Just like the guard injured in the course of the Worcester Artwork Museum theft, safety staff not often carried arms – and, as portrayed mockingly in The Mastermind, they may typically be dozy “retirees” or “acid heads”, as Reichardt says, with restricted coaching. She provides: “Museums used to have these cool round drives out entrance, which made the getaway fairly useful.” And, whereas the movie options an FBI artwork crime investigator harking back to real-life agent Robert Wittman – who recovered $300m (£225m) price of artwork over the course of his profession – the precise FBI Artwork Crime Staff was solely based in 2004.
AlamyHowever as Flynn notes, whereas museums might have been sluggish to understand the specter of theft prior to now, the robbers haven’t usually displayed the sharpest acumen both. “The historical past of artwork crime and main artwork heists has been one in all opportunist idiots who do not actually perceive the character of artworks themselves,” he says, referring to their potential for injury, “or certainly the marketplace for artworks. [Then] these guys out of the blue uncover, to their horror, that the objects they’ve stolen are very troublesome issues to shift.”
The attract of the artwork robber
An archetype in fiction of the artwork robber as lovable rogue additionally began to emerge in the course of the Sixties and ’70s. Amid unrest pushed by the Vietnam Battle and the Nixon administration, disillusionment and discontent reached excessive ranges, particularly amongst youthful generations within the US. Concurrently, movies reminiscent of 1964’s Topkapi (the place a band of artwork thieves try and steal from a palace in Istanbul), 1966’s Methods to Steal a Million (the place Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole plan a heist to altruistic ends) and the identical yr’s Gambit (starring Michael Caine as a plucky cat burglar stealing an vintage bust) helped to glamorise such characters.
Based on historic creator Susan Ronald, who specialises in artwork crime, the rise of the artwork robber in popular culture displays the time’s anti-authority mentality. “A part of [the appeal of these characters] is [their] outsmarting the institution,” she explains. “The truth that artwork heists normally do not contain non-public people makes it extra acceptable. It is an establishment, and there is one thing fairly daring about it.”
