The Rescue Artist

night, a ladder, a shattered window.

The police car skidded to a stop. One cop radioed in the break-in, and two others ran toward the museum. The first man to the ladder scrambled his way to the top, and then, like his thief counterpart a few minutes before, slipped and fell off.

Back to the radio. The police needed another patrol car, to bring their colleague to the emergency room. Then they ran into the museum, this time by way of the stairs.

The policemen hurried to the room with the ladder on the sill. A frigid breeze flowed in through the broken window. The walls of the dark room were lined with paintings, but there was a blank spot next to the high window on University Street. The police ducked the billowing curtains and stepped over the broken glass. A pair of wire cutters lay on the floor. Someone had left a postcard.

The day of the crime was no ordinary winter Saturday. February 12 marked the first day of the 1994 Olympic Winter Games, held in the Norwegian city of Lillehammer. For Norway in general, and for its leading political and cultural figures in particular, this was a rare chance to bask in the world’s admiring notice.

The opening ceremonies, a happy and controversy-free spectacle, were expected to draw 240 million television viewers. To most of that multitude, the word “Norway” called up only the vaguest associations. Snow. Fjords. Pine trees. Reindeer, maybe. Blondes, perhaps, or was that just Sweden? Asked to name a famous Norwegian, most people would draw a blank.

In the minds of the Norwegian establishment, the Olympics were a chance to begin to dispel that ignorance. When viewers around the world turned on their TV sets, they would see a national coming-out party. They would see Norway at its best.

Instead, they saw a celebration marred by shock and outrage. “In this beautiful scenery,” lamented the minister of culture, “it is hard to imagine that such evil things could take place.”

The thieves had no such somber thoughts. When they snatched The Scream, they had left a postcard for the authorities to find. It showed a painting by the popular Norwegian artist Marit Walle, who specializes in cheerful, cartoon-like scenes of everyday life. Walle’s Raging Hormones, for instance, depicts two gray-haired matrons at the beach, binoculars to their eyes, ogling young hunks. The thieves had made their choice as carefully as shoppers in search of the perfect birthday card. They had settled on a Walle painting called A Good Story. It shows three men laughing uproariously, red-faced, pounding the table, gasping for breath. On the back of the card one of the thieves had scribbled, “Thanks for the poor security.”

The security was worse than poor. “All the windows were locked,” the National Gallery’s director, Knut Berg, told reporters. “We didn’t figure that thieves would climb through broken glass. There was a lot of glass. I wouldn’t have dared to go through all that glass.”

National Gallery officials, it soon became clear, had made a string of bad decisions. The Scream had been moved from its customary setting on the National Gallery’s third floor to the second floor. That was more convenient for visitors, since it was closer to the street, but more tempting to thieves as well, for the same reason. Knut Berg had been museum director for twenty years, and for twenty years he had done battle with the politicians who controlled his budget. Now, on the brink of retirement, he had orchestrated a can’t- miss crowd-pleaser. As he watched his installers put the show together, Berg had bustled about happily, beaming with anticipation.

His security chief was more wary. “From January through May 1994,” he had instructed the museum guards in a memo, “Edvard Munch paintings will be exhibited on the first floor [the second floor, in American usage] in rooms 9, 10, and 12. Cameras … should be monitored throughout the night. The night guard should vary his routine and should keep a special eye on the outside walls of the exhibition area. This is a unique exhibition, on the first floor, and we expect it to draw extra attention.”

Bringing The Scream nearer to ground level was a blunder, and installing the painting next to a window that opened on the street compounded it. Making matters worse still, the windows of the old brick museum had no protective bars and were made of ordinary, rather than reinforced, glass. The Scream was not bolted to the wall but hung from a wire, just like an ordinary painting in an ordinary home, without any connection to the alarm system.

The thieves had prepared carefully. Some of their scouting was surreptitious. They had found, for example, that the night guard finished his rounds at about six in the morning and then retreated to his desk. But they carried out much of their research at leisure and in the open, joining the stream of visitors enjoying the “Festival of Norwegian Culture.” The museum’s cameras were out-of-date, they saw, and left some vital areas uncovered. In room 10, there were no cameras at all.

Like most good planners, the thieves kept things simple. They focused exclusively on The Scream, resisting the temptation to pick up other baubles along the way. Nor did they bother with cutting phone lines or disarming burglar alarms or any such electronic skullduggery. Speed was the key; if the thieves could get in and out quickly enough, the best alarms would provide little more than background noise.

For several nights before the theft, workmen at a construction site near the National Gallery had left a ladder lying in plain view. In the dark of night a few hours before the museum break-in, the thieves walked off with it. (The building site happened to be at Norway’s largest newspaper, Verdens Gang. For crooks with a taste for publicity, it was a sweet touch that a newspaper whose job would be to shout out the story had itself played a bit part in the break-in.)

The day before the heist, the thieves stole two cars, a Mazda and an Audi. Both were in good condition and roomy, well-suited to fast driving and awkward cargo. The Mazda was the getaway car. The thieves drove a few blocks to where they had parked the Audi and transferred The Scream to the second car, in case anyone at the museum had seen them flee. Then they split up and drove off in different directions.

Within hours, everyone with a television set, in every country in the world, knew about the theft. In Norway, while excited reporters chattered for the cameras, chagrined officials at the National Gallery picked out a gift-shop poster of their lost masterpiece. The day before, The Scream had reigned in glory. Now a cheap poster in a flimsy frame hung in its place. Beneath the poster, a hand-lettered sign read simply: STOLEN!

2

Easy Pickings

Norway’s museum officials had made two far-reaching mistakes. The first was a failure to focus on details. Buoyed by lofty thoughts about the glories of great art, the National Gallery had paid too little heed to mundane questions of security. The second mistake was a failure of imagination. No one would be audacious enough, museum higher-ups had assured one another, to steal a painting that any buyer would immediately know was stolen.

It’s not that anyone in the art world denies the existence of thieves. Even the smallest museum hires security guards. But the subject is so unseemly, and the yoking together of the words “art” and “crime” so much a joining of the sublime and the grimy, that the art community tends to avert its eyes and hope that the whole nasty subject will go away. Which is fine with the thieves.

For art crime is a huge and thriving industry. Crime statistics are always dodgy, but Interpol, the international police agency, reckons that the amount of money changing hands in the art underworld comes to between $4 billion and $6 billion a year. On the roster of international illicit trade, art crime is number three, trailing only drugs and illegal arms. In Italy alone, where it is common for a tiny village to boast a church with a fifteenth-century altarpiece, police say that thieves make off with a museum’s worth of art each year.

The bulk of what is stolen is good but not great (since that is easiest to resell), but cherished masterpieces disappear, too, and at an alarming rate. In all the world there are only 36 Vermeers. Of that tiny number, three— The Concert, The Guitar Player, and Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid—