Stolen Renoir paintings found hidden, and damaged, behind cinder block wall (cbsnews.com)

92 pointsby ohjeez3 days ago62 comments

john_strinlai 7 hours ago

it seems crazy to me to steal a famous painting from a museum. the number of people willing to purchase a black market painting worth ~$millions is probably like a dozen, and the transaction would be super high risk. so many easier crimes to commit.

tonyedgecombe 7 hours ago

For a while members of the mafia we’re stealing them to trade against their sentence if they got caught for some other crime.

SoftTalker 6 hours ago

Admit to additional crimes in exchange for a lighter sentence? How does that work?

goodcanadian 6 hours ago

I doubt they admit to anything, but having some information that helps lead to the recovery of a valuable item could be worth something. To be honest, this is the first I have heard of the practice, but it sounds plausible to me.

thaumasiotes 3 hours ago

There is a plotline involving this in the first season of The Line of Duty.

It opens with a guy who's complaining to the police about the frequent robbery of his house. They view him as a nuisance and try to respond to his complaints as little as possible.

Eventually someone is apprehended committing a different crime in a different location. An officer visits him in the hospital (there was a mighty struggle before he was caught) and asks if he'd be willing to lower his sentence by potentially resolving some other outstanding crimes that the police are investigating.

She reads off a list of crimes, and he responds "yeah, that was me" to everything she says. One of the items is the several robberies of the guy we met earlier.

It's win-win; his sentence is lowered for doing the police a favor, and the police report a higher solve rate.

After that, the original guy who was always brushed off suffers another robbery. Since he happens to be home at the time of the latest one, he is severely beaten.

DASD 6 hours ago

Crime gravity. If able to provide the solution to a crime that is considered more serious(or of greater value to the prosecuting entity's purview).

akudha 4 hours ago

So the lesson here is if you are a criminal - commit multiple crimes, hope in case you get caught then it is for a lesser crime, so you can trade secrets of a bigger crime for leniency?

I wonder what victims have gotta say about that...

dofm 3 hours ago

> I wonder what victims have gotta say about that...

You only let them say anything every four years or so. And then you set aside their complaints by saying some of them are made up.

dh2022 6 hours ago

Plea bargaining. Green river serial killer admitted to more killings (and cooperated to recover some of his victim’s bodies) in exchange for avoiding the death penalty : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Ridgway#Plea_bargain,_con...

xp84 5 hours ago

"Hey, I don't have any idea how it got there, but I heard some guy talking about a famous stolen painting that's stashed right here in this neighborhood. Apparently a Renoir."

dofm 6 hours ago

Or, since it’s a Renoir, maybe they were planning to distribute them as punishment.

“Thought you were going up in the world, did you Salvo? Oh no, no Armand Guillaumin for you. The boss ain’t pleased and he wants you to know about it. One more screwup and you’ll end up with a face like that”

john_strinlai 6 hours ago

i saw your other comment, and now this one. i dont really know much about art, and i'd love for you to help me understand your apparent disdain for renoir

dofm 6 hours ago

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/...

jerf 6 hours ago

Ah, the classic "picture is worth a thousand words" move. Well played.

dofm 5 hours ago

I could have picked a considerably worse face, too.

But this is a painting of his own young son, Jean (who went on to be a legendary director, screenwriter, actor).

So one presumes there's a method in it, because nobody hates a kid that much.

mosselman 4 hours ago

Is that a phone he is holding?

dofm 3 hours ago

No, it's a 13" tablet.

john_strinlai 6 hours ago

i did not know they did yaoi hands in 1800s france. point taken.

sherr 4 hours ago

You can pick "bad" artworks from any artist, maybe even objectively bad. And I dislike many of his paintings (sickly sweet, "fluffy" style) but he also did some lovely paintings. In my opinion of course.

dofm 3 hours ago

I mean, I am perpetuating a running joke.

But also yes. When he was not doing paintings with lots of faces or naked ladies he was on slightly more solid ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Pierre-Au...

https://lastmuseum.com/artist/auguste-renoir

e.g. I like the Alfred Sisley painting and the more realist painting of his father, and Madame Clementine Valensi Stora which he apparently repudiated.

But I don't think he ever painted a truly good female nude, and some are just utterly reductive (as a photography nerd I find Torso Effect of Sunlight to be the most interesting but the face oh the face)

Loads of it is really rather Monkey Christ, on reflection, and after about 1905 nothing is great.

So I do sympathise with the joke.

pvaldes 22 minutes ago

Round faces and opulent bodies were hot stuff in Renoir's times, not so much today. Older people simply had different concepts of feminine beauty than us.

Also those were artists deliberately breaking the rigid rules of realist classicism and finding inspiration on Asian art. Renoir was criticized by its figures "with skin and clothes obscenely stained with what seems dirty greasy oil spots" but the big point was to trigger controversy and to flip the bird to the classicism of the "real" professional artists.

Cpoll 6 hours ago

Renoir's kind of "pop" as far as Impressionists go. Laypeople like him because his work is easy to look at, but trained artists can find a lot to fault in his technique and composition. He was also kind of an asshole.

dennyabraham 6 hours ago

The numbers are higher than you'd expect. The trade in illegal (and so high rarity and limited access) goods is ongoing and flourishing via the use of third party intermediaries like free port systems [1] as well as networks of morally grey curatorial and preservation staff. Several notable archaeological "missing links" of the past few years came from said staff mediating access to private collections of undescribed provenance.

[1] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2015/07/01/experts-identify-...

jongjong an hour ago

It's weird though.

I don't understand why anyone would want to buy something outside of its legal socio-economic context, when that thing's entire value is derived from that context and is otherwise worth very little intrinsically based purely on aesthetic value.

Any market value it sells for is then based on some shared mental deficiency which prevents people from understanding that.

AnimalMuppet 40 minutes ago

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law." That's the "legal socio-economic context". If it's worth having, and there's only one, so that if you have it nobody else does, then some people will want to have it with or without legal sanction.

And, a thing's economic value is derived from what someone else will pay for it, and only that. If someone else (or several someones) will buy it, whether or not the law agrees that it's legal, then the thing is valuable. (See drugs for an example.)

I wouldn't say that such people have a mental deficiency. A moral deficiency, yes, absolutely, but not a mental one.

embedding-shape 6 hours ago

> the number of people willing to purchase a black market painting worth ~$millions is probably like a dozen

Right, but what about your local brick dealer who has 10-50K to waste on whatever? Definitely way more common and easier than you think to unload these sort of things, once you go down in price a lot because of the circumstances.

ericmay 6 hours ago

There are some “criminals” and criminal gangs and such, but I think the increase we have seen is due to Russia, Iran, and others who are giving extra resources and intelligence to some of these groups to deprive western institutions of their cultural heritage as part of the “hybrid war”.

Notice how things aren’t being stolen at this magnitude in China? Japan? If we’re Russian or Iranian for example I think this would be a great strategy if you view yourself at a civilizational war. Most of Europe is still asleep or in denial.

gvfsa 6 hours ago

I know posting deranged tirades about the supernatural powers of Russia is HN’s favourite pastime but this goes way too far.

xp84 5 hours ago

It's supernatural now to do crime?

sitkack 4 hours ago

It is supernatural to write code by hand, so yeah?

mac3n 2 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

ericmay 5 hours ago

What is “supernatural” about organized crime sponsored by Russia?

BonerWiener 4 hours ago

> Notice how things aren’t being stolen at this magnitude in China

Stealing from a Chinese museum would be extremely difficult. Cameras and security staff monitor exhibits during the day, and even after hours, extensive surveillance everywhere, makes it hard to get away unnoticed. The risk is simply too high

ericmay 4 hours ago

It’s difficult to steal from other museums too. I’m not sure I buy this argument. But let’s say it’s accurate - what about other countries?

pelagicAustral 6 hours ago

I would've thought thats what crypto was meant for.

slop 2 hours ago

Monero or Cash.

Aurornis 5 hours ago

> the number of people willing to purchase a black market painting worth ~$millions is probably like a dozen

You only need one.

With something like this I imagine you could hold on to it for years or even a lifetime waiting for the right connection to come along. Maybe some of them are even commissioned or pre-sold.

I can’t say I know anyone with stolen art, but over my lifetime I’ve known people across a range of wealth classes who got a thrill out of acquiring and owning something that was risky contraband.

tough 5 hours ago

One would think most jobs are "by order" and thus the customer comes before the risk

jimnotgym 4 hours ago

If you can wait out the statute of limitations you can of course sell it. It seems that in France that is not a thing in stolen art from a public collection

timcobb 4 hours ago

You can't sell stolen art by waiting out the statute of limitations

autoexec 3 hours ago

Even if you could no longer be charged with the theft itself, the act of selling stolen property would be a fresh new crime.

YVoyiatzis 5 hours ago

Unless you’re keeping it for yourself…

sandworm101 5 hours ago

There is specific Italian law about return of art. This would normally apply to people who stole the art but a careful lawyer could use this law to negotiate a reduced punishment for organized crime charges. If the art theft is described as a part of a larger criminal enterprise, then the return of that art could trigger a 2/3 reduction in punishment. See below (translated by google).

https://documenti.camera.it/leg18/dossier/testi/gi0031b.htm

"is committed by the person who has collaborated in identifying the co-conspirators or has ensured evidence of the crime or has effectively worked to prevent the criminal activity from being carried to further consequences or has recovered or had recovered the cultural property subject to the crime (penalty reduced from one third to two thirds)."

dewey 4 hours ago

From the documentaries I've watched it's usually the other way around. There's either already a known buyer, or the thief has someone in their circles that already knows how to sell it. So there's a middleman between already trusted entities.

slop 2 hours ago

And then if you offer to sell it to someone, they could blackmail you unless you give it to them for free or cheaper.

gwbas1c 2 hours ago

A month or two I listened to a podcast about stolen art. To summarize:

1: The stolen art sits around for a LONG TIME.

2: The provenance (papers) is forged

3: The buyer usually doesn't look too closely. They're either willing to fool themselves, gullible, or otherwise should know better.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-case-of-the-4-million-g...

john_strinlai 10 minutes ago

appreciate the link, thanks, ill be giving that a listen for sure

blobdole 5 hours ago

"It was through interrogation work that investigators were able to get the receiver of the stolen goods to admit that he had indeed taken possession of the paintings."

Humans are always the hole in the security you build, no matter how good the wall is.

glouwbug 5 hours ago

Interrogation is great, you can even get people to confess to things they didn't even do (from IASIP or something like that)

dofm 7 hours ago

You mean they didn’t brick it back up when they discovered it was a Renoir?

Missed opportunity IMO. It was where it belongs.

You know how Anthropic has banned being cruel to its models? I wonder if the definition includes asking it to generate images in the style of Renoir…

https://www.instagram.com/renoir_sucks_at_painting/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-bites-renoir-sucks-mov...

(ETA: Flagged, haha really? Come on. It’s a well-known running joke.)

ericmay 6 hours ago

What are you talking about? Those are some of the best paintings ever created. Anyone trying to tell you different is probably a fascist or communist. Both authoritarian and hate-filled ideologies that have no place in modern or future societies.

dofm 6 hours ago

Fascists, communists, art critics, and people who can actually paint women’s faces.

(It’s a joke. Like Birds Aren’t Real)

ericmay 6 hours ago

I see - sorry I couldn’t tell. There are a lot of lunatics out there.

matkoniecz 5 hours ago

> Anyone trying to tell you different is probably a fascist or communist.

are you serious and it is your actual position or is it also a joke?

ericmay 5 hours ago

It’s an actual position. These kinds of ideologies hate “the good life” and consider such paintings either decadent (fascists) or supportive of the bourgeoisie (communists).

ks2048 5 hours ago

Random fact: one of the socialist leaders of the Paris Commune saved Renoir's life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Rigault

ericmay 5 hours ago

Hitler probably helped an old lady cross the street once too. Terrible people or those supporting authoritarian ideologies can still do nice things. They pet dogs and eat ice cream too.

SantalBlush an hour ago

I had no idea this was a thing, but I made a similar joke about Renoir last month when the paintings were stolen, so I guess I belong in this club.

mosselman 4 hours ago

The thieves probably just wanted to buy a new gaming PC and thus had to resort to stealing 10 million worth of paintings.

I guess they were going to share the one PC.

moffkalast 4 hours ago

I though this was about The Swedish Job, but apparently this is a completely new Renoir theft? Did they not learn anything from the first one?

Insimwytim 5 hours ago

for a split second branch prediction in my head replaced 'cinder block wall' in the title with 'paywall'

jacquesm 4 hours ago

As long as you are eventually consistent it is all good.