Paintings Stolen from SP Museum
A Daring Midnight Raid Yields Two Important Art Works
A Picasso and a Portinari painting have been stolen from Sao Paulo Museum of Art. It has now emerged that neither of them was insured.
Art thieves in Sao Paulo made off with paintings during a Thursday night don't-mind-if-I-do raid at Sao Paulo Museum of Art.
The art world is now mourning the loss of Pablo Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch as well as the Coffee Worker, a famed painting by Brazilian Candido Portinari.
The thieves were in and out in just 180 second-hand ticks of the clock. Museum officials have admitted that there were no alarms and no movement sensors in the galleries, all of which smacks suspiciously of an inside job.
Security cameras -- without infrared capability of course -- produced only unclear images of the raid.
To complete this Keystone Cops picture, it has now surfaced that none of the museum's paintings were insured, which has come as something of a monocle-popping-out shock to the more sensible and conservative outside art world.
The value of the 1904 Portrait of Suzanne Bloch is estimated to be about $50,000,000. As for the 1939 Coffee Worker (or O Lavrador de Cafe in Portuguese), its value is said to be around 5,000,000 big ones.
Would-be art thieves, take note. The Sao Paulo Museum of Art still has paintings by Renoir, Van Gogh and Modigliani that, apparently, are ripe for the picking.
