[MSN] Canada. Stolen paintings still missing after 35 years. Officials admit little headway made in major Montreal heist. Were the paintings destroyed? Is the new "owner" sitting on them, afraid to show them off? Could they be in South America?

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Stolen paintings still missing after 35 years
Officials admit little headway made in major Montreal heist
  
Bill Bantey 
For Montreal Gazette; CanWest News Service 


Sunday, September 02, 2007


MONTREAL - Were the paintings destroyed? Is the new "owner" sitting on them,
afraid to show them off? Could they be in South America?

Thirty-five years ago Monday, three armed and hooded bandits broke into the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through a skylight under repair and made off
with 18 paintings and 37 objects of decorative arts and jewelry.

It was the biggest theft in the museum's 112-year history. The loot, valued
at $2 million by the museum, included a Rembrandt oil, Landscape with
Cottages, valued at $1 million in 1972.

All but one of the stolen paintings -- a small Jan Breughel The Elder --
remain missing today.

David Giles Carter, director of the museum at the time of the robbery, today
says the "worst possible scenario" is that the paintings have been
destroyed, perhaps because the pictures were too "hot" to be disposed of on
the art market. He also says it's possible the paintings are hidden
somewhere by the new "owner" who might be "sitting on them for a lifetime."

Sean B. Murphy, then-president of the museum, considers it possible the
theft was a "robbery on consignment," and the works have found their way to
South America.

"Many wonderful things happened at the museum during my presidency, but this
was one of the worst," he said recently. "The lessons of the robbery are
that a museum needs a first-rate security system, and the insurance to go
with it." The museum now has that state-of-the-art system.

Another Breughel The Elder, two Corots, two Millets, a Courbet, a Daumier, a
Delacroix, and a Gainsborough were also among the stolen art.

A second group of paintings, including an El Greco, a Picasso and a
Tintoretto, were abandoned by the thieves when one of them inadvertently
tripped an alarm near a side door.

Carter actually spoke to one of the thieves, he recalled. He gave the thief
the nom de guerre "Port of Montreal" because those words appeared on a brown
envelope the museum director received from the robbers containing snapshots
of the works to prove they had them in their possession. But negotiations
eventually broke down when the thieves became suspicious -- with reason --
that a trap had been laid for them.

"A scene out of a movie" was how the museum's then-assistant registrar and
chief of the catalogue Pauline Gravel described it.

The skylight through which the burglars entered was usually connected to the
security system but a construction crew working at the building had dropped
a plastic sheet over the alarm, neutralizing it.

A first guard was surprised at about 1:30 a.m. He had just made his rounds
on the second floor and was preparing to take a tea break when the intruders
ordered him to the ground. He didn't move fast enough and one of the bandits
fired his sawed-off shotgun into the ceiling.

Police say there have been no developments in the investigation.

According to a new book commissioned by the museum, Art in the City: A
History of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, by Georges-Hebert Germain,
"some 25" insurance companies paid the museum $2 million for the missing
works, thereby enabling it to constitute a Special Replacement Fund.

C The Edmonton Journal 2007

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