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'Amateurish' thieves steal 2 Warhol
prints, damage 2 more in botched heist at Dutch gallery
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[November 02, 2024]
By MIKE CORDER
THE HAGUE,
Netherlands (AP) — Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the
southern Netherlands and stole two works from a famous series of screen
prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol and left two more badly
damaged in the street as they fled the scene of the botched heist, the
gallery owner said Friday. |
A man takes an image of a screen print depicting Queen Elizabeth II, one
in a series of sixteen prints of four queens titled Reigning Queens,
1985, by Andy Warhol at museum Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn, Netherlands,
Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, similar to a Warhol work stolen from a gallery
in Oisterwijk, Netherlands, early Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Peter
Dejong) |
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Mark Peet Visser said the thieves attempted to steal all four
works from a 1985 Warhol series called “Reigning Queens,” which
features portraits of the then-queens of the United Kingdom, the
Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom
in southern Africa which is now called Eswatini.
In a telephone interview, Visser said the heist early Friday at
MPV Gallery in the town of Oisterwijk was captured on security
cameras, and called it “amateurish.”
“The bomb attack was so violent that my entire building was
destroyed” and nearby stores were also damaged, he said. "So
they did that part of it well, too well actually. And then they
ran to the car with the artworks and it turns out that they
won't fit in the car. ... At that moment the works are ripped
out of the frames and you also know that they are damaged beyond
repair, because it is impossible to get them out undamaged.”
Visser declined to put a value on the four signed and numbered
works, which he had planned to offer for sale as a set at an art
fair in Amsterdam later this month.
The thieves got away with portraits of Elizabeth II of the
United Kingdom and Margrethe II of Denmark. The prints of Queen
Beatrix of the Netherlands and Ntombi Tfwala, who is now known
as the queen mother of Eswatini, were left on the street as the
thieves fled, Visser said.
Police appealed for witnesses as forensic experts examined the
badly damaged gallery on Friday.
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