The Legacy, the Futility, and the Destruction of Art Theft

Three articles in the Sunday Times talks about the brutality, the stupidity, and brutality of art theft.

First, a short but moving story about how the Nazis dealt with the stuff of the Jews.

In Paris, the plunder of Jewish possessions began with the arrival of German troops in June 1940. At first, it applied only to art collections. But as soon as the Final Solution was devised in January 1942, the confiscations spread to the entire Jewish population, most of which comprised poor immigrants from Eastern Europe. Stripping Jews of their belongings was part and parcel of the effort to destroy them; pillage was an essential tool of extermination.

What happens when you’re in the possession of great beauty that has been stained with the blood of theft? It destroys you.

Until the raid in February 2012, Mr. Gurlitt had guarded his privacy zealously, refusing to open his door even to meter readers from the gas company. He rarely spoke to or even acknowledged his neighbors. He had no friends whom anyone ever saw.

His sudden fame as the keeper of the largest trove of masterworks to be uncovered since World War II has left him bewildered. “What do these people want from me?” he asked Der Spiegel. “I’m just a very quiet person. All I wanted to do was live with my pictures.”

For more than a half-century, Mr. Gurlitt’s only true companions were a vast menagerie of vibrant, multicolored images created by Picasso, Chagall, Gauguin and a host of other modern masters. He inherited the works from his father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, an exuberant Nazi-era art dealer, partly Jewish, who at times worked in the service of the Third Reich but also counted artists disliked by the Nazis among his friends.

Because the collection was so valuable and, perhaps, because its provenance was so tainted by the family’s association with the Nazis, the desire to keep it secure compelled Mr. Gurlitt to live a strange, Gollum-like existence behind permanently.

Who steals art, other than Nazis? There are two types.

Making money from stolen paintings — particularly famous ones — is not a straightforward matter, and those who try to do so fall broadly into two categories. The first, most common type is the naïf, who steals a painting but has laid few plans beyond the theft itself. He soon discovers that the painting’s notoriety has rendered it toxic, and he can’t sell it. The work of art becomes burdensome and worthless — to him at least. A more sophisticated criminal, on the other hand, recognizes that a pilfered masterpiece is a unique commodity and that in order to profit from it, he needs to think more like a derivatives trader than a pickpocket.

The article talks about the knuckleheads who stole and then destroyed masterpieces from Rotterdam.