Stolen Munch paintings recovered
Monday, March 7, 2005 Posted: 4:53 PM EST (2153 GMT)
OSLO,
Norway (AP) -- Three stolen works of art by Edvard Munch -- including a
unique watercolor entitled "Blue Dress" -- were recovered Monday, less
than 24 hours after thieves with crowbars prised them from the walls of
an upscale restaurant.
It was the second theft of the Norwegian master's work in less than seven months.
Iver
Stensrud, of the Oslo police, also said several arrests had been made.
He declined to be more specific or say what condition the stolen
watercolor and two lithographs were in.
"We can say the artwork has been recovered," he said. "It was just good police work."
Munch's tortured tableaus have proven to be quite a draw for Norway's art thieves.
In
August, priceless Munch masterpieces "The Scream" and "Madonna" were
stolen from a museum in a brazen daylight raid. They have yet to be
recovered.
The three pieces stolen Sunday night from the restaurant at the upscale Hotel Refnes were valued at about $257,000.
The
most valuable -- the 1915 watercolor "Blue Dress" -- is worth as much
as $160,857, Munch expert and auctioneer Knut Forsberg said.
The other two are lithographs and include a self-portrait and a portrait of Swedish artist August Strindberg.
Munch
developed an emotionally charged painting style that helped launch the
20th Century Expressionist movement. He died in 1944 at the age of 80,
having produced some 1,700 paintings and 30,000 prints.
The
hotel's owner, Widar Salbuvik, said the thieves used crowbars to pry
the artwork off the walls of the restaurant just after it had closed
for the night. The hotel is near the city of Moss, about 50 kilometers
(30 miles) south of Oslo.
A hotel worker was walking through the
restaurant around 11 p.m. Sunday and surprised two unarmed men who had
torn the pictures and frames from their security mounts on the walls,
police spokesman Jan Pedersen said.
"They dropped one, and broke
the frame and glass, but took the picture," Pedersen said. Police were
searching for two dark-haired men believed to be in their 20s, he said.
The
August theft of "The Scream" and "Madonna" from the Munch Museum raised
concerns about security in the art world, as three armed robbers
grabbed the valuable pieces in broad daylight.
In 1994, another
version of "The Scream" was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo
and was recovered a few months later in a sting operation.
Pedersen
and Stensrud said the two recent Munch thefts did not appear to be
linked. "There are no grounds for assuming any connection between the
thefts, but we will be talking to the Oslo police about it."
"It
seems to be a fashion among criminals to steal Munch," the hotel owner
Salbuvik said. "How professional is it to steal art? Great value, big
risk and hard to sell. They would have to be very slow in the head to
do it."
The hotel is located on the island of Jeloey, where Munch
lived and worked from 1913 to 1916. The hotel has seven Munch works in
its collection of about 400 pieces, which also includes works by Andy
Warhol.
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