Two screen prints from Andy Warhol’s pop art series from 1985 Reigning queens were stolen from a gallery in the Netherlands – and another two damaged – in a botched robbery.
At 3:05 am local time early Friday morningResidents of a small, cobbled street in the village of Oiserwijk heard a huge explosion, followed by the sound of an alarm coming from MPV Gallery. Criminals who bombed the facade of the building took the four signed and numbered screen prints, which would be sold at the PAN Amsterdam art fair in three weeks.
Experts think it was far from a professional robbery: two of the vulnerable prints were damaged and left behind. The other two, apparently too large to fit in the getaway car, were cut from their frames and probably damaged beyond repair.
“It’s horrible,” says Mark Peet Visser, who kept the portraits – depicting the queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland (now Eswatini) – in his North Brabant gallery. “It is also unprofessional for a criminal to work this way, with explosives that are much too heavy and a getaway car that is too small for the work.”
He tells The Art Newspaper that very few people knew the works were hidden in the gallery – and not in private storage – when the thieves broke in. The damaged works are currently being analyzed.
“The (stolen) works can no longer be sold,” he says. “They are all documented, numbered and can no longer be traded. It really doesn’t make financial sense to steal art and you can hardly hang it in your living room.”
Arthur Brand, an art detective who recovered a stolen Vincent van Gogh painting last year – the work handed over in an Ikea bag – said it was unlikely that Warhol’s theft was a commission. “I think it was some criminals who don’t really specialize in art theft, who saw an opportunity and thought, let’s steal them first and then see what we can do… and everything went wrong,” he says.
“Some pieces were (apparently) already destroyed or damaged by the bomb, but then these idiots realized that the car wasn’t big enough, so they left two of them outside and the other two they took out of their frame on the street. People who have seen the security footage are sure those pieces are damaged too – and if they are screen-damaged or if a piece is missing, they are worthless.”
Mark Grol, director of PAN Amsterdam, says the prints would have been “one of the highlights” of the art fair at the end of November. Another “diamond-sprinkled” decor from the series – which is so fragile that it can only be shown once every thirty years – is currently on display in an exhibition at Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn.
Hanna Klarenbeek, curator of the Paleis Het Loo exhibition, says these fragile prints on paper are especially famous in the Netherlands and Great Britain, where many people associate images of their former queen with Warhol’s portrait. “We store them face up, flat, in our storage facilities and display them carefully,” she says. “In this robbery, where they left them on the sidewalk and took them out of their frames, I assume they are very damaged because I know how fragile ours are. You can’t really repair these tears in the paper. So we are extra alert.”