The Rescue Artist

I sat back stunned, but I should have known better. The story hadn’t ended when I turned in my manuscript. Art and art thieves aren’t history; they’re headlines.

“Count no man happy before he dies,” the ancient Greeks said, by which they meant that even the most successful life can fall apart in a moment. The same insight holds for great paintings. When it comes to stolen art, no case is ever truly closed.

On Sunday morning, August 22, 2004, the Munch Museum in Oslo was crowded with visitors. August is tourist season, and the museum had been bustling since it opened at 10 A.M. The collection is devoted entirely to Munch; when the painter died, in 1944 at age 80, he willed his art to the city of Oslo. The museum, nowhere near as large or as imposing as the nearby National Gallery, seems almost to invite its patrons into Munch’s cluttered studio. Many visitors pause at Munch’s austere single bed and its frayed blanket, on exhibit along with the paintings, drawings, and prints.

Sooner or later, and in most cases sooner, everyone who enters the Munch Museum ends up standing before The Scream. This is not the same painting that Charley Hill recovered in 1994, but an equally valuable near-twin. Munch painted four versions of The Scream in all—he returned obsessively to the themes that haunted him—and the two at Norway’s National Gallery and the Munch Museum are the ones familiar around the world.

At 11:10 on that Sunday morning, two armed men in black ski masks and gloves burst into the museum. One burglar pointed his pistol at the head of an unarmed guard and shouted, in Norwegian, for the guard and the terrified tourists to “Lie down!” In the meantime, his partner strode over to Munch’s Madonna, a famous and hugely valuable work in its own right, pulled out a pair of wire cutters, and cut it from the wall. “It looked like he was crazy,” one eyewitness reported. “He was banging it against the wall. Then he got it off the wall, and he was banging it on the floor.” Then he grabbed The Scream.

The two thieves ran outside, each clasping a priceless painting. As they neared the getaway car, a black Audi station wagon, a third man threw open its back door. The thieves flung the masterpieces inside, and the three men sped off.

The nearest police station is only half a mile from the museum, and when the thieves cut the paintings from the wall they triggered an alarm connected to the station. The police arrived within minutes. Still, it was too late.

By one o’clock in the afternoon, police had found the getaway car, abandoned, and battered bits of the paintings’ frames. In the case of The Scream especially, this further evidence of rough handling was bad news. Munch painted his Madonna, an eerie, erotic depiction of a bare-breasted, black-haired woman, in oil on canvas, which makes it relatively robust; but the newly stolen Scream, like the version stolen in 1994, is painted on a piece of cardboard, so it could easily be bent or creased.

On the day after the theft, the director of the Munch Museum held an anguished press conference to plead with the thieves. “Whatever they do,” said Gunnar Sorensen, speaking from a position in front of the blank spot on the wall where The Scream had hung, “they should take care of the pictures as well as they can.”

That was apparently more than the Munch Museum itself had done. According to indignant accounts in the Norwegian press, four months before the theft the museum had withdrawn from the Norwegian Industry’s Security Board. The board, under the auspices of Norway’s Justice Department, advises its members on issues of crime and security. Its membership includes Norway’s most prominent institutions, including banks, oil companies, the Museum for Contemporary Art, and the National Gallery. A month before it withdrew from the Security Board, the Munch Museum had been given KR500,000, roughly $70,000, to beef up security. It had not spent the money.

Like the National Gallery’s Scream, the Munch Museum’s stolen paintings were not insured for theft. “They are irreplaceable works of art,” said the head of the agency that insures assets belonging to the city of Oslo, “and it makes no sense to insure them against theft.”

That is debatable; at the least, an insurance company faced with the possibility of a $50 million or $100 million payout might strive mightily to turn up the heat on the crooks. As it is, the police have found themselves chasing down random leads and praying the thieves will contact them. The obvious suspect, Pal Enger, who had been convicted twice before of stealing paintings by Munch, proclaimed his innocence. “Weapons are not my style,” Enger maintained. “I have always used the methods of a gentleman.”

Frustrated and forlorn, the authorities scarcely try to hide their floundering. “We’re working with the tips we’ve got from the public,” one police official told an interviewer two weeks after the theft. “So far we haven’t tied ourselves to any main theory.”

Charley Hill, whose boiling point is barely above room temperature, rages whenever he contemplates these latest examples of official ineptitude. Even stolid Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective who worked with Hill in 1994, cannot hide his indignation. “Hasn’t the city of Oslo learned anything about security in ten years?” he demands. “I am shocked that once again it was so easy.”

In the best of scenarios, the thieves will realize they cannot sell their paintings and will drop them somewhere where they will be quickly found. Failing that, the robbers may surface with ransom demands. Or, since The Scream and Madonna will surely retain their value for many decades to come, perhaps the silence will drag on. In the case of the Gardner Museum paintings, for example, the silence now spans fourteen years.

An impasse like that is unlikely. Thieves do not steal paintings in order to stash them in a warehouse. But schemes fall apart and deals dissolve. Yesterday’s trophy can become today’s white elephant. Sometimes a seeming lack of activity means not that a painting has been destroyed or stored away but that it has become a trade item in the criminal underworld, like Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter, stolen in Dublin in 1986 and recovered in Istanbul in 1990 in the hands of a thief trying to barter it for a shipment of heroin.

In the short run, the case is in the Norwegians’ hands. In all art robberies, the local police have first crack at sorting things out. But if months go by without progress and all the obvious leads unravel, Charley Hill’s phone will ring again.

In the meantime, when two weeks had gone by without a word about the whereabouts of its two most valuable paintings, officials from the Munch Museum contacted the press. “We are closed and will be closed for three weeks,” museum officials announced, “to install alarms, among other things.”

NOTES

This is a work of nonfiction. If readers find themselves eavesdropping on someone’s thoughts—”It’s perfect,” Hill thought. “I’ll be the Man from the Getty”—or privy to an interior monologue—These guys couldn’t be trying to hide—the material came from an interview.

The great bulk of The Scream narrative comes from my interviews with the principal players, notably Charley Hill. In addition, I am grateful to the producers of a BBC-4 TV documentary called The Scream for providing me the unedited transcripts of their interviews. I also made use of a memoir by Jens Kristian Thune, who was chairman of the board of Norway’s National Gallery when The Scream was stolen. I am grateful to Eileen Fredriksen for translating Thune’s account, Med et skrik, into English.

Since this book is in great part an oral history, I have chosen to keep the notes compact. In particular, readers seeking further details of the various thefts mentioned in passing would do well to begin by consulting the extensive archives at http://www.museum-security.org.

Chapter 1: Break-in

The account of The Scream theft in Chapters 1 to 5 is based on interviews with Charley Hill, Dick Ellis, Leif Lier, and Ludvig Nessa; Thune’s book; news reports (particularly those in the Norwegian