Renoir paintings are not worth a fortune when they are stolen

• By Wyatte Grantham-Philips / AP

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Two Pierre-Auguste Renoir paintings stolen from a small French museum have yet to be recovered, but if the thieves are hoping to cash in on the artwork, they would be hard-pressed to find a buyer.

Selling well-known, stolen art is impossible to do at an auction house or through other public channels without raising eyebrows. Even under the table, the value plummets. Unlike other eye-catching artifacts such as jewels, paintings cannot be chopped up and sold for parts without losing their entire worth.

Art crime experts stress that most buyers simply do not want the liability. In short, the reality looks nothing like the movies.

“People always think that there is this kind of ‘Dr. No’ type from the James Bond movie,” said Arthur Brand, a private art detective based in the Netherlands. “But that’s Hollywood. In the real world, there are no collectors like that.”

Brand, who has investigated art crime for about 20 years, explains that often “nobody will touch” stolen art, particularly high-profile work. Sometimes that means paintings valued at millions of dollars are effectively “worth zero” once they are outside of the museum, if not a small fraction of the price, he added.

Theft at the Renoir Museum on Tuesday last week — the last home of the painter in the French Riviera — marks the latest high-profile art crime targeting collections around the world, and experts warn there could be more.

Cagnes-sur-Mer’s Mayor Bryan Masson said a group of “well-equipped” burglars stole four Renoir paintings from the museum. However, they dropped two of them — Renoir’s Portrait of Madame Pichon and Coco Reading — in the museum garden before they fled, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

Police are still searching for the perpetrators.

In the meantime, Renoir’s Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano and Young Woman at the Well remain missing.

Masson estimated the value of the combined Renoir works stolen at 9 million euros (US$10.4 million).

However, the probability of profiting off such a heist is “extremely low,” said Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

In cases that end in arrests, the common takeaway is that “thieves are people who are good at stealing things and bad at thinking through the consequences,” she added.

Some might try to make money from heists in other ways, such as through demanding a ransom or looking for an insurance payout. However, Thompson said many museums do not have insurance, because it is too costly. That is why the practice is so rare in the US, and it would be difficult to negotiate with insurance companies elsewhere without the thieves incriminating themselves.

As a result, if not surrendered or otherwise recovered, stolen paintings might remain hidden — or in some cases eventually destroyed to get rid of evidence, Thompson said.

Brand, who collaborates regularly with law enforcement in his art crime investigations, said that he has still seen limited cases of stolen paintings “floating around in the underworld” — perhaps as partial payments for products such as drugs.

Depending on country-by-country laws, the promise of returning the art has led to reduced sentences of other charges, he said.

“Some more savvy criminal will acquire it as a get out of jail free card, sort of a bargaining chip,” said Christopher Marinello, a lawyer and founder of Art Recovery International. “So, if some drug dealer ever is arrested, he can bargain with the prosecutor and say: ‘Listen, give me a lesser sentence, and I’ll show you where these Renoirs are,’ and that has always worked, and it will work again.”

Stolen paintings are much more difficult to profit from than museums’ other crown jewels — literally.

Jeweled and metal goods have increasingly become a target of theft, because they can be melted down or broken down into parts. Last year, a handful of experts warned that could be the fate of the stunning heist of crown jewels at the Louvre Museum in Paris, for example — saying that, if done successfully, smaller pieces could later go up for sale as part of a new necklace, earrings or other jewelry without turning too many heads.

However, of course, such pieces would lose their historical worth and, if actually sold, likely only go for a fraction of their original value. Experts also say that it is far from a simple process overall — and gems might still be identifiable by characteristics such as clarity.

Apart from an emerald-set imperial crown found outside the museum on the day of the heist in October last year, the stolen jewels remain unrecovered.

Paintings, in contrast, do not have the same commodity value that can potentially be parceled off.

“It’s a canvas with some old oil paint on it,” Art Loss Register art theft expert James Ratcliffe said. “You can’t touch it up. You can’t resell it other than for what it is.”

Ratcliffe and others said that has not stopped thefts of famous paintings and other artwork from museums. Just earlier this year, three pieces by Renoir, Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse worth millions of euros were stolen in Italy, before being recovered last month.

Ratcliffe said that smaller museums, in particular, are harder to secure, because they might not have the funding necessary to invest in the latest technology — or are located in historic buildings that might take more time and effort to install new guardrails.

Still, pressures are piling up, with some warning that future cases of art theft could be likely as vulnerabilities persist.

“We need to change the way we treat small and country house museums before we lose to our cultural heritage permanently,” said Marinello, who stressed that stronger security and enforcement is overdue. “We’re supposed to be preserving our cultural heritage, not allowing criminals to take what they want and using them as shopping malls.”