Thieves in it for big Monet
Herald Sun. Melbourne, Vic.: Sep 13, 2006. pg. 60

TOGETHER, they would make up a stunning gallery: 167 Renoirs, 166 Rembrandts, 175 Warhols and more than 200 works by Dali.
Experts have a world tally of 170,000 important pieces of missing art -- burgled from private homes, snatched from museum walls or pilfered from storerooms.
Only a fraction is ever found: Interpol puts the figure at 10 per cent. Yet well-known masterpieces such as Edvard Munch's The Scream and Madonna, recovered this month in Norway, turn up more often, partly because of intense police work to find them and partly because they are so tough to sell.
Criminals sometimes mastermind a spectacular burglary, then discover nobody will touch a work of art so famous any buyer would have to hide it from view, says Karl-Heinz Kind, a specialist officer on art theft at Interpol.
Thieves may demand a ransom, or try to sell works at a fraction of their worth. This is when some thieves trip up: the Italian house painter who stole the Mona Lisa in a famous 1911 heist was caught two years later when he tried to sell it.
After a robbery, "the second step is . . . to make money out of it", Kind says. "And that's the much more difficult part and I think very often underestimated by the thief."
But for lesser treasures, the market is lucrative and vast. The FBI estimates the market for stolen art at $7.8 billion annually.
The Art Loss Register, which maintains the world's largest database on the subject, has tallied 170,000 pieces of stolen, missing and looted art and valuables, staff member Antonia Kimbell says.
Interpol has about 30,000 items on its database.
In museums, many thefts occur in storerooms and sometimes go unnoticed for years until museums do inventory.
Then there are the dramatic raids, such as the 1986 assault on the National Gallery of Victoria when the "Australian Cultural Terrorists" stole Picasso's Weeping Woman from the wall. However, Kind wants to dispel the myth of art-world criminals such as Pierce Brosnan's suave character in the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
"I would warn against considering art thieves as gentlemen thieves," Kind says of criminals who are increasingly armed and violent.
The Munch paintings were stolen by masked gunmen at the Munch Museum in Norway in 2004, when the museum was open. Police have said little about their recovery. In 1994 another version of The Scream was recovered undamaged three months after being stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo.
In February, gunmen raided the Chacara do Ceu Museum during Carnaval celebrations in Rio De Janeiro. They made off with a Picasso, a Monet, a Matisse and a Dali before blending into the party crowd.
In 1990, two men disguised as Boston police officers walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They persuaded security guards to unlock the doors, then stole 13 priceless items including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas and Manet.
That heist appears on the FBI's list of the top 10 art thefts. The list is topped by the looting of Iraqi artefacts after the US invasion in 2003 -- an event that mobilised the international community's response to cultural theft.
IN 2004 the FBI dedicated 12 agents to a special art-crime team. In its first year the team recovered more than 100 pieces worth more than $65 million.
"International law enforcement is getting better, they are devoting a lot more resources to it -- specifically in the US, where they really upped their staff," Jonathan Sazonoff, who runs a website on stolen art, says.
Some mysteries are solved without happy endings. Stephane Breitwieser, a French waiter, was sentenced last year to 26 months in prison after he admitted to stealing 239 pieces -- worth $18 million to $26 million -- while he visited small provincial museums.
But the story didn't stop there. Prosecutors said Breitwieser's mother tried to protect him by chopping up paintings and tossing other items into a canal. Investigators recovered 102 pieces -- watches, cups, vases, statues and others -- from the mud. Many other works are believed lost forever.

For Pete's Sake

Peter Hannah at Work

Julie-anne's Show at 69 Smith Street

Here's the link to Julie's website

This is the press reslease and invite for her show:

"Against the weather: arid land”
-a series of paintings by Julie-anne Armstrong-Roper

Julie-anne Armstrong-Roper's latest exhibition, “Against the Weather: arid land” will open at the 69 Smith Street gallery on 31st July. Since 1991 Julie-anne’s work has been widely exhibited in Melbourne and overseas, including a major solo exhibition in 2000 at Australia House in London.

During the past eight years the works have explored the complexities of the human psyche. Julie-anne’s paintings were not purely landscape but abstractions where the weather was used as a metaphor for the emotive changes we experience throughout our lives. Using the sky in all its moods not only to communicate her own feelings, but also to invoke an emphatic response from the audience, Julie-anne has united the external with the internal.

In her latest body of work she has expanded upon these themes. Moving on from abstractions taken from nature, Julie-anne has returned to the figurative, endeavouring in her new works to use the whole landscape to express a feeling of isolation and a sense of the frailty of humanity exposed to the elements. Julie-anne believes this to be the natural continuation of her work, expressing human nature and emotion using the atmospheric and geological environments.

In her art practice Julie-anne aims to create a sense of light and depth beyond the painted surface. She does this by building up the layers of paint and medium over a long period of time. Light is absorbed and contained in her paintings, allowing the viewer to look into the canvases and become totally engrossed by the images.

Julie-anne’s works will be on exhibition until 16th August at: 69 Smith Street Gallery, Collingwood.