Art heist in Rotterdam.

Stolen: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 “Harlequin Head”; Claude Monet’s 1901 “Waterloo Bridge, London” and “Charing Cross Bridge, London”; Henri Matisse’s 1919 “Reading Girl in White and Yellow”; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 “Girl in Front of Open Window”; Meyer de Haan’s “Self-Portrait,” around 1890, and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work “Woman with Eyes Closed.”

Marinello said the thieves have limited options available, such as seeking a ransom from the owners, the museum or the insurers. They could conceivably sell the paintings in the criminal market too, though any sale would likely be a small fraction of their potential auction value.

The problem selling these things is obviously not protection enough to keep thieves from bothering.



IN THE COMMENTS: chickelit said:

From the link: the idea that an unscrupulous private investor might have commissioned the works’ theft was far-fetched. 'That’s something that comes from Hollywood movies,' he said.

Should they blame a Hollywood video or lax security?

Lucian Freud has died.

Having just blogged about a famous man's grandson, I find I must do it again. This is much sadder.

From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.

The flesh was mottled, lumpy and, in the case of his 1990s portraits of the performance artist Leigh Bowery and the phenomenally obese civil servant Sue Tilley, shockingly abundant.

You can see that painting of Sue Tilley here, in an article from 2008 about its sale.

The naked Kate Moss painting.

I love the painter Lucien Freud, and I love his painting of Kate Moss that just sold for $7.29 million. BBC reports:

Moss first suggested she pose for Freud in an article in Dazed and Confused magazine.



Lucian Freud, grandson of famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, usually paints people he knows well but his most famous model, aside from Moss, is probably the Queen.



It takes between six months and a year of regular sittings for the artist to complete a painting, but Moss said she was unconcerned by the length of time it would take.

She is pregnant in the picture (which would seem to be a problem if you're posing over such a long period of time). It's nice to see the famous model displayed like a very ordinary, quite flawed, fleshy female.



The buyer of the painting is anonymous, and quite possibly Moss herself.



Anyway, I highly recommend this book of Freud's paintings. Lots of reproductions of the paintings, and the text is by Robert Hughes.