Marc Allégret’s 1956 comedy Plucking the Daisy stars a young Brigitte Bardot as a first-time author who breaks into the Balzac house museum in Paris under the mistaken impression that her brother lives there. The plot revolves around her unwitting theft of an extremely rare book – and performance of a striptease in a desperate effort to raise the cash to buy it back.
Seventy years on, the lax security that could make such a sequence of events even vaguely plausible is no longer a joke. Museums across the world are scrambling to react to a spate of thefts that has left them in a state of shock. Last year’s break-in at the Louvre, by a gang who gained access using a furniture lift and took €88m (£76m) worth of French crown jewels, is thought by experts to have inspired copycat crimes. While French police believe that they have caught the culprits, treasures including a tiara have not been found.
In August, objects were stolen from museums in Sicily, Vienna and Villena in Spain. This week, thieves targeted the former home of another 19th-century Frenchman, the artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. After cutting a hole in the fence outside the property near Nice, two men escaped with two paintings.
From the Pink Panther films to Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, heists have long been a source of fascination in popular culture. There is something mythic about the gang of thieves seeking riches. Sometimes they are portrayed as plucky Robin Hoods, illicit brotherhoods pitting their wits against the citadels of ultra-wealth. Last year’s Tuner offered a new twist on the genre: a safe-cracker with super-sensitive ears.
But the excitement that spectacular thefts generate in real life, as well as in fiction, must be balanced against realism about their effects. For the Louvre, last year’s raid was a reputational disaster that led its president to resign. For smaller museums such as Renoir’s house, they are closer to an existential threat. The pictures stolen on Tuesday were on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; national collections will stop lending to regional museums if the risks are judged too high. Experts warn that “smash and grab” raiders have learned to operate within the window of a few minutes that it takes police to arrive after an alarm sounds.
Unlike on the sliver screen, thieves do not have to leap between laser beams. Security can surely be improved in some cases. But metal detectors, screens and guards add to queues and place barriers between people and collections that should be easy to access. That they should be needed is a cause for regret. For some smaller, off-the-beaten track museums, they are neither practical nor affordable.
In the UK, there have been concerted efforts in recent years to arrange more loans of works usually displayed in London. A Renoir painting, The Umbrellas, was among works sent on tour to mark the National Gallery’s bicentenary. That museum has thankfully seen no repeat of the events of 1961, when Kempton Bunton stole a portrait of the Duke of Wellington as a protest against the TV licence. His bizarre story could be played for laughs in the 2020 film The Duke because the painting was later recovered from a railway station. In too many other cases, stolen treasures have vanished from the public gaze forever – the tragic opposite of a Hollywood ending.
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