En el New York Times de hoy hay un artículo recordando el robo de dos pinturas de Edvard Munch, artista expresionista de Noruega. El robo ocurrió en el 2004 en el Museo Munch , Noruega. Hasta el dia de hoy, aún no se sabe dónde están las obras apesar de encontrarse detenido un grupo de hombres que, según las autoridades, estaban involucrados en el hurto. Las obras desaparecidas son "El Grito" (1893) y “Madonna” (1894-95). De las dos, la primera es considerada por muchos como su mejor obra.El artículo del New York Times es publicado unos días antes a la exhibición del Museo de Arte Moderno (MOMA). La exhibición comienza el 19 de Febrero y se titula “Edvard Munch: The modern life of the Soul" (La vida moderna del alma). Esta exhibicioón busca "representar cada fase de la carrera del artista mediante 87 pinturas y 50 trabajos en papel".
Origen de "El Grito":
Munch describió así la experiencia que lo llevó a pintar esta obra: "Caminaba yo con dos amigos por la carretera, entonces se puso el sol; de repente, el cielo se volvió rojo como la sangre. me detuve, me apoyé en la valla, indeciblemente cansado. Lenguas de fuego y sangre se extendían sobre el fiordo negro azulado. Mis amigos siguieron caminando, mientras yo me quedaba atrás temblando de miedo, y sentí el grito enorme, infinito, de la naturaleza". Tomado de Image and Art. Para ver más obras de Munch ir a esta página.
Aqui los dejo con un extracto del artículo del New York Times y una foto de los ladrones llevándose los cuadros:
February 12, 2006, Art
The Case of the Missing Munchs
The Case of the Missing Munchs
By Sarah Lyall
THE thieves struck on the morning of Aug. 22, 2004, not long after the Munch Museum had opened. Many of the 80 or so visitors there were clustered in the ground-floor gallery, where the collection's most precious paintings were on display.
The late-summer Sunday doziness was broken by the sudden shouting presence of two men in balaclavas who burst in through the main entrance. They came so unexpectedly, so brazenly, that at first it was hard to know what was happening. Using a gun to force the museum guards to the ground — neither security guards nor police officers are routinely armed in Norway — the intruders wrenched two paintings from the main gallery wall. They treated them with so little care, banging one repeatedly against the ground to dislodge it from its frame, that witnesses spoke afterward of their shock at the brutality of the assault as much as of the theft itself.
The whole thing took less than five minutes, and by the time the police arrived the thieves had long since disappeared. So had two treasures from the museum's huge collection of works by the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. One was "Madonna," a lush, erotic portrait of a long-haired, bare-breasted woman. The other was "The Scream," Munch's classic embodiment of existentialist horror, angst and despair.
The crime, and the ease with which it was pulled off, were seen across the country as a humiliating blow to Norway, which regards Munch's paintings — along with, perhaps, the music of Edvard Grieg and the plays of Henrik Ibsen — as among its most precious cultural assets. The police threw themselves into the job of finding the thieves, and the city of Oslo offered $386,000 for the paintings' return.
One and a half years on, six men stand accused of the crime; their trial is set to begin tomorrow. But the laborious, complicated investigation has stumbled in a fundamental and profoundly frustrating way. The police may have the thieves, but they don't have the paintings.
"It's no secret that we don't know where they are," Morten Hojem Ervik, the police prosecutor who is coordinating the case, acknowledged in an interview.
Sitting on a wooden bench outside an Oslo courthouse before yet another wearying pretrial hearing, Mr. Hojem Ervik tried valiantly to put a positive gloss on the situation. But the fact that the paintings are still at large is as much a source of embarrassment to Norwegians as is the original crime.
"These paintings are national treasures, but also international icons," Jorunn Christoffersen, director of communications at the Munch Museum, said in a recent interview.
Followers of this sort of crime may remember that "The Scream" was stolen once before, in 1994. But that was a different version, the one owned by the National Art Museum across town (there are four versions in all, each a slight variation of the others; one is in private hands and one is a work on paper). And that theft was risibly amateurish, involving a ladder propped up against a second-floor window and a thief so nervous he fell off, nearly braining his accomplice. Timing their crime for maximum public exposure on the morning of the first day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, the thieves escaped with "The Scream" and left a snide little note behind. "Thanks for the poor security," it said.
That story had a happier conclusion. The police recovered the painting four months later after an elaborate undercover sting operation, and it once again hangs in the National Art Museum (away from the windows).
But the 2004 theft was slicker and more violent, and the ensuing investigation has proved to be that much more difficult. From the beginning, everything seemed to conspire against the investigators, starting with the glaring lack of security at the Munch Museum, which had not so much as a cordon to keep people away from the art on the walls. "As easy as robbing a kiosk," one police officer was quoted as telling reporters.
The police took so long to arrive that by the time they did, the crime scene had been contaminated with additional visitors, and many of the witnesses, including tourists sick of hanging around, had already left. Although the closed-circuit television cameras in front of the museum were working, they showed only grainy hooded figures moving swiftly across the grass — no help for identification purposes.
The police do know something of what happened next. Clutching the paintings, breaking off bits of their frames (and twice dropping "Madonna" on their way out), the thieves bundled into a black Audi idling outside and were driven away by an accomplice. They abandoned the car shortly thereafter, after spraying its interior with a fire extinguisher in an effort to obliterate forensic evidence. The police found it later that day.
[…] If the thieves were looking to make a splash, they certainly succeeded. Munch painted both works in the 1890's during a period of great, tortured creativity. "Madonna" (1893-94) is precious, but "The Scream" (1893) is part of the national psyche. Its arresting image — the strong, swirling brush strokes; the bold, vivid colors; the anguished skeletal figure at the center, his mouth frozen in a rictus of psychic pain — makes it one of the world's most recognizable paintings.
A favorite of tortured adolescents, of readers of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer, of anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the horrors of existence, "The Scream" has been widely appropriated in popular culture. It has been evoked by Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone," turned into a brisk-selling line of inflatable plastic dolls and used on anti-Bush buttons (and toilet paper) in the 2004 election with the question, "Bush again?" (An exhibition, "Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul," is scheduled to open on Feb. 19 at the Museum of Modern Art.)
The worth of "The Scream" and "Madonna" together has been put at anywhere from $40 million to $100 million. But the reality is that such paintings are far too recognizable, and their histories too well known, to be sold openly.
"They're never going to come on the legitimate art market," said Sarah Jackson, recoveries and historical research director of the Art Loss Register, which keeps a database of some 160,000 stolen and looted artworks and antiques.
"Paintings like that are commonly sold for ransom purposes or as a tool for reducing your sentence if you're arrested for some other crime," said Detective Sgt. Vernon Rapley, commanding officer of Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad.
Many such pictures turn up years and even decades later, after they have passed through dozens of hands. Some never surface again.
The authorities say they know, at least, where the Munchs were hidden for a month after the theft: in a bus parked on farmland north of Oslo belonging to Thomas Nataas, a man said to be on the fringes of Oslo's criminal community.
In a recent interview with Reuters, Mr. Nataas, 25, who is to stand trial on charges of handling stolen goods — the other defendants face different charges — claimed that the paintings had been stashed in his bus, covered in plastic sheets, without his permission. (The police dispute that, saying he had allowed his bus to be used.) When the thieves finally told him they were there, Mr. Nataas says, he saw the paintings briefly, long enough to determine that "Madonna" had a small rip in it and that "The Scream" was undamaged.
[…] With six defendants awaiting trial, why can the police not persuade them to reveal where the lost Munchs are?
"The main reason is that they're terrified of retaliation," said Charles Hill, a former detective with Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad, who orchestrated the return of "The Scream" in 1994 and now works as an art recovery consultant. "If any of these guys talk, the criminals will go after their families."
[…]As for the museum, it closed after the robbery and reopened 10 months later, after a $6 million security overhaul. The galleries have been reconfigured to make it harder to get in. Visitors now walk through metal detectors.
[…] Speaking in the cafeteria, feet away from where the thieves entered the museum in 2004, Mrs. Christoffersen tried not to criticize the police, saying she believed they were doing the best they could. But a museum without its masterpiece is like a body without a limb.
"For us, the important thing is to have our paintings back," she said.
THE thieves struck on the morning of Aug. 22, 2004, not long after the Munch Museum had opened. Many of the 80 or so visitors there were clustered in the ground-floor gallery, where the collection's most precious paintings were on display.The late-summer Sunday doziness was broken by the sudden shouting presence of two men in balaclavas who burst in through the main entrance. They came so unexpectedly, so brazenly, that at first it was hard to know what was happening. Using a gun to force the museum guards to the ground — neither security guards nor police officers are routinely armed in Norway — the intruders wrenched two paintings from the main gallery wall. They treated them with so little care, banging one repeatedly against the ground to dislodge it from its frame, that witnesses spoke afterward of their shock at the brutality of the assault as much as of the theft itself.
The whole thing took less than five minutes, and by the time the police arrived the thieves had long since disappeared. So had two treasures from the museum's huge collection of works by the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. One was "Madonna," a lush, erotic portrait of a long-haired, bare-breasted woman. The other was "The Scream," Munch's classic embodiment of existentialist horror, angst and despair.
The crime, and the ease with which it was pulled off, were seen across the country as a humiliating blow to Norway, which regards Munch's paintings — along with, perhaps, the music of Edvard Grieg and the plays of Henrik Ibsen — as among its most precious cultural assets. The police threw themselves into the job of finding the thieves, and the city of Oslo offered $386,000 for the paintings' return.
One and a half years on, six men stand accused of the crime; their trial is set to begin tomorrow. But the laborious, complicated investigation has stumbled in a fundamental and profoundly frustrating way. The police may have the thieves, but they don't have the paintings.
"It's no secret that we don't know where they are," Morten Hojem Ervik, the police prosecutor who is coordinating the case, acknowledged in an interview.
Sitting on a wooden bench outside an Oslo courthouse before yet another wearying pretrial hearing, Mr. Hojem Ervik tried valiantly to put a positive gloss on the situation. But the fact that the paintings are still at large is as much a source of embarrassment to Norwegians as is the original crime.
"These paintings are national treasures, but also international icons," Jorunn Christoffersen, director of communications at the Munch Museum, said in a recent interview.
Followers of this sort of crime may remember that "The Scream" was stolen once before, in 1994. But that was a different version, the one owned by the National Art Museum across town (there are four versions in all, each a slight variation of the others; one is in private hands and one is a work on paper). And that theft was risibly amateurish, involving a ladder propped up against a second-floor window and a thief so nervous he fell off, nearly braining his accomplice. Timing their crime for maximum public exposure on the morning of the first day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, the thieves escaped with "The Scream" and left a snide little note behind. "Thanks for the poor security," it said.
That story had a happier conclusion. The police recovered the painting four months later after an elaborate undercover sting operation, and it once again hangs in the National Art Museum (away from the windows).
But the 2004 theft was slicker and more violent, and the ensuing investigation has proved to be that much more difficult. From the beginning, everything seemed to conspire against the investigators, starting with the glaring lack of security at the Munch Museum, which had not so much as a cordon to keep people away from the art on the walls. "As easy as robbing a kiosk," one police officer was quoted as telling reporters.
The police took so long to arrive that by the time they did, the crime scene had been contaminated with additional visitors, and many of the witnesses, including tourists sick of hanging around, had already left. Although the closed-circuit television cameras in front of the museum were working, they showed only grainy hooded figures moving swiftly across the grass — no help for identification purposes.
The police do know something of what happened next. Clutching the paintings, breaking off bits of their frames (and twice dropping "Madonna" on their way out), the thieves bundled into a black Audi idling outside and were driven away by an accomplice. They abandoned the car shortly thereafter, after spraying its interior with a fire extinguisher in an effort to obliterate forensic evidence. The police found it later that day.
[…] If the thieves were looking to make a splash, they certainly succeeded. Munch painted both works in the 1890's during a period of great, tortured creativity. "Madonna" (1893-94) is precious, but "The Scream" (1893) is part of the national psyche. Its arresting image — the strong, swirling brush strokes; the bold, vivid colors; the anguished skeletal figure at the center, his mouth frozen in a rictus of psychic pain — makes it one of the world's most recognizable paintings.
A favorite of tortured adolescents, of readers of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer, of anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the horrors of existence, "The Scream" has been widely appropriated in popular culture. It has been evoked by Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone," turned into a brisk-selling line of inflatable plastic dolls and used on anti-Bush buttons (and toilet paper) in the 2004 election with the question, "Bush again?" (An exhibition, "Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul," is scheduled to open on Feb. 19 at the Museum of Modern Art.)
The worth of "The Scream" and "Madonna" together has been put at anywhere from $40 million to $100 million. But the reality is that such paintings are far too recognizable, and their histories too well known, to be sold openly.
"They're never going to come on the legitimate art market," said Sarah Jackson, recoveries and historical research director of the Art Loss Register, which keeps a database of some 160,000 stolen and looted artworks and antiques.
"Paintings like that are commonly sold for ransom purposes or as a tool for reducing your sentence if you're arrested for some other crime," said Detective Sgt. Vernon Rapley, commanding officer of Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad.
Many such pictures turn up years and even decades later, after they have passed through dozens of hands. Some never surface again.
The authorities say they know, at least, where the Munchs were hidden for a month after the theft: in a bus parked on farmland north of Oslo belonging to Thomas Nataas, a man said to be on the fringes of Oslo's criminal community.
In a recent interview with Reuters, Mr. Nataas, 25, who is to stand trial on charges of handling stolen goods — the other defendants face different charges — claimed that the paintings had been stashed in his bus, covered in plastic sheets, without his permission. (The police dispute that, saying he had allowed his bus to be used.) When the thieves finally told him they were there, Mr. Nataas says, he saw the paintings briefly, long enough to determine that "Madonna" had a small rip in it and that "The Scream" was undamaged.
[…] With six defendants awaiting trial, why can the police not persuade them to reveal where the lost Munchs are?
"The main reason is that they're terrified of retaliation," said Charles Hill, a former detective with Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad, who orchestrated the return of "The Scream" in 1994 and now works as an art recovery consultant. "If any of these guys talk, the criminals will go after their families."
[…]As for the museum, it closed after the robbery and reopened 10 months later, after a $6 million security overhaul. The galleries have been reconfigured to make it harder to get in. Visitors now walk through metal detectors.
[…] Speaking in the cafeteria, feet away from where the thieves entered the museum in 2004, Mrs. Christoffersen tried not to criticize the police, saying she believed they were doing the best they could. But a museum without its masterpiece is like a body without a limb.
"For us, the important thing is to have our paintings back," she said.
Tenía entendido que ¨El Grito¨ era una obra del expresionismo!!
ResponderEliminarDeers*
Hola manu,
ResponderEliminarTienes toda la razón. Corregí el texto. Gracias ;)
Joanne