It was reported last week that seven works of art, stolen from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam last October, may have been burned in the village of Carcaliu, Romania, by a mother who wanted to destroy the evidence against her son, who has been charged with the theft, the BBC reports.
Forensics experts aren’t absolutely positive yet that wood, nails, and ashes obtained from the oven in the home of Olga Dogaru are what remains of the art, but she has confessed: “I placed the suitcase containing the paintings in the stove. I put in some logs, slippers and rubber shoes and waited until they had completely burned,” the Romanian Mediafax news agency reported her as saying. The following works of art, valued at between $130 and $260 million, were stolen and are still missing:
- Pablo Picasso’s 1971 Harlequin Head
- Claude Monet’s 1899 Charing Cross Bridge, London
- Claude Monet’s 1901 Waterloo Bridge, London
- Henri Matisse’s 1919 Reading Girl in White and Yellow
- Paul Gauguin’s 1898 Girl in Front of Open Window
- Meye de Haan’s Self-Portrait from around 1890
- Lucien Freud’s 2002 Woman with Eyes Closed
The results from the forensic studies are expected next week, but if the fragments turn out to be those works of art, museum directors’ worst fears will have been realized. Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu said this particular destruction was “a barbarian crime against humanity” if it indeed occurred.
Editorial
Although some have described this story as that of a mother protecting her son, that’s a myopic view, in my opinion. Only people who don’t understand the first thing about forensic science would think they can actually destroy evidence in an oven. A true act of motherly love would have been to find a way to return the paintings anonymously while her son was in custody.
It’s not easy to fence famous works of art, mainly because everyone who might want to buy them would know exactly where they came from. In other words, the son’s sheer stupidity in stealing the art is a hundred times bigger than the stupidity of the mother in trying to protect him from authorities.
But if destroying art, even art worth hundreds of millions of dollars, can be considered a crime against humanity, my moral compass is off a bit. Consider the 150,000 or so students in Philadelphia’s public schools, who will not have any art classes next year—or music, or nurses and counselors—because of a $300 million budget shortfall that isn’t their fault. Talk about crimes against humanity! There’s a lot of “humanity” there. Or consider the innocent 6-year-olds in Chicago who get shot at block parties while riding scooters. Consider the Rwandans being gunned down. Those are crimes against humanity. This is, at most, a crime against the “humanities.”
I personally feel no great loss but a little depression over the destruction of these great works of art. But they each represent one man’s thoughts at one point in his life. As such, they merit our study, and we thankfully still have photos.
