The robbery of five pictures from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris fed theories many years ago that went well beyond simple theft. A market was spoken of where works of art serve as guarantees for criminal operations, instruments of speculation or assets it is impossible to sell but which are too valuable to return.
Fausto Triana
If the characteristics of the five pictures stolen a few years ago from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris indicate that they are unsaleable, then they seem destined to become hostages to speculation.
Of course, this relates to a different sort of speculation, that is to say the art market’s new or rather now established pattern. Proponents of plastic can only tear their hair out, suffering at the thought that the works could be damaged.
Pierre Cornett de Saint-Cyr, director of the Palace of Tokyo on whose premises the Museum of Modern Art is located, described the thieves as imbeciles. “Give the pictures back, you will never be able to sell them”, he said dramatically.
Five gems valued at 500 million euros that seemingly will not find an opening on the illegal market due to their classification, styles, insurers and the intense investigation that will be carried out by the most renowned detectives in the world, as well as by Interpol.
Five masterpieces were lifted from the elegant area known as “Museum Hill”, a few metres from the Pont de l’Alma bridge where Ladi Di was killed and from the “Crazy Horse” nude cabaret, with the Seine at its back and not far from the Eiffel Tower. Le pigeon aux petits pois, by Pablo Picasso, La pastorale, by Henri Matisse, L’olivier prés de l’Estaque, by George Braque, La femme à l’éventail, by Amedeo Modigliani, and Nature morte aux chandeliers, by Fernand Léger.
There is a certain common denominator among the stolen paintings: cubism. The Frenchman Braque, together with the Spaniards Picasso and Juan Gris, are considered the three creators of cubism. Another Frenchman, Léger, also developed the genre. Matisse (France) and Modigliani (Italy) are two exceptional cases. Matisse was one of the fathers of modern art and in his beginnings was identified with fauvism for his generous and prolific use of colour.
Modigliani’s tumultuous life meant his path to fame came late, after his death, but he is considered one of the all-time greats of the plastic arts. He was inspired by Cezanne, cubism and Picasso’s blue period.
Give all these elements, it is difficult to believe that it was a random robbery. On the contrary, it hides defined purposes that some people relate to drug barons. However, the matter is not so simple.
French investigators let slip the multiple purposes that the paintings have nowadays, especially in the murky drugs world. They serve as guarantees in large narcotics deals and are used in transactions, in their opinion.
Perhaps as a smokescreen. In a voluminous drug trafficking operation, the decoy of stolen paintings camouflaged in airports or seaports is driving the police mad and leaves open and free a second route through which drugs pass, they argue. Another hypothesis points to a sort of “retention” of works that will undoubtedly gain much more notoriety in the future and, of course, will allow them to reach obscene insurance figures.
The City of Light’s Museum of Modern Art has art gallery status. It was inaugurated in 1961 and houses works of favism, cubism, dadaism, surrealism, the Paris school, abstraction and “arte povera”.
It is linked, as well as with the Palace of Tokyo, with the museums of Architecture and Heritage, the Maritime Museum and the Museum of Mankind, the Place de Trocadero, in the orbit of the Chaillot Palace, and is near the Quai Branly.
The Museum of Modern Art’s building was designed by the architects Dondel, Aubert, Viard and Dastugue in an imperial-rationalist style, and opened in 1937 for the World Fair.
In August 1938 it was handed over to the city, which could not enjoy it because the German nazi occupation took over the premises. With ups and downs, it began its real history in 1961 with a collection of over 8,000 works. Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Léger and Braque, Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, Gris, Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Soulages, Raoul Dufy, Pierre Bonard, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain, among others, are represented there. PL
(Translated by Philip Walker – Email: philipwalkertranslation@gmail.com) – Photos: Pixabay
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