{"id":3842,"date":"2013-07-17T10:25:43","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T14:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/?p=3842"},"modified":"2019-07-09T09:49:22","modified_gmt":"2019-07-09T13:49:22","slug":"stolen-masterpieces-burned-to-ashes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/17\/stolen-masterpieces-burned-to-ashes\/","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Masterpieces Burned to Ashes"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you follow art news, you may already know that a rather daring heist occurred in Rotterdam last year.<\/p>\n

Paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Meyer de Haan,\u00a0Lucian Freud\u00a0and two by Monet were stolen on Tuesday from a gallery in Rotterdam in what will rank as one of the most spectacular art heists of modern times.<\/p>\n

The dawn raid at the Kunsthal museum in the\u00a0Netherlands’ second largest city was described by police as a well-planned and bold operation.<\/p>\n

Kate Connolly, the Guardian UK<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Rotterdam<\/a>

A man pauses to look at the empty space where Henri Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune used to hang at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal. Photograph: Peter Dejong\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s the stuff of movies, this – a dawn raid, a \u00a0daring heist, masterpieces worth millions of dollars. Well, maybe not masterpieces but certainly extremely valuable work by some of the best known names in early modernism. But there’s a rather comically dark ending to it all – it turns out that the Mum of one of the thieves got scared for her son and burned them in her stove to destroy the evidence. Not too scared to spill the beans when the cops came knocking, evidently, but hindsight is 20\/20.<\/p>\n

The mother of suspect Radu Doragu said she incinerated the artworks, valued at over 100 million euros ($130 million), in her stove in a bid to “destroy any evidence”.<\/p>\n

“After the arrest of my son in January 2013, I was very scared because I knew that what had happened was very serious,” Mediafax reported Dogaru’s mother as saying, citing court documents.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Agence France-Press<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\t\t\t