The Wall Street Journal-20080215-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Taste -- de gustibus- Opportunity Makes a Thief

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Taste -- de gustibus: Opportunity Makes a Thief

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In the wake of Sunday's theft of four Post-Impressionist paintings from the Buhrle Collection in Zurich (following the lifting of two Picassos from another museum in Switzerland four days earlier), most people are probably asking: How did they do it? Will the thieves get caught? What will become of the pictures if they aren't?

Good questions. But there's another more fundamental one: Why do people steal art at all? Art theft is a labor-intensive, high-risk business. Works of art are hard to store and even harder to get rid of. High-profile thefts, such as those that have occurred in the past two weeks, attract extensive publicity -- making the pictures widely recognizable and therefore too "hot" to be easily fenced.

One of the main factors determining a work of art's value on the open market, says Special Agent Robert Wittman, senior investigator on the FBI's National Art Crime Team, is a legitimate provenance, or ownership history. What thieves rarely recognize is that once artworks have been stolen from a museum, "they have no provenance. They can't be sold, so they're really worth nothing." It is surely no accident, for example, that the 13 paintings stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 -- among them, works by Rembrandt and Vermeer -- haven't surfaced. Anyone with the means to buy such paintings has seen the pictures reproduced in the media.

Sometimes the art is so hard to get rid of that the thieves just have to dump it. Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), cites a 1978 theft at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The case went unsolved until 21 years later, when "three of the four works turned up in a box" at the William Doyle auction house in Manhattan, secreted there during an open house by someone who trusted they could get in and out without being seen.

So why don't thieves stick to jewelry heists or bank robberies? The most popular explanation is that they are commissioned by shadowy underworld figures to obtain art for their private delectation. In the movie "Dr. No," James Bond, an unwilling guest in the eponymous doctor's lair, does a double take as he passes a painting on his way into dinner with his host. Audiences don't laugh now, but they did when the film was first released: The painting in question, Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, had been stolen from London's National Gallery the year before the movie was made. (It was recovered in 1965.)

But this idea of the evil genius as art connoisseur is "a myth," according to Ms. Flescher. Nobody has ever arrested a drug dealer or mafia kingpin and found his hideaway lined with A-list masterpieces from the world's museums.

Still, art thievery continues apace. It amounts to what Special Agent Wittman says is a $3 billion to $5 billion world-wide business. It includes forgery, fraud, high-end museum capers as well as -- the majority of the business -- simple domestic burglaries whose loot is easily disposed of in flea markets. In the past year, Mr. Wittman says, there have been at least five major heists in countries ranging from France to Brazil.

Perhaps art thievery persists for reasons that have less to do with personal prestige or monetary gain than with a vague sense of cultural longing. When the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, he said "because it's there." Maybe that is why art is stolen too. Society has historically expressed its reverence for art by displaying it, paying high prices for it, commissioning it and elevating the people who make it to the status of celebrities if not demi-gods.

These days we venerate art with our blockbuster exhibitions and black-tie auctions. Art theft, too, is a kind of veneration, albeit of a decidedly sinister sort, a backhanded salute to art's powerful grip on the collective imagination. In spite of its inherent difficulties and risks, art theft may be driven primarily by art's easy availability and its high social profile. This explanation doesn't justify what was done in Switzerland on Sunday. But it does show why art theft has always been with us -- and always will be.

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Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.