van Gogh Museum Robberies
It really seems like there are a few artists whose work just keeps being the target for thieves. We’ve talked a little about how Rembrandt is like that but so is van Gogh. The van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was opened in 1973 and since then it has been robbed twice, each time multiple paintings were stolen.
I’m not going to give any background on van Gogh himself or his painting because I have an entire blog post talking about his life and death, we’ll talk more about the pieces in question when we get to them. Also, he’s like pretty famous so I’m sure everyone has at least some idea who I’m talking about.
Theft 1: 1991
The first major theft of the museum happened in 1991, 18 years after it opened. They must have been so happy, everything was going so well and then bam. They’re targeted. It was not a small event either.
At 3:00am on April 14, 1991, two men appeared inside the van Gogh Museum. They had somehow managed to hide somewhere while the museum closed and stay concealed until they popped out. The two men were wearing ski masks and each had a gun. They forced the guards on duty to turn off the infrared security system as well as disable other security they had in place to protect the paintings.
The thieves then spent 45 minutes (FOURTY FIVE MINUTES) walking around the museum carefully choosing the paintings they wanted to take. This is absolutely unheard of. All of the paintings displayed at the museum are available in their promotional materials, why would the thieves not plan their to-steal list ahead of time and minimize the time they had to be inside the museum (the highest risk time)??! Anyways they used their 45 minutes to select 20, I’ll repeat that, 20 works of art to take with them. They brought two garment bags (for some reason) as their getaway bags and stuffed all 20 paintings inside. Including some of van Gogh’s most famous and recognizable works like Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, The Bedroom, The Potato Eaters, Wheatfield with Crows, Still Life: Vase with Violet Irises Against a Yellow Background and more.
The two thieves took one of the guards’ cars to escape, (not the smartest since the guard clearly knows the make, model, and license plate number) a Volkswagen Passat. One minute after the thieves left, at 4:48am, the guards phoned the police. They were able to get the details and quickly start searching.
At 5:23am that same morning a grey Volkswagen Passat matching the guard’s description was found at the Amstel train station. Incredibly they found two garment bags inside containing the 20 paintings that had been stolen only hours earlier. Wonder what the end game was here?
Unfortunately, many of the paintings had been scratched and damaged by being treated so roughly and transported in garment bags. Three of the paintings were even ripped.
Thankfully, three months later, on July 18, 1991, the police announced that they had arrested four men for their roles in the April robbery. Surprise, surprise one of the men had been a guard working at the museum the night of the theft, one of the men was a former employee of the museum’s security firm, and the other two men were the masterminds who promised the two insiders a significant commission if they helped them pull this off. Obviously, that didn’t turn out the way they were hoping.
They told police that they were supposed to meet up with a different getaway vehicle that night at Amstel train station but it never showed up because of a flat tire so they decided to just abandon the car and the artworks in a panic.
All four men were charged and sentenced to prison. In different places I saw that they served 6 or 7 years but regardless, good that they were held accountable and good that all the paintings were recovered. This is considered the largest art theft in the Netherlands since WWII.
Theft 2: 2002
I’m sure the museum was shaken up after everything that happened in 1991 but more than 10 years had passed so maybe they were feeling a little more secure by 2002. Also, they may have beefed up their security, I’m not sure.
Anyways, on the night of December 7, 2002, Octave Durham and Henk Bieslijn used a ladder to climb onto the roof of the van Gogh Museum (sounds chilly). They used a sledgehammer to break one of the windows and in 3 minutes and 40 seconds they gained entry to the museum, chose two paintings to steal (Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen and View of the Sea at Scheveningen), and left again through the broken window, shimmying down a rope to the ground. Sidenote: after the theft people speculated a lot about why these two paintings were chosen but in later years the thieves said that they just selected the smallest ones that would fit through the window easily.
It is a little unclear to me if someone called the police or if an alarm automatically alerted them, but the cops arrived at the scene pretty quickly. Unfortunately, Durham had a police scanner with him so he could hear that they knew that the suspects were wearing ski masks. As a result he and Beieslijn took their masks off, rolled down the windows of the getaway car and looked at the police officers curiously (as if they were wondering what was going on) as they drove by. Of course this worked and they weren’t stopped.
So, the two thieves had successfully stolen these two early van Gogh paintings, the landscape being one of only two that he did, and now they needed to sell them. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what a task that can be.
They found a bunch of different buyers over time but the sale kept never going through for various reasons. For example, one buyer was shot and killed the day the sale was supposed to happen (for unrelated reasons). Finally, they connected with Raffaele Imperiale, head of the Camorra crime family, who allegedly paid €350,000 for the paintings in March 2003. Now, these paintings had never been on the open market so their true value at the time is unknown but the museum’s then managing director put them at around $4 million so ol’ Raffaele was getting a pretty sweet deal. He then sent the paintings to Italy and Durham and Beiesljin blew through the profits in less than 6 weeks!
Obviously, this crazy spending drew the attention of the police who wiretapped their phones. Through this and the rest of their investigation, they finally caught up with and arrested Durham and Beiesljin in December of 2003. They spent three years in jail but refused to reveal anything about the whereabouts of the paintings and people were scared that they would never be recovered. Years and years passed and people started to get resigned to this fact, sadly.
But, going back to Imperiale for a second, over the years he had gotten himself in some legal hot water and he came up with an idea to gain some leniency from the public prosecutor in Italy. On August 29, 2016 he wrote the prosecutor a letter saying that he had the missing van Goghs. In September 2016, because of this letter and also because of a little cocaine trafficking issue, the Italian police raided the house of Imperiale’s mother. There, between two walls, frameless, and wrapped in cloth, were the missing paintings.
The Dutch police were quickly notified and came to verify the authenticity of the works before bringing them back to the van Gogh museum where they continue to be displayed frameless because that is how they were recovered.
In March 2017 (11 years after Durham and Beiesljin were released from prison), Durham announced that he had made a documentary about the theft in 2002. He confesses to everything and talks about all the details of the crime and questions that people had about it (that’s why I had so much information to share here). This has no legal repercussions for him as he has already been convicted and served his time.
I will say that the van Gogh museum is furious about this documentary and refused to participate in it. The filmmaker told them that Durham wasn’t getting paid to participate in the film but the museum had its own take. “The last 14 years have been a roller coaster of hope, disappointment and agony,” the museum’s director, Axel Rüger, said in an interview. “All the time this man is sitting on this information. He knew exactly what he had done and he never breathed a word. To us, it feels as if he is seeking the limelight. The museum is the victim in this case, and I would expect very different behaviour from someone who shows remorse” (Siegal, 2017). Can’t say I disagree with them there, but what do you think?
Update!
Also, this isn’t really related to this article but I wanted to give an update on another van Gogh theft case I wrote about a while ago. The one where van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring was stolen on the artist’s birthday (May 30, 2020). Well, I’m happy to say that on April 6, 2021, an unnamed man was arrested by the Dutch police in the small town of Baarn. They say that extensive research has been conducted into this and other thefts that they believe this 58-year-old male suspect is responsible for and that the arrest is an important step in the investigation. Unfortunately, they didn’t recover the paintings (they think he has stolen a lot more) but they’re hoping this arrest will lead them somewhere good.
Works Cited
Albertson, Lynda. “April 14, 1991: Museum Theft, van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam”. Association For Research Into Crimes Against Art. 2016. https://art-crime.blogspot.com/2016/09/april-14-1991-museum-theft-van-gogh.html?m=0
Bailey, Martin. “Dutch Police Arrest Over van Gogh Smash-and-Grab Raid: How Long Until the Landscape is Recovered?” The Art Newspaper. 2021. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/blog/when-will-the-stolen-van-gogh-landscape-be-recovered
Kaplan, Isaac. “How Two Stolen van Gogh Paintings Made it Home After a 14-Year Saga”. Art Market. 2017. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-two-stolen-van-gogh-paintings-made-14-year-saga
Montgomery, Paul L. “Lost and Found: Huge van Gogh Theft Fails”. The New York Times. 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/15/arts/lost-and-found-huge-van-gogh-theft-fails.html
Siegal, Nina. “As Stolen van Goghs Return to View, A Thief Tells All”. The New York Times. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/arts/design/van-gogh-museum-theft-octave-dunham.html