Stephen Hahn Gallery Robbery
Stephen Hahn was a respected gallery owner and art dealer in New York City, he frequently talked about being on the cutting edge of safety and security for the pieces that he had for sale. Unfortunately, he was proven wrong one night in 1969 when seven works were stolen from him.
Stephen Hahn
A little about Stephen himself before we dive into the matter at hand. Hahn was born in Hungary in 1921 but spent his childhood in Paris. His father was an art dealer specializing in the Old Masters so from a young age he was surrounded by art and knowledge of the art dealing business. During World War II he was deported as a refugee to Santo Domingo where he found work as a surveyor, he ended up living there for six years. After the war, he returned to Paris where he attended the École du Louvre and later taught at Sorbonne. At age 30 he moved to New York with his wife. In New York he started buying and selling paintings out of the trunk of his car, using what he knew to make money for his family.
He ended up meeting Jean Dubuffet, then a relatively unknown artist, and became his champion. Eventually, he opened his own gallery, the Stephen Hahn Gallery, on 75th and Madison which was a fixture there for more than two decades. He developed a reputation for being an expert on Picasso, Degas, and other modern masters with his being one of the most significant collections of 20th-century masters during his years operating the Stephen Hahn gallery. His private collection included works by Picasso, Cezanne, and Matisse among others.
As his reputation grew he attracted high profile clients like Woody Allen, Greta Garbo, Charles Laughton, Mike Nichols, and more. Outside the gallery, he was a founding member of the Art Dealers Association, and he donated works to major cultural institutions. He was also a scholar and had extensive knowledge of many different paintings. On many occasions, he was called on to validate the authenticity of a painting, especially ones by Degas, Picasso, or Rousseau.
Sounds Like a Good Guy. What Happened?
On November 17, 1969, art thieves broke into the Stephen Hahn Gallery. Hahn, as I said, was interested in security and had bragged in the past about the lock on the gallery being “unpickable”. Well…..he was proven wrong. The thieves made short work of the lock and quickly gained access to the gallery. Once inside they grabbed seven paintings; Christ et Deux Disciples by Georges Rouault, L’Hermitage Pontoise by Camille Pissarro, Nympheas by Claude Monet, Mere et Enfant by Mary Cassatt, Interior at Nice by Henri Matisse, Portrait of a Woman by Berthe Morisot, and Cart in the Forest by Marc Chagall. These paintings were valued at $500,000 total at the time.
You want to know what Hahn was doing at the time the theft took place? He was addressing the Art Dealers Association on the subject of art theft in New York. He was talking about his own efforts to discourage and prevent theft at his gallery, mentioning the unpickable lock. Irony at its finest.
Apparently, he had a pretty good sense of humour about this, commenting that the thieves were conservative for not taking the more valuable Picassos in favour of the Monet.
There isn’t a ton of information on the investigation but six years later, in 1975, the FBI announced that they had recovered five paintings from a man in Mount Vernon, NY. Among those paintings, four of them were confirmed to be from the Stephen Hahn Gallery robbery. Those four plus a small Renoir that was also recovered were estimated to be worth about $1 million on the black market at the time.
The recovered paintings were Christ et Deux Disciples by Rouault, L'Hermitage a Pontoise by Pissarro, Mere et Enfant by Cassatt and Nymphéase by Monet.
The suspect was identified as George Daniel Annunziata, the FBI arrested him on an extortion charge. People were confused about this but it later came out that finding these paintings was literally just a lucky break. The FBI was working on an extortion case that had nothing to do with stolen art and they just happened to stumble across them. They did discover that Annunziata had been handling negotiations for the sale of the four paintings stolen from the Stephen Hahn Gallery. Luckily that didn’t end up happening.
As for the other three paintings, I haven’t been able to find mention of them anywhere so to the best of my knowledge they’re still missing. Likely they’ve been sold, either together or individually, and once they’re in private homes or stashed away somewhere the chances of recovering them drop. But you never know, the FBI might just get another lucky break while working on something unrelated. Fingers crossed!
Works Cited
Hudson, Edward. “Stolen Paintings Picked up by FBI”. The New York Times. 1975. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/24/archives/stolen-paintings-picked-up-by-fbi-mount-vernon-man-seized-on.html
Schoppert, Stephanie. “Ten Daring Art Thefts of the 20th Century”. History Collection. 2016. https://historycollection.com/ten-astonishing-art-thefts-20th-century/5/