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| Woman with a Fan. Amedeo Modigliani. by Travis Simpkins |
“La
Femme à l'Éventail” by Amedeo Modigliani: Stolen on
May 20, 2010
by Travis Simpkins
The Painting:
La
Femme à l'Éventail
or Woman
with a Fan
was painted in 1919, and is a prime example of Modigliani's
technique. The typically elongated portrait depicts Lunia Czechowska,
a Polish woman whose husband was a friend of Modigliani's dealer
Leopold Zborowski. Lunia posed for the artist ten times during a
three year period, with this portrait being completed one year before
Modigliani's death.
The Theft:
On May 20, 2010, a lone thief pulled
off one of the biggest art thefts in history. Five works, valued at
up to €500m,
were stolen from the Musée
d'Art Moderne in Paris. The filched paintings were well-known works
by top-tier artists: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Leger and Braque.
Lax
security and careless blunders were largely to blame for the success
of the heist. It was discovered that the paintings were gone around
7:00 a.m. The three guards on duty that night were dumbfounded,
telling investigators that they “saw nothing.” A closer look at
the museum's security system and the events of that shift painted an
unsettling picture. Inspection of the security alarms revealed that
the motion detectors that covered the area in which the theft took
place had been non-functional for nearly two months, since March 30.
The alarms points were malfunctioning, causing false alarms, and the
management decided to disable them to alleviate their frustration.
Spare parts to make repairs had been ordered, but had not arrived
yet.
On
the night of May 20, all of the exterior CCTV cameras were focused
towards the roof of the building, leaving the guards blind to street
level activity. At about 4:00 a.m., the thief sheared a padlock and
smashed through a first floor window to gain entry to the Musée
d'Art Moderne. Once inside, the masked “burly” thief passed by an
array of interior CCTV cameras, which nicely recorded his nonchalance
as he perpetrated the crime. The thief spent about 15 minutes
removing the five canvases from their frames, and he placed them all
together in a large single bundle before exiting from the same
window. French investigators theorize that the guards were sleeping,
or otherwise distracted, in order to have missed the entire crime
playing out on their monitors. The
Brigade de Répression du Banditisme believes that the thief acted
alone.
In
2011, a suspect told police that he had thrown the five paintings in
the garbage and that they were destroyed by a trash compactor.
However, this claim is unsubstantiated.
The
five masterpieces are unsellable and have not been recovered.
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| Police investigate the 2010 Art Heist scene at Paris' Museum of Modern Art |
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| The 5 Stolen Paintings: 2010, Paris Museum of Modern Art |
