Are art thieves playing tricks on me, asks JAMES TWINING?

Art heists are often the stuff of fiction. As a Da Vinci painting is recovered, I'm beginning to wonder if my books are part of the plot.

It was not so many years ago that the thought of a living artist selling a work for £50 million was completely inconceivable.  And yet this was precisely the sum paid in August for Damien Hirst’s latest creation, a diamond encrusted skull titled For the Love of God, in what was just the latest example of the unprecedented and seemingly inexorable boom being enjoyed by the global art market.

According to one survey, the value of contemporary art has risen by 55% in the past year alone.  The auction room sales numbers certainly seem to back this up.  The record price paid for a painting in 2004, $104 million, has been surpassed four times in the last year, with Jackson Pollock's No 5, 1949, topping the list at $140 million.  At the contemporary art sales in New York in May this year, a total of $837 million of sales was achieved by the main auction houses, with more than 120 artists' records broken. The comparative total last November was a mere $550 million.

And yet amidst all this froth and irrational exuberance lurks a darker story.  The welcome announcement by police in Glasgow on Thursday of the recovery of The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, a $70 million da Vinci masterpiece snatched from Drumlanrig Castle in a daring heist in 2003, has served as a potent reminder that the inexorable rise in art prices over the last ten years has gone hand in hand with a rise in the levels of international art and antiquities crime.  As the expression goes, where there’s brass, there’s muck. 

Often called the world’s second oldest profession, art crime is believed by the FBI to be the world’s fourth largest area of criminal activity after drug smuggling, arms dealing and money laundering, and to be worth some $6bn a year.  90 to 95 percent of stolen art is never recovered.

Although the bulk of activity is in small, low value items that are harder to identify and easier to sell on, an increasing number of high profile cases have hit the headlines over the past few years, reflecting both an upswing of activity by criminals determined to make the most of the rising market, and increased public interest. 

In Spain in 2001, for example, thieves took 14 works of art, including a Goya and Pisarro, from Esther Koplowitz, one of the world’s richest women.  In 2003, a £35 million salt cellar by Cellini was robbed from a museum in Vienna and in 2004, Munch’s The Scream was stolen at gun point in Oslo.  The world’s largest heist remains the Isabella Stewart Gardner job in Boston in 1991, when two thieves disguised as Boston police officers bound and gagged two security officers and made off with 13 paintings, including a Rembrandt and Vermeer, worth more than $300 million.  None have ever been recovered.  

The reasons behind the theft of works like these remain unclear, as such masterpieces are notoriously difficult to sell on the open market.  Often the crimes appear to be opportunistic, with the thief only belatedly realizing the value of what they have taken.  This can lead to him trying to ransom it back to the original owners and although no-one would never admit it, money does change hands in the form of finder’s fees and “legal costs.” 

A common theory is that these priceless works are stolen to order, with visions of criminal masterminds bent on world domination decking out their hollowed-out volcanoes with Vermeers and Renoirs looming large in people’s imaginations.  Far more likely, is that they are taken as a form of currency with which to sweeten a drugs deal or to pay for something – in 1986, for example, the IRA leader Martin Cahill stole 18 paintings worth £30 million from Russborough House in the hope of exchanging them for weapons.   

From my perspective, the timing of the painting's recovery is certainly apt. Next week sees the publication of my third novel, The Gilded Seal, the latest in a series of thrillers set in the international art underworld.  Coincidentally, the theft of The Madonna of the Yarnwinder and its possible fate form an integral part of the plot of the book. Bizarrely this is on the back of US law enforcement agencies recovering 10 priceless 1933 Double Eagles (rare $20 coins) only a few weeks before the publication of my first novel, The Double Eagle.

 

Sometimes, it seems, art imitates art!

 

James Twining

The Gilded Seal is published on October 15 by Harper Collins.