Art theft

Two Eastman Johnson paintings stolen in the 1970s are recovered

A Connecticut auction house identified the stolen works in a private estate collection and helped return them

Two Renoir paintings worth €9m stolen from Renoir Museum in France

Thieves took two further works but dropped them as they fled, the mayor of Cagnes-sur-Mer says

Gareth Harris. Additional reporting by Vincent Noce

Rembrandt self-portrait returns to German city 80 years after it was illegally removed

The work is on loan to the exhibition ‘Rembrandt 1632: The Creation of a Brand’ at the Ducal Museum Gotha

Police recover eight Matisse works stolen in Brazil heist

Five pieces by the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari, taken in the same heist last December, remain missing

Four works by Renaissance master Antonello da Messina stolen from Sicily museum

The heist, which included several San Gregorio altarpiece panels, occurred on Saturday while the town was celebrating Assumption Day

Italynews

Stolen Cezanne, Matisse and Renoir paintings recovered in Italy

The works had been taken from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation near the city of Parma in March

Picasso painting recovered in French drug raid was stolen ‘opportunistically’, police source says

The portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter was reportedly discovered during a search of a house in the town of Champigny-sur-Marne

Gone bananas: Cattelan's Comedian stolen from Centre Pompidou-Metz exhibition

The duct-taped banana installation was swiftly restored after its "perishable element" went missing on Saturday afternoon

Renoir, Cezanne and Matisse works stolen in ‘three-minute’ Italian museum heist

Italian police say that four hooded criminals broke into the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, housed in a rural villa south of Parma, on 22 March

Dealer Yves Bouvier to stand trial in Paris over missing Picassos

The trial comes after the conclusion of a decade-long investigation into the alleged disappearance of works belonging to Picasso's stepdaughter

‘No one was really interested in finding those works’: major Brazilian art theft still unsolved as statute of limitations expires

Paintings by Monet, Matisse, Dalí and Picasso were snatched in a cinematic heist from Rio de Janeiro’s Museu da Chácara do Céu in 2006

Heritagefeature

Meet the global taskforce working to recover stolen cultural heritage

A reporter for The Art Newspaper has been on the scene with the Heritage Crime Task Force (HCTF), tracking, identifying and repatriating a wide variety of art and antiquities lost to crime and conflict

Crime news

Suspects in Brazil Matisse heist arrested, but alleged thief nicknamed ‘Gargamel’ remains at large

The 13 works stolen, by Henri Matisse and Candido Portinari, have not been recovered and are valued at up to $180,000

Filmreview

Romanian art heist film frames theft within political and migrant struggles

“Jaful Secolului” (Traffic) was inspired by a 2012 heist at Kunsthal Rotterdam and is Romania’s official selection for the 2026 Oscars

Gunmen stole works by Matisse and Portinari from Brazilian library in brazen daytime heist

The 13 works, stolen from the Mário de Andrade Library, were part of a show organised in collaboration with the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo

Book Clubfeature

The Rembrandt robber: five takeaways from an insider’s book on a notorious art thief

The security expert Anthony Amore provides insights into the curious case of Myles Connor, who stole Rembrandt’s Portrait of Elsbeth van Rijn

Anthony Amore. With an introduction by Gareth Harris

Repeat art fraudster arrested for stealing Courbet painting

By the time London dealer Patrick Matthiesen realised the person he had handed “Mother and Child on a Hammock” over to was not who he claimed to be, it was too late

Comment | Art theft is just the start, what happens after a jewellery heist is the real question

Due to the world-wide publicity of the brazen theft at the Musée du Louvre last month, the stolen jewellery may be impossible to shift

Limestone relief disappears from Egypt’s Saqqara necropolis

The work, taken from the tomb of a vizier called Khentika, features a motif that is extremely rare in Ancient Egyptian art

Ancient marble bust returned to Italy following seven-year legal battle

The first-century sculpture was seized from the New York-based gallery Safani in 2018, prompting a series of lawsuits that have finally been resolved

British woman agrees to return stolen Renaissance painting to Italian museum

Barbara de Dozsa had previously argued that she owned the painting by Antonio Solario as the limit for claims had passed

Middle man in Cattelan gold toilet theft given suspended sentence

Frederick Doe was convicted in March of conspiring to transfer criminal property and was accused of trying to broker the sale of around 10 kilograms of the stolen gold

Two found guilty in theft of Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet

The Crown Prosecution Service says it is confident that the case “played a part in disrupting a wider crime and money-laundering network”

Thirty five years on from ‘the world’s largest art heist’, how much are the works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum worth?

From $200m to upwards of $1bn, the estimated value of the 13 works stolen in Boston on 18 March 1990 has varied in the decades since

Member of museum theft ring sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing Warhol and Pollock works

Thomas Trotta was part of a theft ring that nabbed a variety of items, including sports memorabilia and gold nuggets, from museums on the East Coast of the US over two decades

Cattelan gold toilet trial: defendant says he used the loo and it was ‘splendid’

The fully functioning 18-carat gold toilet was removed from an exhibition of Maurizio Cattelan’s work at Blenheim Palace in 2019

Metropolitan Museum repatriates ancient bronze griffin head that was stolen from Greek institution

Per the terms of the Met’s agreement with the Greek government, the cast-bronze antiquity will return to New York next year for a special exhibition

Cattelan's £4.8m gold toilet stolen in five minute raid and split into smaller parts, court hears

The court case of three men charged with the 2019 theft has begun in Oxford, and is expected to last four weeks

Michelangelo Pistoletto unveils his own version of stolen Caravaggio masterpiece in Sicily

Theft from a Baroque oratory remains unsolved after 55 years, sparking countless conspiracy theories