NewzPolice were on Tuesday hunting for two thieves who escaped with two Renoir paintings from a museum in southern France, after abandoning two others in its garden as they fled, a mayor said. The heist is the latest in a string of such robberies in France including the daylight theft last year of crown jewellery valued at around $100 million from the Louvre in Paris. Two Renoir paintings stolen from a small French museum have yet to be recovered but if the thieves are hoping to cash in on the artwork, they would be hard-pressed to find a buyer.Selling well-known, stolen art is impossible to do at an auction house or through other public channels without raising eyebrows.
Even under the table, the value plummets. And unlike other eye-catching artifacts such as jewels, paintings can't be chopped up and sold for parts without losing their entire worth.Art crime experts stress that most buyers simply don't want the liability. In short, the reality looks nothing like the movies.“People always think that there is this kind of ‘Dr.
No’ type from the James Bond movie,” said Arthur Brand, a private art detective based in the Netherlands. In the real world, there are no collectors like that.”Brand, who has investigated art crime for about 20 years, explains that often “nobody will touch” stolen art, particularly high-profile work. Sometimes that means paintings valued at millions of dollars are effectively “worth zero” once they're outside of the museum, he added, if not a small fraction of the price.Tuesday's theft at the Renoir Museum — the last home of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the French Riviera — marks the latest high-profile art crime targeting collections around the world, and experts warn there could be more.Here's what we know.Where the Renoirs could wind upCagnes-sur-Mer's mayor, Bryan Masson, said a group of “well-equipped” burglars stole a total of four Renoir paintings from the museum in his town on Tuesday.
But they dropped two of them — Renoir’s “Portrait of Madame Pichon” and “Coco Reading” — in the museum garden before they fled, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Police are still searching for the perpetrators.In the meantime, Renoir's “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano” and “Young Woman at the Well” remain missing.Masson estimated the value of the combined Renoir works stolen Tuesday at 9 million euros ($10.5 million).But the probability of profiting off such a heist is “extremely low,” said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. And in cases that end in arrests, the common takeaway is that “thieves are people who are good at stealing things and bad at thinking through the consequences,” she added.Some may try to mak…
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