06/19/2020 - 12:55
- Clarín.com
- The New York Times International Weekly
By Nina Siegal
AMSTERDAM - The photographs look like the kind of images the kidnappers distribute with a ransom request to establish that their victim is alive. A newspaper cover is included as a time stamp to indicate that the images are recent.
In this case, the subject is not a kidnapping victim, but a painting by Vincent van Gogh that was stolen from the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands in March.
An image of the back of the stolen work, "The Garden of the Parish House at Nuenen in Spring" by Van Gogh.
Arthur Brand, a private Dutch art crime detective investigating the robbery, only said he received them from a "source in my network ", without further details. He published them on his Twitter and shared them with a Dutch newspaper, De Telegraa f, which published them on Thursday.
Brand suspects that the images circulated in criminal circles in an effort to find a potential buyer. He said he shared them to see if he could develop any leads.
"They are important because it is proof of life ," Brand said. "In many cases like this art theft, you see the criminals getting nervous and feeling that the police are behind their back and they destroy it. Now we know that it has not been destroyed."
Police investigating the case did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Brand declined to say if the police had contacted him about the photos.
Ursula Weitzel, a prominent art crime prosecutor in the Netherlands, said she has never before seen "proof of life" photographs of works of art circulating in this way.
Experts said there are no published images of the back, suggesting that the photograph was taken by the thieves.
The painting, "The Garden of the Parish House at Nuenen in Spring", from 1884, was stolen while it was part of a temporary exhibition at the Singer Laren, on loan from the Groninger Museum. Security camera footage of the March 30 theft shows a man entering the museum with a mallet to break two glass doors and leaving with the painting under his arm.
Andreas Blühm, director of the Groninger Museum, said that the photographs of the painting look authentic, because one shows the back of the work. "You can only have that if you have the painting," he said in an interview. "There are no published images of the reverse, so it is very likely to be authentic. " He said he could not comment on whether the museum had been approached with a ransom request.
Esther Driessen, a spokeswoman for singer Laren, said the museum was happy to see that the painting had not been destroyed. "We hope he will return to the museum without damage," he said.
In one photograph, the painting is set between a May 30 issue of The New York Times that ran an article on the robbery, and the biography of the convicted thief Octave Durham , who stole two Van Gogh paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2002. Those works were recovered from the home of a mafia boss in Italy in 2016.
"I've said from the beginning that this is a copycat ," Brand said. "These guys want to do what Octave did and sell it in the criminal underworld. This photo shows that it's a pretty good theory . They show they have the book that this whole story is written in."
(Durham was in hospital at the time of the Singer Laren robbery.) Blühm said he was distressed to see the apparent damage on the job. "It is out of the frame, so that is already a damage," he said. "The way it was taken out was not very smooth. We treated the paintings differently." " It hurts me to see it like this," he said, "because they put the book in the box and we don't, it's terrible. But seeing the image also gives me a little relief, knowing that it's still there. The rest is speculation. I hope that come back soon."
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