Art: A Shifty Business
This article originally appeared in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
What Canada’s Largest Art Heist Reveals about the Art World’s Shady Side
By all accounts, the biggest art heist in Canadian history should’ve been even bigger. Just past midnight on September 4, 1972—fifty years ago, this month—a man in a ski mask and climbing spurs accessed the roof of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts by scaling a nearby tree. He then extended a ladder to two similarly masked robbers below. From atop the building, the trio entered the gallery by rappelling with rope through a broken skylight. Once inside, they bound and gagged the security guards at gunpoint and began ransacking the building—cracking frames, shattering vitrines—with the apparent intention of stealing everything of value. The plan, it appears, was to descend and ascend, grinch-like, through the ceiling, during what likely would have been an all-night operation.
But thirty minutes into the break-in, one of the men tripped an alarm, forcing the gang to hustle out the side door with whatever they could carry: thirty-nine items, mainly jewellery and figurines, and eighteen canvasses, including paintings attributed to Gustave Courbet, Eugène Delacroix, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Thomas Gainsborough, and Peter Paul Rubens. The most valuable piece the men took was Landscape with Cottages, a work of dark pastoralism credited to Rembrandt, master of the Dutch Golden Age. The museum initially reported that the entire haul was worth $2 million.
Perhaps more valuable still was the bounty the thieves left behind: paintings by Pablo Picasso, El Greco, Francisco Goya, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as an additional Rembrandt, all of which had been stacked haphazardly on the gallery floor. The heist was ambitious but clearly not as much as its participants had intended it to be.
However, if the crime was scaled down during the operation itself, it has been only further diminished in the public imagination. Compare it to the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston. That theft has been fictionalized in eight novels, analysed in three television documentaries, name-checked on the Showtime series Shameless, parodied on The Simpsons, and picked over by conspiracy theorists with a level of fervour normally reserved for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Clearly, America’s largest art heist still looms large in popular culture.
As for the Canadian equivalent, in a 2019 magazine feature—arguably the most comprehensive reconstruction of the incident—arts-and-culture writer Chris Hampton notes that the robbery happened at the same time as Canada’s hockey summit series against the Soviet Union. “One is remembered in volumes,” he writes in Canadian Art. “The other, barely at all.” He reports that in 1972, the Montreal police put two detectives on the case. But, after a year, they basically gave up.
Perhaps the biggest question surrounding the MMFA break-in—bigger even than the mystery of who did it and where the paintings are today—is why such an ambitious stunt has been relegated to a historical footnote. A related question is why, even at the time of the theft, it failed to generate sustained public outcry. The answer, I suspect, has a lot to do with the bizarre way that Western culture valuates art and also with the warped ethics of the art trade itself, which can make it difficult for us to summon outrage over art crime, even when it happens on a million-dollar scale.
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