Cattelan’s Golden Toilet Theft
In 2019 there was a really shitty theft (sorry, I had to) at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s birthplace. How did an item as big and as connected to the infrastructure of the house even get removed and how do we go about getting it back?
Maurizio Cattelan’s America
Controversial Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan is best known for his hyperrealistic sculptures and installations. With no formal art training he has said that creating shows and playing around with things has been his education. He also frequently takes a satirical approach to his pieces and what they represent, causing him to be labeled a jokester or prankster of the art world.
This piece that we’ll be talking about today, America, was created for The Guggenheim museum in New York in 2016. And yes, it is a 18-carat, solid gold, fully functional toilet. It was created in a foundry in Florence, Italy and was made to look exactly like the museums other Kohler toilets. It was installed in one of the museum’s bathrooms for patrons to use and a special cleaning routine had to be put in place because of the fact that it was solid gold.
According to the museum, while the work was installed there over 100,000 people waited in line to use the gold toilet, yes you could actually use it, and a security guard was stationed outside the bathroom. The work is made out of 227lb of gold which in 2019 was worth around $4 million just as a toilet with its value going up to $6 million as an artwork. The toilet is supposed to make a viewer, or in this case user, think about excessive wealth. “Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise” said Cattelan (CBC, 2019).
In September 2017 the White House reached out to The Guggenheim asking to borrow Landscape with Snow by van Gogh for Donald Trump’s private rooms. The curator at the time declined the request and instead offered to loan them America. No response was received.
Blenheim Palace
In September, 2019 America was moved and installed in the historic Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, the birthplace of Winston Churchill and now the site of many different art exhibits. The piece was installed in a bathroom that had previously been used by the famous Prime Minister and was, once again, open for visitors to the exhibit to use.
However, on September 14, 2019 at 5:00am, very soon after being installed and before the show even opened, a group of men (different sources say different numbers but anywhere from 4-7 people) broke into the palace and ripped the toilet out of the wall, carrying it away with them in their getaway cars. Because this piece was plumbed into the palace’s system this caused quite a lot of flooding and water damage in the UNESCO World Heritage designated building.
It’s so unfortunate because the curator of Blenheim Palace was asked before the installation if security would be put in place for the toilet and he responded that the toilet was connected to the palace’s plumbing and wouldn’t be easy to steal, “so no, I don’t plan to be guarding it” (CBC, 2019).
Of course the police were immediately involved and they arrested one man fairly quickly and then six more people in the subsequent years though no charges were ever laid. Until 2023. 4 years after the theft of America the Crown Prosecution laid charges of burglary, conspiracy to transfer criminal property, and transferring criminal property on four men; James Sheen, Michael Jones, Fred Doe, and Bora Guccuk. In November 2023 at their trial Sheen pled guilty, he is already serving 17 years for unrelated burglaries so it’s unclear how much more time he’ll have added to his sentence for this. The other defendants pleaded not-guilty and their trials are set for 2025. You know I’ll keep you posted.
As for the work itself, you may have seen this coming but it’s never been found. In 2021, a police and crime commissioner in England said “recovering the toilet would be a challenge…If you have that large amount of gold, I think it seems likely that someone has already managed to dispose of it one way or another. It would be great if we could recover it and return it but personally, I’m not convinced it’s still in quite the same form it was” (Cassady, 2023). Meaning that it’s probably been melted down or broken apart to be sold. It’s likely that it will never be found, at least not in its original toilet form which is strangely sad.
Works Cited
Cassady, Daniel. “UK Police Make ‘Major Breakthrough’ in Search for Stolen Maurizio Cattelan Toilet”. ArtNews. 2023. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/uk-police-breakthrough-search-maurizio-cattelan-toilet-stolen-1234677957/
Martin, Saleen. “Man Pleads Guilty to Stealing 19-Carat Golden Toilet from Art Installation”. USA Today. 2024. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2024/04/03/guilty-plea-golden-toilet-theft-england/73193307007/
“Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet Stolen from British Art Exhibit”. CBC. 2019. https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cattelan-golden-toilet-theft-1.5284007