High-Profile Heist

In what art experts are calling one of the biggest heists in history, a lone burglar seems to have made away with five paintings estimated at some 120 million dollars early Thursday morning after jimmying a padlock and breaking a window at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the city’s 16th arrondissment.

The five works stolen were Pablo Picasso’s Le pigeon aux petits-pois; Henri Matisse’s La Pastorale; Amedeo Modigliani’s La femme à l’eventail; Fernand Léger’s Nature-mort aux chandeliers; and George Braque’s L’olivier près de l’Estaque.

While only a single masked intruder was seen on a video surveillance camera, and the police have not yet identified any suspects, the fame of the paintings, as well as the high-profile nature of the crime, may make it difficult for the brazen thief–or thieves–to stay underground long. As Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, the director of the neighboring museum Palais de Tokyo, stated passionately on French television this morning: “You cannot do anything with these paintings. All countries in the world are aware, and no collector is stupid enough to buy a painting that, one, he can’t show to other collectors, and two, risks sending him to prison…These five paintings are unsellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them.”