I find art thefts fascinating and here are some recent capers (or stories about them) from SF to the UK:
- There’s been a string of recent art thefts in San Francisco galleries, including work by Margaret Kilgallen, Jay Nelson, Terry Hoff & Barry McGee;
- A woman is tied up in a major art heist in the UK which included 15 paintings including Endymion by the 19th-century English painter George Frederic Watts and Apple Blossom by early 20th-century English artist Sir George Clausen (BBC);
- A story about art, drug dealers & the FBI titled “The Trial from a $6 Million French Art Heist Ends in Suburban South Florida” which involves the August 2007 heist of Allegory of Water and Allegory of Earth by Jan Brueghel the Elder, The Lane of Poplars at Moret by Alfred Sisley, and Cliffs near Dieppe by Claude Monet;
- Someone grabbed two paintings from a hospital in Charleston, SC, one of which depicted “shrimp falling out of a seagrass basket”—THE BASTARDS!!!; and
- Lest we forget that the works by Vermeer & Rembrandt from the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston are still missing after 19 years, a new theory has emerged that suggests that mobsters masterminded the whole thing.
There’s also this curious (if off topic) story about Spel, a legendary street graffiti artist from North Philadelphia, who is selling his paintings created in prison to fund his defense for a murder he says he never committed. The works are reportedly doing “extremely well in a gallery in New York.”
There’s a website of Spel’s art (though lots of the links seem broken) & this great quote:
“I’ve been blessed,” Spel says. “I always believed my art would be the way that the truth about me would come to light.”
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