatish Taseer/London and Charles P. Wallace/Berlin