VAN GOGH'S POPPY FLOWERS, ALSO KNOWN AS VASE AND FLOWERS, STOLEN IN CAIRO
A Van Gogh painting worth $50m, known as both Poppy Flowers and Vase And Flowers, was cut from its frame and stolen at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum in Cairo on Saturday, August 21. Measuring 30cm by 30cm(1ft by 1ft), and depicting yellow and red flowers it is believed to have been painted in 1887, three years before the death of Vincent Van Gogh.
The Mahmoud Khalil Museum was built in the 1930’s and holds works by Monet, Renoir and Degas. The same Van Gogh was stolen from here in 1978, and recovered ten years later in Kuwait.
In May five paintings — worth up to $124 million — were stolen from the Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris (see post for May 20 on antiquesandartireland.com).
INTERPOL, the world’s largest international police organization with 188 member countries, has a database of missing art. The organization’s general secretariat also produces a CD-ROM – updated every two months in English, Spanish, French and Arabic – of all the missing items, and provides it to museums, antique dealers and collectors.
The London based Art Loss Register (ALR) is a growing computerized international database about lost and stolen art, antiques and collectables.
In July 2010 a stolen Caravaggio was recovered in Berlin. The ‘Taking of Christ’ or the ‘Kiss of Judas’ was snatched from the Ukraine’s Museum of Western European and Oriental Art in Odessa in July 2008. A joint German Ukrainian police operation resulted in three Ukrainians and one Russian national being detained in Berlin, just as the suspects were reportedly about to sell the stolen painting. More than 20 suspects were arrested and an alleged international art theft gang was broken up.
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